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 | Opinion: The Anti-Empire Report - March 2010 |
 by William Blum
Informed consent
About half the states in the US require that a woman seeking an abortion be told certain things before she can obtain the medical procedure. In South Dakota, for example, until a few months ago, staff was required to tell women: "The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being"; the pregnant woman has "an existing relationship with that unborn human being," a relationship protected by the U.S. Constitution and the laws of South Dakota; and a "known medical risk" of abortion is an "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." A federal judge has now eliminated the second and third required assertions, calling them "untruthful and misleading." [1]
I personally would question even the first assertion about a fetus or an embryo being a human being, but that's not the point I wish to make here. I'd like to suggest that before a young American man or woman can enlist in the armed forces s/he must be told the following by the staff of the military recruitment office:
"The United States is at war [this statement is always factually correct]. You will likely be sent to a battlefield where you will be expected to do your best to terminate the lives of whole, separate, unique, living human beings you know nothing about and who have never done you or your country any harm. You may in the process lose an arm or a leg. Or your life. If you come home alive and with all your body parts intact there's a good chance you will be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Do not expect the government to provide you particularly good care for that, or any care at all. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, March 09 @ 12:41:08 EST (4 reads)
(Read More... | 14740 bytes more | Comments? | Opinion | Score: 0)
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| History/Culture: Imagination Crisis |
 by Sarah Browning
Our country faces a crippling crisis of imagination. The problems we face are enormous: a rapidly deteriorating planet, a broken health-care system, millions out of work, so many who’ve lost their homes, children who go to bed hungry, and two wars that grind on with no end in sight.
After a brutal year of rancor and name-calling, we seem to have lost faith that we have the power to solve these problems. In our despair, we don’t even know what an alternative to the status quo might look like.
Who can help? Our most creative citizens: our poets. “Any progressive social change must be imagined first,” the poet, essayist, and translator Martín Espada has written, “and that vision must find its most eloquent possible expression to move from vision to reality.”
If, when you think of poetry, you have itchy, uncomfortable memories of being forced to memorize “Crossing the Bar,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, let me introduce you to Lenelle Moïse, a young Haitian-American poet who lost family members in the earthquake. Despite the anguish, she was able to write, in the wake of the devastation, “freedom thaws in your ribcage…/ every tick, my friend, divine/ confirmation: you are alive. beat. yes!/ you are alive.” ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, March 09 @ 11:08:59 EST (5 reads)
(Read More... | 4289 bytes more | Comments? | History/Culture | Score: 0)
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| Politics: The Democratic Party's Plan To THROW The Next Couple Elections |
 Alert from: activist.thepen
Facing reality is a tough job but somebody's got to do it. And we
foretell for you the events of the future NOT because we want them to
happen, but to get you to act to keep them from happening. But to do
that you need an action page, so here it is.
Put The Public Option Up For A Vote:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1038.php
And now we will explain why this action page is so critical. To
understand the current political dynamic, first you must understand
that the Democrats are PLANNING on losing the next couple election
cycles. UNTIL you understand that, the events to unfold in the next
couple years (unless you act to derail them) will make no sense to
you.
You don't have to believe us. Just listen to the way the Democrats
themselves are talking. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, March 08 @ 19:44:37 EST (9 reads)
(Read More... | 11538 bytes more | Comments? | Politics | Score: 0)
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| History/Culture: In Pursuit Of The Way Things Ought To Be |
 By Howard Bess
The cover of the book is black except for three letters four inches in height. SIN.
The book was a birthday gift to me. In other words, the book found me. I did not find the book. The author is Notre Dame Old Testament professor, Gary Anderson. In very small letters on the front cover are the words “a history.”
In the book Anderson looks at the images and words that are used in the Old Testament to describe sin. He does a very careful job of putting the sin images and words into their historical context. For me it is a reminder that our understanding of sin is ever changing. It is the task of the clergyperson to find new words and images to communicate a reality. Things are not the way they ought to be. It is the minister’s job constantly to analyze and critique society and to point people to a better path.
Old Testament and New Testament agree on one thing. There is such a thing as the way things ought to be. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Saturday, March 06 @ 22:47:36 EST (15 reads)
(Read More... | 5472 bytes more | Comments? | History/Culture | Score: 0)
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| Politics: The Sanity of Hopelessness |
 By David R. Hoffman
Oh say can you see by the fluorescent light
The politicians we’ve bought at our last corporate meeting?
Whose venal hearts and deceit wrought health care’s defeat,
While from boardrooms we laughed and then raised premiums?
And the wars that were fought for the profits we’ve sought
Gave proof to our shareholders that freedom is bought.
Oh say does that banner of corporate fascism now wave,
O’er democracy’s corpse and the working class slaves?
(Anthem of the Corporate Fascist States of America)
Make no mistake about it: America is hopelessly corrupt.
If there were any doubts about this reality, they were efficiently crushed by the Congressional stalemate over health care reform and by the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
Citizens United, under the pretext of expanding the First Amendment’s “freedom of speech” clause, continued the destruction of democracy, first spawned by the court in Bush v. Gore, by granting corporations unlimited ability to influence the outcome of political elections. Thanks to Citizens United, corporations can now buy and own politicians legally and outright, instead of concealing their purchases behind the veil of so-called Political Action Committees (PACs).
Meanwhile the almost unanimous Republican opposition to Health Care Reform has exposed just how pervasive and unifying this corruption truly is, and has made America’s so-called “two party system” unworkable and anachronistic. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Saturday, March 06 @ 22:30:55 EST (15 reads)
(Read More... | 20652 bytes more | Comments? | Politics | Score: 0)
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| My Story: My Name Is Ed. I'm a Racist |
 by: Ed Kinane, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Alcoholics Anonymous knows that recovery requires acknowledging one's illness; denial cripples recovery. What follows isn't about drinking, but about a more cunning disease. Before I say more, I want to introduce myself: "My name is Ed. I'm a racist."
No, I'm not flaunting my bigotry, nor succumbing to guilt. I'm acknowledging that I've been deeply conditioned by a society permeated with racism. For a white person raised in the US, racism recovery demands persistent mindfulness. It's the task of a lifetime.
Admitting you're an alcoholic is hard; likewise admitting to racism. Conveniently, our standard notion of racism features behavior we avoid. We "know" we're not racist because we shun ethnic slurs; we wince at the N-word.
The flipside of this (necessary but insufficient) standard is our widely held, but rarely examined, notion of anti-racism. Again, we "know" we're anti-racist because, in my case for example, back in the eighties we organized against South African apartheid. Or because recently we contributed to Haitian earthquake relief. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, March 05 @ 21:43:45 EST (21 reads)
(Read More... | 6987 bytes more | Comments? | My Story | Score: 0)
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| Opinion: Where Are This War’s Heroes, Military and Journalistic? |
 By Dave Lindorff
When Charlie Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 women and children and old people in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four heroes who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers to justice. One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who evacuated some of the wounded victims, and who set his chopper down between a group of Vietnamese and Calley’s men, ordering his door gunner to open fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people. One was Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who learned of the massacre, and began a private investigation, ultimately reporting the crime to the Pentagon and Congress. One was Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in Charlie Company who witnessed the whole thing, and reported it all to Ridenhour (also confiding that if Ridenhour didn't succeed in getting prosecutions going he had a hit list of all the officers involved and planned to execute them himself!). And one was journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in the US media.
Today’s war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres. It has them almost weekly, as US warplanes bomb wedding parties, or homes “suspected” of housing terrorists that turn out to house nothing but civilians. But these My Lais are all conveniently labeled accidents. They get filed away and forgotten as the inevitable “collateral damage” of war. There was, however, a massacre recently that was not a "mistake"--a massacre which, while it only involved fewer than a dozen innocent people, bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a 12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others, in Kunar Province, on Dec. 26. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, March 04 @ 20:38:35 EST (28 reads)
(Read More... | 7573 bytes more | Comments? | Opinion | Score: 0)
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| Science News: Lack of Morning Light Keeping Teenagers Up at Night |
News Release: RPI.edu
First Field Study Shows Lack of Exposure to Morning Light Delays Sleep in Teens
The first field study on the impact of light on teenagers’ sleeping habits finds that insufficient daily morning light exposure contributes to teenagers not getting enough sleep.
“As teenagers spend more time indoors, they miss out on essential morning light needed to stimulate the body’s 24-hour biological system, which regulates the sleep/wake cycle,” reports Mariana Figueiro, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Program Director at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting Research Center (LRC) and lead researcher on the new study.
“These morning-light-deprived teenagers are going to bed later, getting less sleep and possibly under-performing on standardized tests. We are starting to call this the teenage night owl syndrome.”
In the study just published in Neuroendocrinology Letters, Dr. Figueiro and LRC Director Dr. Mark Rea found that eleven 8th grade students who wore special glasses to prevent short-wavelength (blue) morning light from reaching their eyes experienced a 30-minute delay in sleep onset by the end of the 5-day study. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, March 04 @ 20:12:22 EST (25 reads)
(Read More... | 6036 bytes more | Comments? | Science News | Score: 0)
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| Politics: Deficit Fear Mongering |
 by: Ellen Brown, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis
IMF-Style Austerity Measures Come to America: What "Fiscal Responsibility" Means to You.
In addition to mandatory private health insurance premiums, we may soon be hit with a "mandatory savings" tax and other belt-tightening measures urged by the president's new budget task force. These radical austerity measures are not only unnecessary, but will actually make matters worse. The push for "fiscal responsibility" is based on bad economics.
When billionaires pledge a billion dollars to educate people to the evils of something, it is always good to peer closely at what they are up to. Hedge fund magnate Peter G. Peterson was formerly chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and head of the New York Federal Reserve. He is now senior chairman of Blackstone Group, which is in charge of dispersing government funds in the controversial AIG bailout, widely criticized as a government giveaway to banks. Peterson is also founder of the Peter Peterson Foundation, which has adopted the cause of imposing "fiscal responsibility" on Congress. He hired David M. Walker, former head of the Government Accounting Office, to spearhead a massive campaign to reduce the runaway federal debt, which the Peterson/Walker team blames on reckless government and consumer spending. The Foundation funded the movie "I.O.USA." to amass popular support for their cause, which largely revolves around dismantling Social Security and Medicare benefits as a way to cut costs and return to "fiscal responsibility." ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, March 03 @ 20:41:02 EST (31 reads)
(Read More... | 16169 bytes more | Comments? | Politics | Score: 0)
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| Business/Economy: The Top 10 Reasons We Don’t Need More Nukes |
by Alisa Gravitz
Many of President Barack Obama’s domestic priorities seem intractably stuck in partisan gridlock, but one of his recent State of theUnion proposals appears to be moving ahead quickly: taxpayer-backed loan guarantees for so-called “safe, clean, nuclear power plants.”
The Energy Department has already announced a new $8.3 billion loan guarantee for new nuclear plants in Georgia, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu is using Facebook to explain why the administration believes nukes are necessary.
“No single technology can provide all of the answers,” Chu says. “We need nuclear power as part of a comprehensive solution.”
No way. While it’s certainly true that our energy needs require a diversity of solutions, nuclear power shouldn’t be in the mix. Solar, wind, and geothermal power, combined with energy efficiency, can overcome our reliance on fossil fuels, provide energy security, and mitigate the climate crisis. Here are the top 10 reasons why we shouldn’t build any more nuclear reactors: ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, March 03 @ 20:09:49 EST (32 reads)
(Read More... | 4896 bytes more | Comments? | Business/Economy | Score: 0)
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| Politics: Supreme Court Takes Up Appeal by Enron's Skilling |
 by: Kyle Berlin, t r u t h o u t | Report
The Supreme Court on Monday heard oral arguments concerning an appeal by former Enron Corporation CEO Jeff Skilling, who was tried and convicted in 2006 on numerous counts of fraud, false statements and insider trading linked to his role in the Enron scandal.
Skilling, currently in prison facing a sentence of over 24 years, is challenging the constitutionality of a 1988 statute that makes it illegal to commit fraud that deprives someone of "the intangible right of honest services." Prosecutors have used the law, which does not require them to prove that money or property has been stolen, to attack government and corporate corruption.
The statute's vagueness has prompted the Supreme Court to consider it in three cases this term, and in his appeal Skilling argues that "the statute is nothing more than a common-law fiduciary-breach statute, impermissibly criminalizing whatever wrongful or unethical corporate acts a given prosecutor decides to attack."
Skilling's lawyers argue that prosecutors must show that Skilling acted for his own personal gain at the expense of the company, instead of only showing that he was disloyal or dishonest with company employees and customers. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, March 02 @ 18:45:27 EST (33 reads)
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| Politics: A day for democracy, Vermont style |
 From: Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG)
Last week's vote in the Vermont State Senate to close Vermont Yankee on schedule was a remarkable thing. When our Senators voted on Wednesday, instead of bending to the will of the multi-billion dollar corporation lobbying them, they acted on behalf of the Vermont citizens that they are there to represent.
That vote was a great example of Vermont's representative democracy. Tomorrow is your chance to take part in Vermont's tradition of truly direct democracy - Town Meeting Day.
Town meeting is a rare instance of real, face-to-face democracy that only happens in special places like Vermont. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, March 01 @ 21:11:47 EST (36 reads)
(Read More... | 1940 bytes more | Comments? | Politics | Score: 0)
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| Business/Economy: Down and Out...in America |
by William A. Collins
Hard to live
On lousy pay;
All the good jobs
Went away.
Returning from Haiti makes life in America look pretty sweet…briefly. Until you read the data. The poverty rate here is up to 12 percent, or 39 million people. Unemployment hovers around 10 percent (not even counting the underemployed or those who have given up), 14 percent lack health insurance, and 15 percent endure hunger.
Well, what do you expect? It’s a recession. Indeed, it’s The Great Recession. When the economy is down, people suffer. That’s why we have safety nets: unemployment compensation, food stamps, TANF (welfare), heating assistance, etc. Each of these is now overloaded, with not enough heating fuel to go around. But at least the stigma is reduced. Most families today have someone on unemployment, and people have grown less ashamed of taking food stamps. Sam’s Club, BJ’s, and Costco now welcome them. Poverty is becoming clubby. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, March 01 @ 21:00:08 EST (32 reads)
(Read More... | 4365 bytes more | Comments? | Business/Economy | Score: 0)
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| International: Iran Captures a 'Good' Terrorist |
By Ray McGovern
The Iranian government is celebrating the capture of Abdolmalek Rigi, the leader of a violent group called Jundallah (Arabic for Soldiers of God), which Tehran says is a terrorist organization supported by the United States, Great Britain and Israel.
Jundallah is one of several groups that have been conducting bombings and other violent attacks against Iran’s Islamic regime with the aim of knocking it off balance.
In a July 7, 2008, article for The New Yorker magazine, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh quoted Robert Baer, a former CIA clandestine officer who worked in South Asia and the Middle East for nearly two decades, as saying that Jundallah was one of the militant groups in Iran benefiting from U.S. support.
Hersh also reported that President George W. Bush signed an intelligence finding in late 2007 that allocated up to $400 million for covert operations intended to destabilize Iran’s government, in part, by supporting militant organizations. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Saturday, February 27 @ 19:51:20 EST (34 reads)
(Read More... | 18581 bytes more | Comments? | International | Score: 0)
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| Space: PCs Around the World Unite To Map the Milky Way |
 News Release: RPI.edu
Combined computing power of the MilkyWay@Home project recently surpassed the world’s second fastest supercomputer
At this very moment, tens of thousands of home computers around the world are quietly working together to solve the largest and most basic mysteries of our galaxy.
Enthusiastic and inquisitive volunteers from Africa to Australia are donating the computing power of everything from decade-old desktops to sleek new netbooks to help computer scientists and astronomers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute map the shape of our Milky Way galaxy. Now, just this month, the collected computing power of these humble home computers has surpassed one petaflop, a computing speed that surpasses the world’s second fastest supercomputer.
The project, MilkyWay@Home, uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, which is widely known for the SETI@home project used to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, February 26 @ 22:01:47 EST (38 reads)
(Read More... | 7928 bytes more | Comments? | Space | Score: 0)
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| Friday, February 26 | | · | Senate Panel Blasts Blackwater |
| Thursday, February 25 | | · | Strange Snow Patterns are Consistent with Climate Change |
| Tuesday, February 23 | | · | No Justice Forever - America's New Foreign Policy of Indefinite Detention |
| Monday, February 22 | | · | Agribusiness Profits, Mutant Germs, and Us |
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| Monday, February 15 | | · | Cheney Exposes Torture Conspiracy |
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