7/18/11

The Lord Nelson Mass Rocks (Video)



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A heavy read from The Immanent Frame

The politics of the atonement « The Immanent Frame: "Kahn is not making a normative claim. His project is not constructive in the sense of trying to redirect the political imaginary. He is not affirming this imaginary by saying this is the way politics should be, “that politics must be put back on a religious foundation.” Rather, Kahn’s enterprise is a phenomenological or “descriptive” one. It aims, he says, “to explore the political imagination we have,” apart from the question of “whether or not we should have it.”"


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Just in case you thought the sexes are equal

I Blame The Patriarchy: "For it is the stated position of the Savage Death Island Chapter of Spinster Aunts International that, in a patriarchy, “consensual sex” (between women and dudes) doesn’t even exist. This is because, in a patriarchy, agency is not conferred equally upon women and dudes. This untoward circumstance creates a contingency wherein the notion of consent is, for women, entirely non-substantive, a figment, a desperate fantasy invented to obscure the true nature of women’s status as the sex class."


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Cool union song (Video)


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Time to rethink working hours and jobs and how to distribute them fairly to all

Yglesias | ThinkProgress: "We need shorter hours because it is unrealistic to count on growth in GDP to absorb all this current and future “surplus” labor. Rich countries just never grow that rapidly. So the austerity economics that says work longer and retire later has it exactly wrong." Agreed.


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The unfinished business of America's secret history of torture

Chris Hedges: America’s Disappeared - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig: "It will take time—a lot of time; the crimes committed by Bianco and the two former officers sent to prison this month are nearly four decades old. If it does not happen, then we will continue to descend into a terrifying, dystopian police state where our guards will, on a whim, haul us out of our cells to an amusement park and make us ride, numb and bewildered, on the kiddie train, before the next round of torture."

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The CIA operates with impunity

Here is a largely forgotten sidebar on the US operation to kill Osama. 


"The revelation drew a quick and angry response from health experts. Medecins Sans Frontieres called the operation 'a dangerous abuse of medical care.' In the Washington Post, Orin Levine and Laurie Garrett warned that the CIA's 'reckless tactics could have catastrophic consequences.'"

The CIA operates with impunity
Sad violations to attain a lethal end
No wonder humane workers are suspect
As rules of helpfulness we bend





Club For Growth is a toxic force that will do us all in

Club For Growth To Republicans: Trigger A Default, Or Else! | TPMDC: "And at the same time they're warning the GOP against voting for the only viable option currently on the table for avoiding a catastrophic debt default." The headline will prove very true if it prevails. We had a one percent taste today. These crazies do not care if we lose every dime we have.

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When officials say not suspicious I get suspicious

Reporter who blew whistle on Murdoch found dead | The Raw Story: "Hoare in recent weeks has proved a source second-to-none in the ongoing hacking scandals, speaking with reporters at The New York Times and The Guardian about how News Corp. employees were able to obtain GPS location data from any phone they wanted to, simply by bribing police." Abduction - a permissable guess. I guess this is connected somehow.

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Current Debt Ad Wars Are Missing The Point

Debt Ceiling Debate Sparks New Round Of TV Ad Wars : NPR: Dems need to give the public enough credit to know that the GOP is crazy and hypocritical. Instead of Big Mike nightmare ads they need to explain that our income is at a low and that income from the wealthy will help relieve the debt. The GOP GPS ad is effective because nothing it says is an outright lie. It is just a tissue of fears and frustrations with a nice voice. We lose when we do not answer as cleverly.


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The issue is not source but transparency

How Foreign Money Can Find Its Way Into Political Campaigns: "Yet foreign governments and corporations are openly spending tens of millions of dollars a year buying influence in Washington by hiring well-connected lobbyists, according to research by the Sunlight Foundation and others who have examined the filings those lobbyists have to make to the Justice Department." We need to know who is doing what. Then we can judge whether what they are doing makes any sense. We should be concentrating on morphing journalism into saturation investigation linking whistleblowing to authority outlets. This is the ground being ploughed by Pro Publica and Human Rights Watch.

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Sometimes the best things are hidden

Report: More Americans have green jobs than oil or gas jobs - CSMonitor.com: "Clean energy and other parts of the 'clean economy' account for 2 percent of US jobs, employing some 2.7 million Americans, according to a recent report." I just added Christian Science Monitor to my sources because of factlets like this. For all my grousing, progress is being made.

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President Obama still isn't getting the contest thing so I'll spell it out

Obama is a Peirce guy. Don't ask me why, I just know he is, He thinks in threes, not twos. Just like Charles Sanders Peirce did. Not me versus you. But Me and you and a solution somewhere out there. And the thing has to work, so that if you and me crop up again and again the third has to be different until it achieves what will make it possible for you and me to coexist happily. I said I would spell this out in terms of contests which I have advocated forever and the President pays no mind. Obama gets up and says this energy thing is huge, vague, confusing, a monster. That is the First. Doing anything about is is impossible because there are so many interests and they are all dug in. That is the brute reality. Pierce's Second. And because these two things are utterly obvious, no one on any side can fail to comprehend the dyad. That means the first and the second. In Peirce, the third is the creative linking of the first and the second. I say that the way to get this done is to sponsor contests to create actual physical, working models of a world beyond the one we have now. A thousand points of light. A zillion ideas. A massive democratic experiment. I only care to get one view for this post. The viewer's name is Barack Obama. Let this be the letter he reads before he goes to sleep.

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Nice in Bahrain they go after the sick and their healers

Bahrain: Systematic Attacks on Medical Providers | Human Rights Watch: "(Beirut) - The Bahraini government should immediately end its campaign of arrests of medical professionals and attacks on injured patients linked to recent anti-government protests, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today." This is double sick. The government is illegitimate. The country should be given to the people the government is victimizing. Human Rights Wants the government to investigate its own criminality. That goes as far as from here to my window. We need a no nonsense global celebrity-humanitarian panel that will alight wherever Human Rights Watch suggests to highlight, video and otherwise do that Bradley Manning did to enlighten the world to abuses. The first place they should alight is Leavenworth, then Bahrain.


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Why didn't we think of this - Zap the debt ceiling period

Moody’s: Get Rid of Debt Ceiling - The Daily Beast: "Here’s one way to avoid this mess again: Moody’s, the credit-rating agency, urges the U.S., in a new statement, to eliminate the debt ceiling entirely. Arguing that it creates “periodic uncertainty” among bond investors." We essentially have already. The goal of pay as you go is still the best goal and the economics that hallows deficit spending is what ultimately has to go. Paying the piper is what we must do as a new and sustainable and person-centered economy takes the place of a corporate, military, reifying, predatry, debt-ridden one.


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When an Obama promise is stalled it means we were stupid enough to believe the GOP would help us move forward

PolitiFact | The Obameter: Require 25 percent renewable energy by 2025: "'Will create a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) that will require 25 percent of American electricity be derived from renewable sources by 2025, which has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs on its own.'" We all do stupid things. Next time around throw the rascals out. It's that simple. All they have done for two years and more is grouse about Obama, who is a Republican as much as he is a Democrat, and favor the worst of the Bush Agenda. We clearly need sixty senators and a majority in the House before Obama's most salient promises can be kept.

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Let's see one percent today thank you GOP how much more can you lop off the market

Markets Stumble on Debt and Deficit Worries - NYTimes.com: "Stocks in the United States and Europe fell more than 1 percent on Monday in the wake of the publication late Friday of the results of stress tests on European banks, and as investors remained wary about the debt-ceiling talks in Washington." I swear I saw this coming. I have not got much but what I had I took out of the market when I saw the noxious image of Eric Cantor threatening collapse several months ago. My big wheel friend laughed at me. I keep praying he is right and I am wrong. But Eric Cantor and company do not give a tinker's whatever about me or anyone else who relies on the market for a little bit of wiggle room before they die.

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BP is back at it again this time in Palin's back yard

BP pipeline leaks oily mixture onto Alaskan tundra - Business - Stocks & economy - msnbc.com: "LONDON/ANCHORAGE — BP reported yet another pipeline leak at its Alaskan oilfields, frustrating the oil giant's attempts to rebuild its reputation after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill." Sarah should get a mouthful of the noxious stuff just for begging for more oil by any means necessary. BP should be fined a million hourly for every desecration it allows. The company's reputation is toast but we have a sort of amnesia about disasters. Thankfully BP is sufficiently careless to keep reminding us. But that does not keep the GOP from insisting that our only hope lies in corporations and private enterprise, the more unregulated the better.

All we need in the wake of our foreign wars is a war on pot in the US

Federal medical marijuana memo stirs angst in industry | McClatchy: "But last month brought a new memo from another deputy attorney general, James Cole. And this time, it is stirring industry fears of federal raids on pot dispensaries and sweeping crackdowns on large-scale medical pot cultivation" Here's how it will go. Money will pay agents and operations to put pot growers out of business. Illegal pot will prosper, creating still more WoD expense. The GOP will stiffen penalties and sentences. They will give arrest preference to blacks and hispanics and ignore suburban pot users. The day when our dysfunctional sprawl society implodes will be delayed and these folk will think they are saving the world.

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Saying leave Casey Anthony alone is like saying don't eat those cookies

Casey Anthony’s Whereabouts Unknown - The Daily Beast This will probably be my only mention of CA. Suffice to say that I do not know what she did or did not do. But where I smell mob and hear the voice of Nancy Grace, I take warning. I am at least inclined to her side. I want her to get somewhere safe and maybe not appear to be who she was for the sake of her protection. Maybe Hamlet had the right idea. Disappearing is not easy to do in our predatory-news environment with everyone wanting to be a citizen journalist and photographer. I wish her the best. On the other hand maybe celebrity is the best protection for those whose images have been bruised and whose names are known worldwide.

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I could have told you book supermarkets are toast

Borders Books Nears Liquidation - The Daily Beast: "Borders Books may soon be no more: bids were due at 5 p.m. on Sunday for the struggling book-store chain, but the deadline passed without a single offer." I used to scout scarce books (and an occasional rare one) and there is no bookstore worthy of the name where the owner cannot see the customer and the book. Better the antiseptic reality of the e-book than the transmutation of Wal-mart to book dealing. There was a window of opportunity for these behemoths. It is shutting tight with a happy vengeance. Books will come back when neighborhoods and kiosks and an evolution of the tag-sale morph into the cyber city that will replace today's strip city, sprawl, has-been urban wastelands.

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I want one (Breast Feeding Doll Video)


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Breast Feeding Dolls Are The Coolest

“Breast Milk Baby” Breastfeeding Doll Heading To U.S. Retailers - Tracey John - Pixels, Panels & Playthings - Forbes: "Sure, we’ve had dolls that eat, pee and even poop. But now Berjuan Toys’ “Breast Milk Baby,” a doll that lets little girls (and boys) learn about breastfeeding, is coming to a toy store near you." I am waiting to see what the wingnuts do on this one. If I learned one thing at UNICEF, it was t respect the breast and its life-saving product.

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When I saw that Ralph Nader is for Elizabeth Warren I knew why she was zapped.

Richard Cordray: Consumer Financial-Protection Nominee - The Daily Beast: "He’s not Elizabeth Warren, but the White House’s pick for the consumer-protection bureau may be just as fierce in battling the big banks. Daniel Stone on his chances at confirmation." There is no more potent kiss of death on the planet. It's good Obama picked someone who might do a bit of what she wanted to do. In politics, beware your friends more than your enemies.


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If I were Karzai I'd move to Miami

Karzai Aide Is Gunned Down in Kabul Home - NYTimes.com: "KABUL, Afghanistan — A close adviser to President Hamid Karzai was killed on Sunday night after two gunmen stormed his walled home here. It was the second killing in less than a week of one of the president’s trusted but controversial political allies." Afghanistan may qualify as a bad place. I mean a part of the globe that for all its intrinsic beauty utterly ruins everything there by an addiction to the notion that violence is sort of like chewing gum. You don't think about it much. It is just there. Karzai should be feeling real hear just about now. The shooters are getting closer all the time. Petraeus just handed the war over to him. Quick where shall I put it? Money down the drain. Graves. Mourning families. Bad ground. Avoid in the future please.

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The big deal may happen after all

President Obama, Sen. Boehner Again Talking About Debt Ceiling Deal - ABC News: "And it does appear the 'big deal' is back on the table." Remember it was the President who proposed it. Go for it! Smooch Boehner if you have to.

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Just in case you want to dig a little deeper

Obama’s Last Lecture | FDL News Desk: "One of the more constant critiques of this Presidency is that Barack Obama has failed to teach a generation of willing listeners a story about his beliefs and his values, something that will outlast his term in office and provide a blueprint for the future. This isn’t true. He’s teaching a fundamental lesson. It just may not be one that progressives value." Cap tip digby.


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Meanwhile in Tunisia:

Tunisia: Police Brutally Disperse Peaceful Protesters · Global Voices: "Tunisian police brutally dispersed protesters outside the headquarters of the Cabinet yesterday (July 15). The protesters were calling for reform and were planning to launch a third sit-in at Kasbah square, which is the epicenter of protests in the Tunisian capital Tunis." Remember the Democratic revolution. It is still underway and we lie on beds of ease. Perspective per favor.


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The most salient fact in the entire welter of so called facts

U.S. Debt Ceiling Increase Remains Unpopular With Americans We are a democracy and twice as many do NOT favor raising the debt ceiling as favor it. This trumps all the talk of favoring taxes on the rich and opposing cuts to entitlements - the progressive mantras. It comes down to, stop adding more debt. Obama understands this. The answer is his big idea. Because it is the answer the Republicans oppose it. It is his ticket to victory in 2012. Therefore we should go for the big and suck it up on entitlements. That is the best way to ensure that we hold on to what we have and meet the challenge that most Americans want to meet. Stop the bleeding.

Here's the fiscal facts and the conclusion we might draw

Fiscal FactCheck | FactCheck.org: "These historically high rates of spending and low rates of taxation have combined to produce a chain of deficits that are also the highest since WWII." And here is the conclusion: "We won't attempt to assign blame to one party or the other for the deficits. There is plenty of blame to go around, some of which rests with an American public that won't accept cuts in the largest categories of public spending, and also resists tax increases on anybody but 'the rich'." Solution zap all the Bush tax cuts and cut the military before anything else. Close the corporate loopholes. Come back if that does not solve it.

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Daily Kos seems concerned with placing blame and the debt crisis has not even been solved yet

Daily Kos :: State of the Nation If Charlie Brown were here you know what he would say. Not you bet your sweet bippy. But that's what I would say. If I cannot get to one text that is positive toward the President on a blog that frigging started out supporting John Dean (!), all I can conclude is that the Tower of Babel is definitely running on all cylinders. Of course we forget that these things come down to the final minute when the President notes the monumental solution that wiser heads have achieved. But people have to fill in the time with something.


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Just in case you want to sound educated about the debt stuff

Debt debate cheat sheet - CNN.com All the options are here. I still believe it will be a larger deal than the least but that the enacting of it will be an incremental process. The solution will leave 2012 in abeyance with no clear victors. The sky will not fall.


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At least Gary Johnson knows drugs should be legalized and that tolerance is good


So far he is better than most of the hopefuls. 

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Why is the godfather guy smiling

Herman Cain backs Tenn. move to ban mosque - CBS News: "(AP) Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said Sunday that communities have a right to ban Islamic mosques." Because he has just driven another nail into the coffin into which the ontological value tolerance has been placed by a free act of rejection in the fertile mind of Herman Cain. Has he also rejected non-idolatry, helpfulness and democracy? I doubt we will ever know. All we know is that he has just won support from those who think and do likewise. Congrats Herman.


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Wait a minute dogs run free right


Wrong.

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Right and Christ did not run a clinic devoted to getting government grants and skewering the least and lost

Marcus Bachmann Looking Gay — BagNews: "“Christ is the Almighty Counselor.”– Marcus Bachmann (from Bachmann & Assoc. counseling website)" While we heap coals of fire on Marcus Bachmann and say that he looks gay, let us consider that the most pressing problem we have today is not that there are such people acting with consummate hypocrisy but that we fiddle while Rome quietly burns a degree at a time. The longer we rely on oil ant the car the less difference it makes what Marcus Bachmann looks like or who is President or what we eat for breakfast.


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Let's see we would be at war with Iran, human rights would be in the toilet and McCain would be the most part time President since W

Would We Be Better Off If John McCain Were President? | World | AlterNet This is a dumb question because it is just another excuse to beat up on Obama in the name of progressive funk. Progressive funk translates into not paying any attention to the unsung achievements of President Obama while politics is dancing in the heads of progressives with all the force that it mesmerizes wingnuts. It is getting almost impossible to heed progressives save for the fact that most of their perorations have a grain of truth. What happens is that truth that makes sense is transformed into self-referential angst that no one cares about. And into nasty jabs at the President, because someone has to be the scapegoat for the failure of progressives (aka democracy). Robust support of the President would have avoided the catastrophe of 2010. Instead we had neutered Democrats and self-referential progressives and a disaster at the polls.  We will never really know what the President could have done. (False progressive assumptions.) I prefer to think he does what he can do. There is a vast difference between these two POVs.


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That's right write your own story

3quarksdaily: The Legend of Marcus Aurelius: "Me, I’m writing my own story." There are two things in life that we confuse. Values and character. Values are what make us do what we do. They are freely chosen. They require acts of will to attain fruition in deeds. Then there is character which has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with how you are seen by others and by yourself. When a character is fixed freedom is compromised. Characterization is the very worst of things. When Jesus says judge not that you be not judged, he is cautioning against giving up your inherent freedom and lapsing into characterization. 90 percent of what we do tends toward that particular failing.



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