Month: June 2008

The Supreme Court granted the right of habeas corpus to detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

John McCain said this is “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

Detention without being charged. Isolation without rights or advocates. Torture. Are these good decisions?

McCain says combatants should not be given the status granted to citizens; “These are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they are not and never have been given the rights that the citizens of this country have,” he said. “Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.”

I wouldn’t want America harmed nor its forces weakened, but a candidate for President surely must show more than this simplistic view of power. Where’s his vigor and gumption and ambition to solve challenges rather than bellyache to the choir?

McCain offers nothing but pandering, citing “unaccountable judges” at the Supreme Court and mongering that we are about “to be overwhelmed” with cases from detainees.

We have let little men argue small things.

Habeas Corpus is a fundamental thing, only to determine the legality of imprisonment. Where’s the threat McCain trumpets? A qualified candidate would seek to provide this to all the earth!

A new procedure to deter and hold suspects while affirming the humanity of our nation can be developed, perhaps under the judiciary or combined with the military.

Failure to prove our care for dignity and to eagerly seek to protect the innocent has damaged us very much around the world.

We must be proud that we are a civil nation too.

The difference between analysis and ideology:

Obama has said he admires Doris Kearns Goodwin’s wonderful Lincoln biography, Team of Rivals. “He talks about it all the time,” says a top aide. He is particularly intrigued by the notion that Lincoln assembled all the Republicans who had run against him for President in his war Cabinet, some of whom disagreed with him vehemently and persistently. “The lesson is to not let your ego or grudges get in the way of hiring absolutely the best people,” Obama told me. “I don’t think the American people are fundamentally ideological. They’re pragmatic … and so I have an interest in casting a wide net, seeking out people with a wide range of expertise, including Republicans,” for the highest positions in his government. [TIME]

Trends in Japan is an English language new product blog in Tokyo.

It astounds me how many variations are fitted into the Hello Kitty brand, how many sculptures are made from food; there’s a vending machine for an electric car!

It’s time to throw away a drawer full of ‘Approved’ & ‘Top Secret’ stamps….

link to Rubberized Emotion.

More upside-down culture & costs:

An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined. [spotted at Dvorak]

Oh, what we gonna do?

Wonder Drugs That Can Kill by Jeanne Lenzer

Drugmakers: Prepare for a Smackdown by Linda Marsa

Long article about possible shifts in Terrorist fundamental belief though it’s a long time we might wait:

Fadl was one of the first members of Al Qaeda’s top council. Twenty years ago, he wrote two of the most important books in modern Islamist discourse; Al Qaeda used them to indoctrinate recruits and justify killing.

Now Fadl was announcing a new book, rejecting Al Qaeda’s violence. “We are prohibited from committing aggression, even if the enemies of Islam do that,” Fadl wrote in his fax, which was sent from Tora Prison, in Egypt. [from Kottke]

With respect to those who fight for us, but with heavy argument against torture, I’m sad to see our nation blemished not by wit but mere zeal:

The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Pentagon in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks pursued abusive interrogation techniques once used by North Korea and Vietnam on American POWs despite stern warnings by several military lawyers that the methods were cruel….

The ‘origin of harsh methods’ mustn’t be the USA, but that’s not the way it seems:

Update of Senate Hearings at IHT: Mark Fallon, the deputy commander of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantánamo, wrote “Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.”

McClatchy newspapers prepared a series called ‘Beyond The Law’ that looks deeply into how torture became accepted practice.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.

McClatchy investigations are thorough:
WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes.” [empahasis added]

Worry is such a veneer, worse when it’s pumped to sell media. Here’s a thought:

Kevin Surace: Our mission is to reduce CO2 output by a billion tons per year, three percent of all the CO2 produced by mankind. We can do it because the built environment is the play. 52% of all CO2 comes from building: 40% for heating and cooling buildings, and 12% for construction. Nobody wants to do anything about it; I was at the Fortune Brainstorm Green Conference and all anyone wanted to talk about is cars and fuel, when the biggies are cement, metal, glass and drywall.

We are all in the same boat on a stormy sea, and we owe to each other a terrible loyalty. – G. K. Chesterton

Reading from a liveJournal blog, elf_awareness:

Trees
Trees slow fireworks
brown and green
my bones fleshy
condensation
sinews winding with the sun
dreaming with the moon
wordless grammar of groves
and lexicons of sinews

But this is what I was thinking.

Condensing
Trees slow fire
grammar of groves
winding with the sun

Bones slow flesh
lexicon of sinew
dreaming with the moon

I read “Trees slow fireworks” and stopped. I skipped to “fleshy condensation” and stopped. Halted now, I reached “grammar of groves” and stopped. There we are then. Pictures. Distilled. After a long good breath, I can only salute elf awareness. Yo!

Huh. Election Fraud News

The Money Party Series

The Money Party (1). The Essence of Our Political Troubles
The Money Party (2). Lousy Leaders and How to Get Rid of Them
The Money Party (3). Big Lies that You Must Believe

The Money Party (4) Money Party to Citizens: Drop Dead!
The Money Party (5) “Us versus Them” New

Violation of War Crimes Act…. Oh, it goes on and on:

Jason Leopold: Rumsfeld Personally Approved Brutal Interrogations

Kishore Mahbubani says, “I try to distinguish between modernization and Westernization.

“They are not the same thing at all. The paradox that the West hasn’t grasped yet is that you have modernization and de-Westernization taking place at the same time. That is something that doesn’t fit the Western mindset. For them, modernization can only be Westernization.

…
“There is a kind of new cosmopolitan global personality emerging….”

Did you know obituaries are “often more fact filled than things published during someone’s lifetime and sometimes reveal key information that open up whole new areas of inquiry”?

Think about it here, Discovering the dead.

Bill Moyers with Holly Sklar about earning a living:

“Adjusting for inflation, average wages are lower than they were in the 1970s. Our minimum wage, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1950s. One of the things going on is that income and wealth inequality have gone back to the 1920s. We are back at levels that we saw right before the Great Depression.”

The American Dream In Reverse?

I’ve just watched this Moyers’ interview and recommend it highly to “calibrate” your view of our economy, brush away propaganda, bugger illusion, and get on with it.

world entertainment news – Thursday, June 12 02:35 pm [Yahoo UK. time deprived link]

Dr. Drew Pinsky “unprofessional” and “unqualified”.

Pinsky, who is a regular on the US reality show, has written an article for Playboy magazine suggesting Cruise might be mentally ill for getting involved with the Church of Scientology. The medical expert also claims the Top Gun star may have suffered some kind of childhood trauma.

He writes: “Why would somebody be drawn into a cultish kind of environment like Scientology? To me, that’s a function of a very deep emptiness and suggests serious neglect in childhood – maybe some abuse, but mostly neglect.”

But Cruise’s attorney, Bert Fields, has slammed the article – insisting Pinsky’s analysis is absurd.

He tells the New York Post’s gossip column PageSix, “This unqualified television performer who is obviously just looking for notoriety is so grotesquely unprofessional as to pretend to diagnose Tom and others without ever meeting them.

“He seems to be spewing the absurdity that all Scientologists are mentally ill. The last time we heard garbage like this was from (Nazi propaganda chief) Joseph Goebbels.”

We are excessively technocratic these days.

I don’t think our ideas about governing are either accurate or important. As if Pavlov/Skinner took our imagination, we now have decades of policies to repair our failing, until Nash just threw up his hands and called it Game. Years on, results suck.

We like to think our tricks of reward or repetition or reprogramming is sophisticated. We like to think we grew beyond ordinary snarling or swatting. But decades later, no one points to great success building behavior or fixing habits or keeping peace. Sell the billboards back to sloganeers.

We may be more easy than that. There’s no formula to manage us. We corrupt ourselves if secret. We solve if challenged. We heal if among.

R. D. Laing was on to it when he said we are best free, unencumbered, amidst ourselves.

“We can work it out” is a heartfelt truth.

The belief and fashion of intervention has hurt us, methinks. We’re not so poorly human that we require so much to repair us.

To make better progress, just give and be together. Community will solve us.

What’s wrong with justice?

Bush says,

“That’s their decision. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.”

[Whitehouse version] [a Dissent]

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What’s wrong with democracy?

US.

We let dying defend too little.

picture removed, just too rough for my taste

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I’m deeply embarrassed to accuse. It’s far different than I care to be. Yet in a time of concern, our days of loss and tomorrow of debt, I want to be strong, urging, and able.

Is it true we’re fooled? Is it true we merely gild the rich? Is it true our leaders tell lies to us? Do they favor friends? Are tricks common and principles lost?

We see millions dying and killed, millions, and cannot understand and no longer respect our effort.

Oh, the incongruity! My butter heart is too thick in these dilute waters.

I know these are temporary days, as short as the longest war, but I truly truly ache so deep because we have no fist, no grip, no hand that is building our prosperity or keeping our grand horizon, nor assisting our survival, nor proud to share it.

We cannot let our era be fruitless labor. We cannot let heritage be cheap.

Not once are these odd failing days where we put our hope. Then, not once we give our hope to arrogance, not cheap satisfaction, never falsity.

We know we have proud days.

I’m sure these are proud times too.

These are times our conscience comes.

Could this be true? It’s from a comment at cbc.ca pointing out that locals in Guatemala have only low quality coffee available because the ‘middlemen’ export nearly all the good beans.

“Starbucks pays $1 per pound (green beans) for certified shade grown, hard-bean, fair trade coffee from Guatemalan farmers. 1lb of beans ends up making about 20 to 30 cups of coffee at Starbuck’s where we pay $2 per cup. They make $40-$60 per pound, making the margins astronomical.”

My worry button is saying coffee will spike its prices soon. Let’s build a solar roaster and buy in bulk. Hey! We need our coffee. Jennifer Warner at WebMD says we get “More Antioxidants From Coffee” than any other source; “Nothing else comes close”.

Bush leaves Germany and at least one German newspaper wastes no time expressing how they feel.

The Cowboy and His Sunset: Europe Happy to See the Back of Bush

…
German newspaper commentators have launched a scathing attack on US President George W. Bush’s record, saying he embodies “the arrogance of power” and has shattered the world’s faith in America. more…

…
It’s the best of all bad forms of government, but for many it’s no longer good enough. Today democracy leaves lots of people cold, and in Asia and Africa, many prefer autocratic systems.

Damaged by Bush, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, few are interested in the model of democracy exported by the United States. By Erich Follath more…

John Dvorak offers grumpy as a main feature & promo, and sometimes it’s important to be grumpy. He says, “Our tolerance for corruption has certainly changed since Nixon’s, and then Clinton’s Presidency.” He’s also pointing out Kucinich is making progress.

Kucinich won 50 percent of the vote in a five-way House Democratic primary in March.

“Kucinich, D-Ohio, read his proposed impeachment language in a floor speech. He contended Bush deceived the nation and violated his oath of office in leading the country into the Iraq war.

“Kucinich introduced a resolution last year to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. That resolution was killed, but only after Republicans initially voted in favor of taking up the measure to force a debate.”

helpless empathy burns

poor refugee and poor police and poor politics, even Mandela is silent. had we not dumped the ill on the street during Trickle Down nor let our homeless content our scorn, then during these horrid days we would have known to do.

look after ourselves.

3) …. it is not just a system of economics, but a system of political economy.

Two sides of the same issue jumped the links and media tonight.

1) Feeble government lets the superclass soar over the rest of us.

2) Gangsters, profiteers, poisoners and pimps are ripping through global society.

This is a formidable set of potential liars, equipped with money, technical expertise, transnational reach and state power.

guile rulz
Stop it, America.

Nothing is Left or Right and nothing is so radical as failing.

Go get ’em.

David Letterman:

“Don’t you agree? The guy was a mistake. It’s not the greenhouse gases. It’s the Whitehouse gases.”

Need work?

The government has put up websites, but it hasn’t done much to make it so that it’s easy to access the data available in those websites or (even more important) let other applications and services do something with that data and actually make it useful to the citizens that data is supposed to help.

Good ol’ Mike Masnick at TechDirt has a bit more to say here.

McBush? Please no!

The choice between Obama and McCain is as fundamental as between the future and the past.

“We did not arrive at the doorstep of our current economic crisis by some accident of history.”

New York Times, June 10, 2008

With Fall Vote in View, Obama Assails McCain on Economy

RALEIGH, N.C. — Senator Barack Obama, with the Democratic stage to himself for the first time, began a two-week assault on Senator John McCain’s economic policies in a series of battleground states on Monday, moving to focus on the ailing economy as the central theme of the general election campaign.

… relieve the hardships of American families

… rescue the economy from the brink of recession.

… a more active government role in restoring the nation’s economic health and aiding distressed families.

… no McCain tax cuts for corporations.

… preserve Social Security by requiring higher payments from the wealthy.

… resist all efforts to privatize Social Security or raise the retirement age.

… repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest.

Assail McCain has a ring to it.

“We were promised a fiscal conservative. Instead, we got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history.

“And now John McCain wants to give us another. “

Well, we’ve been there once. “

We’re not going back.”

“Bottom-up prosperity will keep America strong and competitive in the 21st century.”