Let Him Off the Hook?

Brilliant!!

Solidarity With All ProDemocracy Protesters

Please take a moment today and say a prayer for the Pro-Democrcay protesters in Egypt who have had their internet access cut by a government who wishes to hide what it is doing from the world.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/faog1/update_on_egypt_revolution/

Graph showing internet traffic to and from Egypt with abrupt drop.

All We Are Saying Is Give Peace A Chance

People. Like. Freedom.
Way to go, Egyptian protesters. Solidarity forever.



http://i.imgur.com/rcPGl.jpg

Tunisia-Like Riots Are Breaking Out In Egypt - Business Insider 25 January 2011

QUOTE Tens of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets across Egypt, facing down a massive police presence to demand:
Jobs;
Cheaper food; and
Ouster of President Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for 30 years since Sadat's assassination in 1981.
Three Dead
As of the time of release of this briefing, three people are dead. Two protestors died in the port city of Suez and a security officer died in central Cairo. Protests also took place in Alexandria and industrial Nile Delta towns.
Hundred Injured
At least 100 protestors were injured in Cairo, where police used tear gas, rubber bullets, batons and dogs to try to disperse the crowds, and Twitter has been blocked. UNQUOTE Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/egypt-revolt-post-tunisia-is-a-dam-breaking-what-happens-next-2011-1#ixzz1C9zc8ZQ8

Incredible Video Of Protesters Chasing Egyptian Riot Police http://www.businessinsider.com/video-egypt-protester-vehicle-2011-1#ixzz1C9yRcLgn

Johnny Cash & The Four Horsemen

I've posted on this before and was pleased to run across the Unrepentant Cowboy's take on Mr. Cash and the 4 Horsemen.

Be sure and watch both videos. Even if you are already a Christian ~ especially if you are one.

QUOTE Jesus came first as a lamb. The Jews, expecting a savior, couldn't or wouldn't recognize him. He will return as a lion. And Christians can't or won't recognize him when he does. I tire of a bunch of whiney ass wimps and cowards using my savior's name. I tire of worthless praise songs emanating from lying lips. For some, he will come like a thief in the night. UNQUOTE

Here's one for you, Unrepentant Cowboy, enjoy:

The Tin-Eared Entitled: Let The Eat Cake: We Profit!

From The Daily Economic Update (Robert Denner) comes a cry of outrage over the mindless and heartless natterings of in infobabe on a popular TV network.

QUOTE This is the part of CHANGE that must be embraced. The current system is broken if it must see fit to starve fellow humans at the sake of turning a freaking profit for your retirement. This is a case where YOU can make all the difference. Stop feeding the monster and at least consider how your money is being used to destroy millions of lives. At the very least make sure that the funds you are investing in are DEVOID OF FOOD SPECULATION. And make sure you voice your outrage at Wall Street’s seeming INDIFFERNCE at the suffering of hundreds of millions of people.
You want to understand the anger that the 3rd world feels against the United States? This is one HUGE reason.
The absolute AMORAL delivery of that woman on CNBC still rings in my ears, even after 10 hours. How to profit from human misery, should have been the teaser they used as they went to a commercial break. UNQUOTE
~~~

MLK Day 2011

Rules Vs. Results

Our friend from financial services days-gone-by (and sometimes mentor) David L. Smith has a good post up over at his blog, Cassandra Chronicles, in which he spins off a Paul Krugman train of thought to pinpoint the difference between the liberal and conservative (American) views.

QUOTE Conservatives are wedded to the rules — an ideological Master Narrative propounding (at least in theory) unfettered capitalism; free markets; low taxes; minimum government; strong military; willingness to use military force, if perceived to be necessary; and representative democracy — and approve of whatever outcome the rules produce. In the conservative mind, the rules are morally justified, paramount and, therefore, unchangeable and unassailable. Accordingly, with simple, if flawed logic, conservatives claim the results their moral rules produce must necessarily be moral.......Liberals, on the other hand, focus on the results produced by the rules, and if the results are morally or practically objectionable, liberals believe in changing the rules to produce a more morally and practically desirable result (the political equivalent of ‘managing by results’). Therefore, liberals tend to be unmoved by conservative arguments based primarily on the morality of the rules.Unlike the conservatives, united by a common, unchanging creed, liberals tend to squabble a lot about just how the rules ought to be changed, simply because of the myriad combinations and permutations of possible results and developing socio-economic conditions their rule changes must address. UNQUOTE

It is as though the conservatives are the Old Testament and the liberals the New. Not a bad conceptualizing of the two.
~~~
Happy Martin Luther King Day!
~~~

The Caring Community and the Dialectic of Violence

The United States has had so many catastrophes in so very short a time that we have begun to think constantly in catastrophic terms. Most recent disaster is the shooting of an unarmed US Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords (D. AZ) a Federal Judge, and a little girl and other bystanders at a public appearance in Tucson AZ yesterday.

Ms. Giffords’s father Spencer, 75, wept when asked by the New York Post if his daughter had any enemies. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The whole Tea Party’ – the Right wing of the Republican Party."

Palin put rifle cross hairs over Gifford's district together with words encouraging supporters to "reload" and "take aim" at Democrats. That's incendiary language that should be condemned. McCain has used very similar incendiary language but did not reference it to specific Democrats (to my knowledge) as did Palin. Come out and condemn her for it and do it loudly. She deserves that and more. - Reddit user jray7

The local sheriff had some words of potent wisdom that the wise would do well to heed in no uncertain terms:

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, speaking about Arizona:"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry. It's not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included. And that's the sad thing of what's going on in America. Pretty soon, we're not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people who are willing to subject themselves to serve in public office." He later added: "Let me just say one thing, because people tend to poo-poo this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech. But it's not without consequences."

Yes, we have the right to free speech. But the right to free speech has never included the right to shout fire in a crowded theater, and yet many of these so-called constitutionalists claim it has.

Here's a tweet from filmmaker Michael Moore from yesterday that asks a succinct question:

If a Detroit Muslim put a map on the web w/crosshairs on 20 pols, then 1 of them got shot, where would he b sitting right now? Just asking.

What does a caring community do when a psychotic responds to the verbally violent urgings of a powerful leader? Does it do anything beyond the obvious isolation and imprisonment of the violent psychotic? Or does it seek to remake and retool the larger community into a place where

public meetings can take place unmolested, where vigorous debate never means malice of harm intended and where verbal threats of violence are taken seriously and those who speak them reined in? Or does the community cease to care and let itself be overwhelmed by those whose dark intent is to suggest mayhem until an unhinged and unstable follower commits it?

What are Some Examples of Actionable Abusive or Insulting Language?

1. Verbal threats; 2. Humiliating statements; 3. Racial or sexual slurs; and 4. Scandalous statements. We have seen all of these in public political life in the recent past.

It is high time our politicians cooled the rhetoric to a civil and polite level.

Deborah J. Yost

9 January 2011

Lincoln, NE

Grope-N-Ogle-R-Us

The purpose is not security, but to humiliate and constantly remind who is "in charge". Year-to-date statistics for 2010 on airport screening at Dulles and Reagan Airports from the Department of Homeland Security:

Terrorist Plots Discovered 0

Transvestites 1,333

Hernias 3,485

Hemorrhoid Cases 3,172

Enlarged Prostates 8,249

Breast Implants 59,350

Link to The New American article and hat tip to slow_dazzle at Hubbert's Arms.

South Park Bank Bailout Episode

Summing it up nicely. "It's gone!"

Let's Let the Empire Dry Up and Blow Away

The first rule of holes is to stop digging. With 700 military installations around the globe, and more armament than sense, how can we not see that hauling our men and women and equipment home, one by one, and putting them to work at a new green energy job, or a new local/organic agriculture job, would increase our quality of life and our respect around the world a thousand-fold? When will people stop believing the lies that are told by those in power ~ when it is obvious that those in power only care about enriching themselves at the expense of other's labor, blood and sorrow? From Nature Bats Last, please click on over and read it all.

QUOTE In a Tucson coffee shop last week I saw a woman, apparently in her early twenties, dressed in a short skirt, an apron, and high heels. Had she been behind the counter, she would have been the perfect symbol of the 1950s, a refugee from two generations gone by. We’ve moved from the unquestioning automatons of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell to the firebrands of a radical counter-cultural worldview and back again. A generational sea change swept us from post-war “liberators” drunk on early 1950s propaganda to revolutionaries willing to take risks in defense of late 1960s ideals. The revolution gained steam through the 1970s, but lost its way when the U.S. industrial economy hit the speed bump of domestic peak oil. The Carter Doctrine — the world’s oil belongs to us — coupled with Ronald Reagan’s soothing pack of lies, was the perfect match to our middle-aged comfort, so we abandoned the noble ideals of earlier days for another dose of palliative propaganda. Three decades later, we’ve swallowed so much Soma we wouldn’t couldn’t find a hint of revolution in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. UNQUOTE

Happy New Year!!

May those who love us, love us.

And those who don't love us,

May God turn their hearts;

And if He doesn't turn their hearts,

May He turn their ankles,

So we will know them by their limping.

~~~

Haste ye back, we loue you dearly,
Call again you're welcome here.
May your days be free from sorrow,
And your friends be ever near.
May the paths o'er which you wander,
Be to you a joy each day.
Haste ye back we loue you dearly,
Haste ye back on friendship's way.

~ Scottish blessing

~~~

As we start the New Year,

Let's get down on our knees to thank God we're on our feet.

-Irish wisdom

May the Lord keep you in his hand and never close his fist too tight on you. And may the face of every good news and the back of every bad news be toward us in the New Year. -Irish toast

Quarks and Bees and Cosmic Dances

I don't pretend to understand this fully, but how wonderful! The well-known honey dance of the honeybee is found to interact with quantum fields. What if the common little brown honeybee held the earth together?
From neuroquantology.com

QUOTE Shipman is not, however, content to play Kepler. "You can look at this idea and say, `That's a nice geometric description of the dance, very pretty,' and leave it like that," she says. "But there is more to it. When you have a physical phenomenon like the honeybee dance, and it follows a mathematical structure, you have to ask what are the physical laws that are causing it to happen."At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation. The flag manifold, she notes, in addition to providing mathematicians with pure joy, also happens to be useful to physicists in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks, tiny particles that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. And she does not believe the manifold's presence both in the mathematics of quarks and in the dance of honeybees is a coincidence. Rather she suspects that the bees are somehow sensitive to what's going on in the quantum world of quarks, that quantum mechanics is as important to their perception of the world as sight, sound, and smell. UNQUOTE

Yuletide!

"WINTER GIFT" by Julia Helen Jeffrey
*********
I am the Christmas Spirit
That comes with the end of December:
A winter solstice spell, perhaps,
When people forget to remember –
The drab realities of fact,
The cherished hurt of ancient wrongs,
The lonely comfort of being deaf
To human sighs and angel’s songs.
Suddenly, they lose their minds
To heart’s demands and beauty’s grace;
And deeds extravagant with love
Give glory to the common place.

--Anthony F. Perrino

A Light Will Shine

So here's the story of the day ~ at bottom, the true meaning of the holiday season and of the rebirth of light in a darkened world. Merry Christmas to all, and may God bless us, every single one.

From Boston.com
17 year old boy drives to a stranger's house every night to carry their son with cerebral palsy up the stairs to his bedroom because the parents can't.

Cute Overload Day

It's cute overload day at TRT! Hat tip to Rachael Garver for this one.

Debby Cantlon, who plans to release Finnegan, the young squirrel, back into the wild, bottle-fed the infant squirrel after it was brought to her house
When Cantlon took in the tiny creature and began caring for him, she found herself with an unlikely nurse's aide: her pregnant Papillion, Mademoiselle Giselle.

Finnegan was resting in a nest in a cage just days before Giselle was due to deliver her puppies. Cantlon and her husband watched as the dog dragged the squirrel's cage twice to herOwn bedside before she gave birth.

Cantlon was concerned, yet ultimately decided to allow the squirrel out and the inter-species bonding began.

Finnegan rides a puppy mosh pit of sorts, burrowing in for warmth after feeding,Eventually working his way beneath his new litter mates.

Two days after giving birth, mama dog Giselle allowed Finnegan to nurse; family photos and a videotape show her encouraging him to suckle alongside her litter of five pups.
Now, Finnegan mostly uses a bottle, but still snuggles with his 'siblings' in a moshpit of puppies,Rolling atop their bodies, and sinking in deeply for a nap.

Finnegan and his new litter mates, five Papillion puppies, get along together as if they were meant to.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Keep loving everyone, even the squirrelly ones.

~~~

What About Bradley Manning?

What with all the attention on Julian Assange the past few weeks, people generally just forget that young Bradley Manning (traitor or hero depending on how you look at the world) is cooling his heels in a federal jail cell. Which is fine unless the hero faction is correct, as I contend, then it becomes problematic.

If Tom Paine was alive today he'd be a Julian Assange. If John Adams was alive today, he'd be a Bradley Manning.

Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com writes:

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a "Maximum Custody Detainee," the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.
From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every
day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including
even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on
suicide watch).

This is especially distressing since the consensus in the psychological world is that long-term solitary confinement is indeed a potent form of torture.

It's one thing to impose such punitive, barbaric measures on convicts who have proven to be violent when around other prisoners; at the Supermax in Florence, inmates convicted of the most heinous crimes and who pose a threat to prison order and the safety of others are subjected to worse treatment than what Manning experiences. But it's another thing entirely to impose such
conditions on individuals, like Manning, who have been convicted of nothing and have never demonstrated an iota of physical threat or disorder.

ibid.

Daniel Ellsberg, in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now last week, said:

The fact is that what Lamo reports Manning is saying has a very familiar and persuasive ring to me. He reports Manning as having said that what he had read and what he was passing on were horrible -- evidence of horrible machinations by the US backdoor dealings throughout the Middle East and, in many cases, as he put it, almost crimes. And let me guess that -- he’s not a lawyer, but I'll guess that what looked to him like crimes are crimes, that he was
putting out. We know that he put out, or at least it's very plausible that he put out, the videos that he claimed to Lamo. And that's enough to go on to get them interested in pursuing both him and the other.And so, what it comes
down, to me, is -- and I say throwing caution to the winds here -- is that what I've heard so far of Assange and Manning -- and I haven't met either of them --
is that they are two new heroes of mine.

-Daniel Ellsberg

Bradley Manning Defense Fund

Stand With Brad.org

Seth Martin of Iraq Veterans Against the War, writes:

In the film "District 9," a scandal erupts over South Africa's mistreatment of a community of oppressed extraterrestrials. The man who first discovers the truth is made the target of a nationwide manhunt, accused of having sex with aliens and said to be contagious. Later, a young contractor who exposes said truths to the public is arrested and thrown into prison. While that film is known for its sci-fi backdrop, the portrayal of justice and power it provides is eerily contemporary. Julian Assange is accused of sex without a condom, and at least one of his accusers suspected to have CIA ties.

Bradley Manning, on the other hand, is awaiting court-martial and faces up to 52 years in prison. As an enlisted soldier, he will be tried not by a jury of his peers, but by a jury of officers, thereby giving him a far slimmer chance of receiving a fair trial.

It is chilling to consider that, if we in America had reacted to pro-accountability leaks in the past the way we do today, Daniel Ellsberg would likely be in prison. So might those who reported the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Do we want to be the country that promises free-speech, except for those who speak uncomfortable truths? Do we truly want to be the Land of the Free (with Caveats)? Do we want to send the message that those who reveal high-level malfeasance are not heroes to be lauded, but criminals to be hunted down and punished?

For my country's sake, and the sake of all who would speak truth to power, I hope not.

US and China Conspired to Abort Copenhagen Climate Summit

Thank you WikiLeaks. From Speigel Online:

QUOTE Although the US signed the protocol, it never ratified it. As such, the Chinese and the Americans can continue polluting at will. Meanwhile European nations will have to cut their energy consumption. They, therefore, fought for a new agreement in Copenhagen, one that would tie the United States, China and newly-industrialized nations India and Brazil to specific emission-reduction targets. UNQUOTE

Ticktock, ticktock, Karma's a bitch. She's riding Binky into town and carrying a satchel full of toxic emissions with little American and Chinese flags stuck to them.
Jaysus.

There Oughta Be A Law

Oh wait. There is, it just is being selectively enforced. From The Huffington Post comes a tale of robosigners, wrongful foreclosures and how very hard they are to get resolved properly. Big banks run amok. Yes there is legal recourse but at huge cost and for those who have done NOTHING wrong, a huge unjust burden that is neither democratic nor American in the classic sense of the word.

It is oppressive, autocratic abuse of the citizenry. It is subversive of true law and order. Be sure and click on over to read it all, comments too.

Must-read comment by Reader Mrbadexample:

QUOTE Everyone needs to keep this meme in mind when reading these stories--These are the stories we're hearing about. These are the stories where a wronged homeowner was able to scrape together a retainer for an attorney and fight the bank. In most cases, the bank is able to bully the homeowner into some sort of settlement­. This is regardless of whether the bank is at fault in the first place. Friends involved in litigation with the bank that issued their mortgage found the bank had forged documents in their applicatio­n file. Their attorney acknowledg­ed that this should be a slam-dunk of a case for a court, but the bank would try to run them out of money--it would take upwards of $20,000 up front to pursue it and it would be two or three years out of their lives. They settled. This sort of behavior is Exhibit A of why Elizabeth Warren's Banking Consumer group was set up. And it's Exhibit A of why the new Congress will do everything they can to defund her. UNQUOTE

Happy "World Press FreedomDay"

From our sister blog, Wonkette (I am a proud 'wonkette' myself)comes this story of Orwellian nuance and impact: QUOTE The United States, which is currently engaged in a complete war against some weird guy with a website, is going to host “World Press Freedom Day,” the Department of State announced today. They’re all especially excited about protecting the flow of digital news, which is why Washington is “concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information.” LOL. This is the same Department of State (and Justice Department and Pentagon and CIA and NATO and PayPal) trying everything to cut off WikiLeaks’ access to the Internet and its own money. UNQUOTE

Hey, how odd is that, 'National Corporatocracy Festival' and 'I Love Big Brother Long Time' Week are coming up too!

I HAZ TRAFFIC CAMS!