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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.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

25 December - iGoogle

NASA's DC-8 Flying Over the Weddell SeaImage by NASA Goddard Photo and Video via Flickr
Mars RoversImage by Jastro via Flickr
Overview of the Mars Exploration Rover aeroshellImage via Wikipedia
English: Martian sunset: Spirit at Gusev crate...Image via Wikipedia

Anti-whaling activists’ drone tracks Japan fleet

Brazil hits Chevron with new oil spill fine
Brazil's environmental protection agency hands Chevron $5.4 million for 'poor handling' of oil spill last month

 
The National Defence Authorisation Act continues the onward march of the 'war on terror' through the American homeland.
In an instructive coincidence, the passage of the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) by the US Congress came on December 15, 2011, the same day as the official start of US forces' pullout from Iraq. One front in the US' post-9/11 conflicts closed overseas, as another front seemingly opened at home. Now awaiting President Barack Obama's signature, which will turn it into law, the NDAA would further entrench here at home some of the defining features of the United States' extraterritorial campaign against political violence by non-state actors
For years, my students, my colleagues and I have been dealing with the realities of indefinite military imprisonment without trial, and of trial before untested and unfair military commissions. But we deal with those issues in the context of our work on behalf of our many non-citizen clients imprisoned outside of the US, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan.
Together, the NDAA's provisions keep Guantánamo open as a facility, while expanding within the US a set of practices and legal approaches that stem from the Guantánamo experiment. Of course, the Guantanamisation of the American justice-and carceral-system was already well underway. Since 9/11, lengthy and oppressive pre-trial detention conditions have become the norm in federal terrorism cases, along with draconian sentence enhancements meted out to convicts in such cases, and subsequent imprisonment under cruel Special Administrative Measures and in majority-Muslim Communications Management Units. But this legislation represents further, significant strides in that direction, and, notably, ones that are overtly military in character.
To be clear, the NDAA does not institute martial law for all in the US. But it would be foolish not to see that it lays a potential foundation for it in the future. Students of history, and those of us new Americans who have lived under military or militarised regimes - and that includes many Muslim Americans - will spot the kinship and recognise in this law some of the markers of authoritarian rule.
An irony among many is that there were no such certification hurdles to drop human beings into the endless Guantánamo ordeal in the first place. These provisions poignantly underscore how the entire Guantánamo system is an absurd one-way ratchet.
The first provision, section 1021, purports merely to reaffirm the status quo under the 2001 Authorisation for Use of Military Force. However, by codifying for the first time the interpretation given that law by two successive administrations and the federal courts, Congress has effectively reinforced the status quo, perhaps placing it beyond the reach of pending lawsuits challenging the prevailing interpretations.

Poet-Bashing Police

The deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines. NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning.

the entire university system in California is under great stress and the State Legislature is paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like $16,000. It is no wonder that the real estate industry started inventing loans for people who couldn’t pay them back.

“Whose university?” the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world.

 
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Anonymous Dumps Massive 

Unable to retrieve: http://apps.current.com/ig/get.xml
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