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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

22 December - START and Shock Jocks

An Israeli soldier buys from Palestinian child...Image via WikipediaBurl Ives - The Little White Duck

Assange: Intercepted SMS Traffic Exposes Setup


Julian Assange, Rape Allegations, and the Catch-22 of the "Real Rape Victim" | Focal Point  

They were going to replace the DNS with their own proprietary technology.They were going to replace electronic mail with their own proprietary technology.
They were going to replace the world wide web with their own proprietary technology

ClipperCreek Ships 4,000th Electric Vehicle Charging Station 

Iran quake toll climbs many buried 

Iran says nuclear swap must be based on Brazil-Turkey deal 

Christmas in Afghanistan 

 In Afghanistan, a country where the average lifespan is only 45 years, and where less than a third of the people are literate, the situation after a decade of U.S. efforts is still one of severe poverty, with no functioning judicial system, very little respect for a violently corrupt police force, and a crisis in both clean water resources and agriculture led by misguided, failed, and just plain fraudulent privatised reconstruction projects.    The problems have emerged during the subsequent upheavals and invasions. Prior to that, and after the period of colonialism, the country had a functioning, well respected and well liked, leftist secular government.

But nobody seems to remember that last fact.

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: Obama’s Annual Review of the Afghanistan Strategy Inflated and Wishful 
The public opinion in America and Europe, in general, condemn the war in Afghanistan and consider the strategy of Obama as being meaningless. Therefore, some close allies of America are determined to pull their forces out of Afghanistan until the end of 2011.

Israeli settlers poison Olive Trees and torch Mosques in the Wild West Bank 
Naale, Israeli settlement in West BankImage via WikipediaFrom January 2009 through August 2010, Israeli settlers in the West Bank perpetrated 84 acts of arson involving olive groves, homes and farm buildings. Vigilante settlers have left behind Hebrew graffiti with the words "revenge" or "price tag," referring to their campaign against outpost evacuations or the temporary freeze on settlement expansion. Settlers are turning the bucolic hills and fields of Palestine into the Wild West Bank.

In 1994 Baruch Goldstein, a New York-born Jewish settler, walked into Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs, or the Ibrahimi Mosque, and gunned down Muslim worshippers, killing 29 and wounding another 150. His deadly rampage triggered a period of settler violence in the occupied territories that continues to this day. His grave, in the adjacent and illegal Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, has become a pilgrimage site for Israeli extremists.BEIT HORON, WEST BANK - FEBRUARY 7:  Vehicles ...Image by Getty Images via @daylife

According to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, Israeli civilians killed 49 Palestinians from Sept. 29, 2000 to Aug. 31, 2010. "Settlers block roadways, so as to impede Palestinian life and commerce, shoot solar panels on roofs of buildings, torch automobiles, shatter windowpanes and windshields, destroy crops, uproot trees, beat shepherds, abuse merchants and owners of stalls in the market. Some of these actions are intended to force Palestinians to leave their homes and farmland, and thereby enable the settlers to gain control of them."

American donors finance this settler project.Israel is now recruiting police officers from the very same settler communities that have been tormenting Christians and Muslims in the West Bank. According to a startling report by Jonathan Cook published in the Palestine Chronicle, their new special officer training course includes seven months of religious studies in Elisha, an extremist West Bank settlement. "Although all the settlements are illegal under international law, Elisha is one of dozens of wildcat settlements also illegal under Israeli law," Cook observes. More than 300 settlers are reported to have expressed an interest in the course so far.Nili, Israeli settlement in West BankImage via Wikipedia

"A right-wing settler activist, Hor Nizri, who has clashed with the police in the past over the evacuation of settlements, has been put in charge of recruiting young settlers," Cook writes. "He told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that the program was 'a historic reconciliation,' adding: 'We want to fill the ranks of the police as we fill the ranks of the army.'

"His comments have sparked concern among Palestinian groups inside Israel that the program is the first phase of an attempted settler 'takeover' of the police, replicating their growing dominance of sections of the army."
( Note the similarity to the complaint about USAF training )
 

Religion should unite, not divide 

"Mommy, my classmate asked Ustaz [Mr.] Adrian if he was Christian or Muslim," my daughter told me one day. "You know what he said? He said, 'I'm Palestinian.'"

True, my daughter was not sure how that response clearly answered the classmate's question until I better explained it, but I was in total awe and extremely happy that a teacher in a Catholic School had the good sense to spread the message of nationalism and unity to his young protégés rather than divide them by their religion.

This is not to say that religions cannot unite. If understood and applied properly, they can do more than unite – they can move mountains. However, religions are also used as weapons, tools of extortion and a means of dividing peoples in ways extremely difficult to overcome. Israel's exploitation of the Jewish faith is the perfect case in point and it is damaging, not only to the Palestinians who are forced to live under Israel's rule, but also to Jews as well who do not appreciate their faith being held captive by Zionism.
IDF soldiers and Israeli settlersImage via Wikipedia
The repeated call for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is not, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims, simply for the acknowledgement of Jews' rights here. Nor is it void of sinister undertones. It is further consolidation of Israel's claim that Jews are exclusively entitled to Palestine and that any concession to that effect is out of Israeli good will and generosity.

In Israel, blatant discrimination against other religions is somehow still disguised as "security" and "self-preservation", even as extremist Israelis take to the streets in endorsement of the 39-rabbi decree to ban Jews from selling or renting to Arabs. Settlers fanatically burn mosques and copies of the Quran in West Bank villages and fundamentalist Israelis spit on Christian priests during religious ceremonies in the Old City of Jerusalem.

There are "crazies" in all societies regardless or race or religion. However, what sets Israel apart is the impunity with which these so-called crazies operate.

Israel was founded on the basis of Jewish "supremacy" if you will, which in turn creates a virtual spawning ground for such fanaticism and racism

Another humanoid species co-existed with early humans and Neanderthals 

 The picture of early human life that emerges is a lot messier than what we believed even just twenty years ago, when many anthropologists believed humans diverged from Neanderthals and the two species never interbred again. Now it seems that humans had many cousin species - at least two that we know of - and that we separated from them only to rejoin them later, forming families and creating lineages that persist to the present day.

Pentagon Wants to Give Troops Terminator Vision 
A suite of cameras digitally capture a kilometer-wide, 360-degree sphere, representing the image in 3-D (!) onto a wearable eyepiece. You'd be able to literally see all around you, including behind yourself, and zooming in at will, creating a "stereoscopic/binocular system, simultaneously providing 10x zoom to both eyes." And you would do this all hands-free, apparently by barking out or pre-programming in a command - the solicitation leaves it up to a designer's imagination - when needing to adjust focus.

The Real Reason Why Republicans Don’t Want the “New Start” Treaty 

New START ratified, so what's next for arms control?   HT  Blue Girl Daily

What happened while you were watching DADT? A Defense Budget passed. 

Make the Big Green Buy  ( Op - Ed )
Republican gains in Congress don't have to mean the end of efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions. Obama can use governmental buying power.

Comments
tommythek50

Times lead in: "Now that anti-science Republicans,,,"

A more accurate lead in: "Now that anti-junk science..."

Many extremist "views" or "speculations" have not been proven scientifically. Extremists should focus on what is factually known. Read Scientific American, the nation's number on scientific publication on science. This publication does not utilize political agendas. It reports scientific facts.

Most non-political scientists report that pollution and use of non-replenishable resources are a much more immediate threat to our environment. So, we should recycle plastics, glass, metal, etc., rather than placing them in land fills. We should take care of and drive our cars longer so the metal, glass and plastics inside them are tossed out.

The cost, energy use, and benefit of many so called "green" technologies actually hurt the environment more. Ethanol is number one. The diesel fuel by tractors and farm equipment, the corn not going to feed both human and farm animals, the "pork" subsidies that are never recovered by government to return to taxpayers.

Hopefully, both parties can come back to reality and start concentrating on what we can control. It truly is not rocket science...just a commitment to work on what is the worst first...prioritize.

Slavery, Segmentation, And The Right To The City

If segmentation plays an important role in structuring, and controlling, labor in America today, then it's to the history of the present patterns of segmentation within the workforce we have to turn if we're to discover when and how effective ruptures in the system can occur.
The control of labor must be an important concern in the capitalist system because it is the exploitation of surplus labor that serves as the basis of profit. And the drive, or desire, after profit, is the engine of the entire system. Labor has to be not merely made to rely on wages (through which the extraction of surplus labor is accomplished), it has to be kept under social control as well. Like the Assizes and paternal laws of feudal states, an entire legal and juridical framework had to be constructed that reflected the needs of capital. And beyond this, an entire network of secondary social relations--beside but attached to the primary systemic relationship of exploiter-exploited, capitalist-worker--had to be put into place.
 The division of certain parts of the globe into "civilized" and "colonised" zones not only represented an early large-scale segmentation of labor in the system, it of course provided the historical basis for the political divisions that remain to this day: developing and developed, Third World and First World, indebted nations and creditor nations, etc.
 America could be regarded as the first area under European imperial control that developed its own independent capitalist economy on a considerable scale, and thereby began to transform the relationship between coloniser and colonised.
The movement from an industrial to a postindustrial economy has also meant that any pretense of government or business neutrality on issues of labor organizing has been abandoned. Regulations designed to structure collective bargaining and other labor relations in factories have been declared invalid by courts for application in the "service sector," and where this has not been possible, they've simply been ignored by authorities.
Throughout the '50's and '60's, and right up until the economic crisis of the 1970's, there was a thriving black working class in almost every big city north of Tennessee and east of the Mississippi River.

A New Low - Heckling The Unemployed
I don’t know how someone can yell “Get a job” and keep a straight face when that’s exactly what the person living out of his car wants, especially at this time of year. Talk about taking the Christ out of Christmas. The only explanation I can think of is those hecklers have something in common with Dr. Seuss's Grinch - hearts two sizes too small.

Assange calls for criminal charges against ‘shock jock’ Fox hosts
Julian Assange has accused Fox personalities Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, among others, of committing terrorism through their calls to hunt down and kill the WikiLeaks founder. ...calling for my assassination, calling for the illegal kidnapping of my staff,If we are to have a civil society, you cannot have senior people making calls on national TV to go around the judiciary and illegally murder people. That is incitement to commit murder. That is an offense.
When people call for illegal, deliberate assassination and kidnapping of others, they should be held to account. They should be charged for incitement to commit murder.


Family Escalates Fight Against Air Force Academy for Allowing On-Campus Proselytizing
When the Baas family attended Lauren's graduation in 2010, Jean said she witnessed incidents of proselytizing by older cadets who attended the ceremony. "They went around asking the seniors who they were responsible for bringing to the fold," Baas said. At the time, the USAFA dismissed the account as hearsay - but the letters in support of Cadets for Christ show that "it's not hearsay anymore," Baas said. "It's been a hard struggle. They cannot continue it."

Chaplain Bruno also reportedly told the family that the USAFA had received nine negative responses about Cadets for Christ.

"Thirty-five to nine, like it's a score," Baas said.

MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein called the USAFA's move "a new level of deception and malfeasance."

"They're using tabulated numbers to convince our clients that there is no problem," Weinstein said, invoking Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's words that Americans "do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment."

The emails demonstrate unconstitutional proselytizing, Weinstein said, because Warrick and the Cadets for Christ are shown to be working with the USAFA in an attempt to justify their position. "This act is collusion," Weinstein said. "It's being used to mollify someone who's fighting a constitutional cause ... they're not asking for letters for other organizations." Warrick's solicitation of current cadets is compounded by the fact that the USAFA is federally funded, labeling his actions an attempt to "engage the power of the state."
 

CNN Reporter Put On Watch List After Criticizing TSA 

Firefox 4 Beta 8 Arrives With Faster Graphics, Better Sync 
Mozilla’s nightly builds have already been renamed to beta 9, which means we’ll see at least one more, possibly two more beta releases before Firefox 4 arrives in final form. Mozilla hasn’t set an official release date for Firefox 4 yet, but it’s expect to arrive sometime in early 2011. 
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