Thursday, November 30, 2006
Another Latin Lefty
Hey Folks,
Here we have another role model.
This brave man, Correa, has taken the bull by the horns. Just as in a number of other Latin countries, he has decided to buck a system designed to help the few at the expense of the many.
In most of these countries it seems that 80% of the people suffer in order to carry the annointed 20% around on silk pillows; and that has been the status quo for years and years - you might say "the natural order" or "the way god wants it."
It turns out, however, that if someone has the guts to stand up for the 80%, only 15 to 20 percent of the oppressed are stupid enough to side with their oppressors. Clearly, if any politician allows himself the option of addressing the needs of the people, he can be elected (if he isn't assassinated first - or soon after). Lately, those brave enough to stand up keep winning with 60 to 65% of the vote - much to the chagrin of the elite (who pose as supporters of democracy and the rule of law but connive tirelessly to subvert both).
Correa presents an extra opportunity for study not available in other Latin countries' move to the left. He was elected by the people, but without first attempting a house-cleaning of the legislature, still unanimously toadies of the elect.
According to the article:
Correa says his first act after being sworn in as president on Jan. 15 will be to call for a national referendum on the need to elect a special assembly that could rewrite the constitution and even shut down Congress.
That puts him on a collision course with the legislature, which has dismissed Ecuador's last three elected presidents, violating impeachment proceedings in the process, after huge street protests demanding their ousters.
Correa looks toward reforms in Ecuador
By MONTE HAYES, Associated Press Writer Mon Nov 27
QUITO, Ecuador - Rafael Correa, the leftist nationalist headed to victory in Ecuador's presidential race, is already planning radical reforms when he takes office in January.
That is putting him on a fast track to a dangerous confrontation with the country's opposition-controlled Congress — a body he has called a "sewer" but which he needs to carry out his reforms.
"We receive this triumph with deep serenity and humility," the 43-year-old Correa, who calls himself a "personal friend" of Venezuela's anti-U.S. President Hugo Chavez, said at a news conference Sunday night.
With 58 percent of the ballots counted, Correa had a 65 percent to 35 percent lead over banana tycoon Alvaro Noboa, Ecuador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal said Monday.
While votes in Noboa's stronghold of Guayas, Ecuador's most populous province, were among the last to be tallied, even a strong advantage there would not be enough for Noboa to win.
Correa's followers took to the streets in caravans with musicians to celebrate a victory that few questioned except Noboa, who said he would await the end of the official count that might not come until Tuesday.
Correa said his victory "is a clear message to our traditional political class of the profound changes that our citizens want. This country doesn't need patching up. It needs a new constitution in tune with the times."
Correa, who has a doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois, surged in voter support as a fresh-faced outsider determined to reform Ecuador's political system.
His view that the Ecuadorean democratic system is designed to benefit parties rather than people is shared by many voters fed up with corruption, greed and incompetence in the political establishment.
During the campaign, Correa attacked Ecuador's Congress as a "sewer" of corruption and ran no candidates for the legislature. He now faces a Congress totally in the hands of his opponents — but says that's not important.
"Let's stop worrying so much about Congress. Let them scrutinize what they want. We're not afraid," he said. "What we won't tolerate is any attempt at instability or blackmail."
Correa says his first act after being sworn in as president on Jan. 15 will be to call for a national referendum on the need to elect a special assembly that could rewrite the constitution and even shut down Congress.
That puts him on a collision course with the legislature, which has dismissed Ecuador's last three elected presidents, violating impeachment proceedings in the process, after huge street protests demanding their ousters.
Jaime Duran, a public opinion analyst who served as chief of staff in a previous government, noted that the congressmen elected in October were just as legitimately elected as Correa.
"They have the same right to serve as Correa does," he said.
Correa's problem is that Congress would have to approve a constitutional reform to allow creation of a constituent assembly. And it has blocked attempts by the last two presidents to rewrite the constitution.
Correa has vowed to rally street protests if lawmakers don't agree to a new constitution that trims the power of the traditional parties.
Many of the reforms he proposes would make politicians more responsive to voters. For example, congressmen would represent districts instead of being elected with a national vote. He also supports allowing recall of all elected officials.
But he risks violating the constitution if he tries to organize an election for a constituent assembly without Congress' approval.
He argues "the voice of the people" as reflected in a national referendum takes precedence over Congress or the constitution — a position challenged by most legal experts.
Insistence on forcing electoral authorities to convene an election for the assembly could put him in risk of impeachment, say experts.
"That immediately creates a conflict with Congress," said Benjamin Ortiz, head of a think tank in Quito.
Since Correa has no congressmen to defend him, "for the first time there would be sufficient votes to impeach a president without resorting to the murky maneuvers of the past," Ortiz said.
Here we have another role model.
This brave man, Correa, has taken the bull by the horns. Just as in a number of other Latin countries, he has decided to buck a system designed to help the few at the expense of the many.
In most of these countries it seems that 80% of the people suffer in order to carry the annointed 20% around on silk pillows; and that has been the status quo for years and years - you might say "the natural order" or "the way god wants it."
It turns out, however, that if someone has the guts to stand up for the 80%, only 15 to 20 percent of the oppressed are stupid enough to side with their oppressors. Clearly, if any politician allows himself the option of addressing the needs of the people, he can be elected (if he isn't assassinated first - or soon after). Lately, those brave enough to stand up keep winning with 60 to 65% of the vote - much to the chagrin of the elite (who pose as supporters of democracy and the rule of law but connive tirelessly to subvert both).
Correa presents an extra opportunity for study not available in other Latin countries' move to the left. He was elected by the people, but without first attempting a house-cleaning of the legislature, still unanimously toadies of the elect.
According to the article:
Correa says his first act after being sworn in as president on Jan. 15 will be to call for a national referendum on the need to elect a special assembly that could rewrite the constitution and even shut down Congress.
That puts him on a collision course with the legislature, which has dismissed Ecuador's last three elected presidents, violating impeachment proceedings in the process, after huge street protests demanding their ousters.
It goes on:
Correa's problem is that Congress would have to approve a constitutional reform to allow creation of a constituent assembly. And it has blocked attempts by the last two presidents to rewrite the constitution.
Correa has vowed to rally street protests if lawmakers don't agree to a new constitution that trims the power of the traditional parties.
You see, Folks, the system is set up to maintain itself - no matter how corrupt or perverted. As the article shows, the Congress has ignored the law a number of times lately, but you can bet that they - and the Bushies here - will yell bloody murder if and when Correa calls for street demonstrations on behalf of the people's interest.
We can learn from this. If the Democrats should behave, as some predict, not much differently from the imperialistic, elite-oriented Republicans, then street demonstrations ARE in order.
Americans are not accustomed to thinking that way, but that WILL be the way it is. We can learn by watching Ecuador.
- Uke Man
Correa looks toward reforms in Ecuador
By MONTE HAYES, Associated Press Writer Mon Nov 27
QUITO, Ecuador - Rafael Correa, the leftist nationalist headed to victory in Ecuador's presidential race, is already planning radical reforms when he takes office in January.
That is putting him on a fast track to a dangerous confrontation with the country's opposition-controlled Congress — a body he has called a "sewer" but which he needs to carry out his reforms.
"We receive this triumph with deep serenity and humility," the 43-year-old Correa, who calls himself a "personal friend" of Venezuela's anti-U.S. President Hugo Chavez, said at a news conference Sunday night.
With 58 percent of the ballots counted, Correa had a 65 percent to 35 percent lead over banana tycoon Alvaro Noboa, Ecuador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal said Monday.
While votes in Noboa's stronghold of Guayas, Ecuador's most populous province, were among the last to be tallied, even a strong advantage there would not be enough for Noboa to win.
Correa's followers took to the streets in caravans with musicians to celebrate a victory that few questioned except Noboa, who said he would await the end of the official count that might not come until Tuesday.
Correa said his victory "is a clear message to our traditional political class of the profound changes that our citizens want. This country doesn't need patching up. It needs a new constitution in tune with the times."
Correa, who has a doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois, surged in voter support as a fresh-faced outsider determined to reform Ecuador's political system.
His view that the Ecuadorean democratic system is designed to benefit parties rather than people is shared by many voters fed up with corruption, greed and incompetence in the political establishment.
During the campaign, Correa attacked Ecuador's Congress as a "sewer" of corruption and ran no candidates for the legislature. He now faces a Congress totally in the hands of his opponents — but says that's not important.
"Let's stop worrying so much about Congress. Let them scrutinize what they want. We're not afraid," he said. "What we won't tolerate is any attempt at instability or blackmail."
Correa says his first act after being sworn in as president on Jan. 15 will be to call for a national referendum on the need to elect a special assembly that could rewrite the constitution and even shut down Congress.
That puts him on a collision course with the legislature, which has dismissed Ecuador's last three elected presidents, violating impeachment proceedings in the process, after huge street protests demanding their ousters.
Jaime Duran, a public opinion analyst who served as chief of staff in a previous government, noted that the congressmen elected in October were just as legitimately elected as Correa.
"They have the same right to serve as Correa does," he said.
Correa's problem is that Congress would have to approve a constitutional reform to allow creation of a constituent assembly. And it has blocked attempts by the last two presidents to rewrite the constitution.
Correa has vowed to rally street protests if lawmakers don't agree to a new constitution that trims the power of the traditional parties.
Many of the reforms he proposes would make politicians more responsive to voters. For example, congressmen would represent districts instead of being elected with a national vote. He also supports allowing recall of all elected officials.
But he risks violating the constitution if he tries to organize an election for a constituent assembly without Congress' approval.
He argues "the voice of the people" as reflected in a national referendum takes precedence over Congress or the constitution — a position challenged by most legal experts.
Insistence on forcing electoral authorities to convene an election for the assembly could put him in risk of impeachment, say experts.
"That immediately creates a conflict with Congress," said Benjamin Ortiz, head of a think tank in Quito.
Since Correa has no congressmen to defend him, "for the first time there would be sufficient votes to impeach a president without resorting to the murky maneuvers of the past," Ortiz said.
Support our troops: shop while they drop!!
Hey Folks,
If you are awake and really care about anything important, this will make you crazy!!
- Uke Man
November 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
While Iraq Burns
By BOB HERBERT
(a ukethanks to Phyll)
Americans are shopping while Iraq burns.
The competing television news images on the morning after Thanksgiving were of the unspeakable carnage in Sadr City — where more than 200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a series of coordinated car bombs — and the long lines of cars filled with holiday shopping zealots that jammed the highway approaches to American malls that had opened for business at midnight.
A Wal-Mart in Union, N.J., was besieged by customers even before it opened its doors at 5 a.m. on Friday. “All I can tell you,” said a Wal-Mart employee, “is that they were fired up and ready to spend money.”
There is something terribly wrong with this juxtaposition of gleeful Americans with fistfuls of dollars storming the department store barricades and the slaughter by the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including old people, children and babies. The war was started by the U.S., but most Americans feel absolutely no sense of personal responsibility for it.
Representative Charles Rangel recently proposed that the draft be reinstated, suggesting that politicians would be more reluctant to take the country to war if they understood that their constituents might be called up to fight. What struck me was not the uniform opposition to the congressman’s proposal — it has long been clear that there is zero sentiment in favor of a draft in the U.S. — but the fact that it never provoked even the briefest discussion of the responsibilities and obligations of ordinary Americans in a time of war.
With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its consequences. In an interview last week, Alex Racheotes, a 19-year-old history major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said: “I definitely don’t know anyone who would want to fight in Iraq. But beyond that, I get the feeling that most people at school don’t even think about the war. They’re more concerned with what grade they got on yesterday’s test.”
His thoughts were echoed by other students, including John Cafarelli, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, who was asked if he had any friends who would be willing to join the Army. “No, definitely not,” he said. “None of my friends even really care about what’s going on in Iraq.”
This indifference is widespread. It enables most Americans to go about their daily lives completely unconcerned about the atrocities resulting from a war being waged in their name. While shoppers here are scrambling to put the perfect touch to their holidays with the purchase of a giant flat-screen TV or a PlayStation 3, the news out of Baghdad is of a society in the midst of a meltdown.
According to the United Nations, more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September and October. Nearly 5,000 of those killings occurred in Baghdad, a staggering figure.
In a demoralizing reprise of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the U.N. reported that in Iraq: “The situation of women has continued to deteriorate. Increasing numbers of women were recorded to be either victims of religious extremists or ‘honor killings.’ Some non-Muslim women are forced to wear a headscarf and to be accompanied by spouses or male relatives.”
Journalists in Iraq are being “assassinated with utmost impunity,” the U.N. report said, with 18 murdered in the last two months.
Iraq burns. We shop. The Americans dying in Iraq are barely mentioned in the press anymore. They warrant maybe one sentence in a long roundup article out of Baghdad, or a passing reference — no longer than a few seconds — in a television news account of the latest political ditherings.
Since the vast majority of Americans do not want anything to do with the military or the war, the burden of fighting has fallen on a small cadre of volunteers who are being sent into the war zone again and again. Nearly 3,000 have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed.
The war has now lasted as long as the American involvement in World War II. But there is no sense of collective sacrifice in this war, no shared burden of responsibility. The soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suffering and dying in a war in which there are no clear objectives and no end in sight, and which a majority of Americans do not support.
They are dying anonymously and pointlessly, while the rest of us are free to buckle ourselves into the family vehicle and head off to the malls and shop.
If you are awake and really care about anything important, this will make you crazy!!
- Uke Man
November 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
While Iraq Burns
By BOB HERBERT
(a ukethanks to Phyll)
Americans are shopping while Iraq burns.
The competing television news images on the morning after Thanksgiving were of the unspeakable carnage in Sadr City — where more than 200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a series of coordinated car bombs — and the long lines of cars filled with holiday shopping zealots that jammed the highway approaches to American malls that had opened for business at midnight.
A Wal-Mart in Union, N.J., was besieged by customers even before it opened its doors at 5 a.m. on Friday. “All I can tell you,” said a Wal-Mart employee, “is that they were fired up and ready to spend money.”
There is something terribly wrong with this juxtaposition of gleeful Americans with fistfuls of dollars storming the department store barricades and the slaughter by the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including old people, children and babies. The war was started by the U.S., but most Americans feel absolutely no sense of personal responsibility for it.
Representative Charles Rangel recently proposed that the draft be reinstated, suggesting that politicians would be more reluctant to take the country to war if they understood that their constituents might be called up to fight. What struck me was not the uniform opposition to the congressman’s proposal — it has long been clear that there is zero sentiment in favor of a draft in the U.S. — but the fact that it never provoked even the briefest discussion of the responsibilities and obligations of ordinary Americans in a time of war.
With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its consequences. In an interview last week, Alex Racheotes, a 19-year-old history major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said: “I definitely don’t know anyone who would want to fight in Iraq. But beyond that, I get the feeling that most people at school don’t even think about the war. They’re more concerned with what grade they got on yesterday’s test.”
His thoughts were echoed by other students, including John Cafarelli, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, who was asked if he had any friends who would be willing to join the Army. “No, definitely not,” he said. “None of my friends even really care about what’s going on in Iraq.”
This indifference is widespread. It enables most Americans to go about their daily lives completely unconcerned about the atrocities resulting from a war being waged in their name. While shoppers here are scrambling to put the perfect touch to their holidays with the purchase of a giant flat-screen TV or a PlayStation 3, the news out of Baghdad is of a society in the midst of a meltdown.
According to the United Nations, more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September and October. Nearly 5,000 of those killings occurred in Baghdad, a staggering figure.
In a demoralizing reprise of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the U.N. reported that in Iraq: “The situation of women has continued to deteriorate. Increasing numbers of women were recorded to be either victims of religious extremists or ‘honor killings.’ Some non-Muslim women are forced to wear a headscarf and to be accompanied by spouses or male relatives.”
Journalists in Iraq are being “assassinated with utmost impunity,” the U.N. report said, with 18 murdered in the last two months.
Iraq burns. We shop. The Americans dying in Iraq are barely mentioned in the press anymore. They warrant maybe one sentence in a long roundup article out of Baghdad, or a passing reference — no longer than a few seconds — in a television news account of the latest political ditherings.
Since the vast majority of Americans do not want anything to do with the military or the war, the burden of fighting has fallen on a small cadre of volunteers who are being sent into the war zone again and again. Nearly 3,000 have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed.
The war has now lasted as long as the American involvement in World War II. But there is no sense of collective sacrifice in this war, no shared burden of responsibility. The soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suffering and dying in a war in which there are no clear objectives and no end in sight, and which a majority of Americans do not support.
They are dying anonymously and pointlessly, while the rest of us are free to buckle ourselves into the family vehicle and head off to the malls and shop.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Love the Simpsons? Hate the Simpsons?
Hey Folks,
Want a little gorey fun? Try "Shoot the Simpsons":
http://www.stopbeingbored.com/game/345/The-Simpsons.html
I was looking at something else ( http://www.stopbeingbored.com/game/359/Make-Your-Own-Simpson-Charactor.html ) and found this more interesting (even if a bit more disturbing).
- Uke Man
Want a little gorey fun? Try "Shoot the Simpsons":
http://www.stopbeingbored.com/game/345/The-Simpsons.html
I was looking at something else ( http://www.stopbeingbored.com/game/359/Make-Your-Own-Simpson-Charactor.html ) and found this more interesting (even if a bit more disturbing).
- Uke Man
What do the recent election results actually mean?
Hey Folks,
Here's an analysis worth taking a look at.
- Uke Man
The Elections: What They Do—and Do NOT—Mean
Revolution #69, November 19, 2006
Here's an analysis worth taking a look at.
- Uke Man
The Elections: What They Do—and Do NOT—Mean
Revolution #69, November 19, 2006
Last Tuesday’s mid-term elections marked a significant turn of events. For the first time in 12 years, Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate were voted out, and Democrats were returned to power. As soon as the results were in, the much-hated Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was forced to resign.
Yet the question of the day remains: what is actual significance of these elections? What changes are—and aren’t—likely to result? What will—and won’t—they mean for the overall Bush agenda and the Iraq war? And what challenges and responsibilities confront those who oppose everything Bush and his regime stand for, and understand the need to reverse the whole direction they’ve been taking the world?
What do you think of the Democratic victory? is on everyone’s lips, and this post-election discussion and debate is one that every reader of our paper should plunge into.
The War—Their Agenda and Ours
Many people see the vote as a popular referendum repudiating Bush, his administration, and the Iraq war. Millions of those who voted did so out of anger and disgust with the war. But in reality the war was not up for a vote—at least not in the way people may think.
The elections marked the crescendo of months of dire warnings and criticisms—including from within the U.S. military and other major voices in the imperialist foreign policy establishment—concerning the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
The Bush team had thought they’d quickly be able to turn Iraq into a pro-U.S. client state, a platform for further aggression in the region, and a signal to the world that U.S. power was unchallengeable. Instead, U.S. forces have been unable to either quell the growing insurgency or cobble together a new Iraqi ruling class with the power, cohesion and legitimacy to stabilize the situation. All this has the potential to turn Iraq into a center of anti-U.S. hatred and instability, further strengthen Iran, destabilize the region, weaken the U.S. military, and open the door for rival powers. In short, exactly the opposite of what Bush and company set out to accomplish.
This caused forces within the ruling class to maneuver to force Bush to adjust his strategy. These forces want to prevent a strategic debacle and to salvage what is possible from Iraq—in order to maintain U.S. military, political, and economic domination over the Middle East. They are not aiming for an immediate end to the war but instead for a shift in tactics within Iraq and, perhaps, in regard to other forces in the region. They are not questioning the morality or justness of the war, merely its execution. For these forces, the elections became one means of both criticizing the Bush team and forcing (and creating political cover for) a serious reassessment of the war’s conduct and adjustment in strategy.
The Democrats’ calls for a “new direction” and “competent” leadership in Iraq and their criticisms of Bush’s “failed policy” served these objectives. The Democratic denunciations of the war were vague. Few candidates spelled out specifically what they would do, and fewer still called for immediate withdrawal. Some called the war a “mistake,” but none called it what it actually is: reactionary, criminal, and immoral.
This vagueness had two major virtues for the ruling class. First, it enabled the Democrats—who have consistently voted for and supported the Iraq war and continue to support its broad objectives—to divert the broad anti-war anger into a framework that doesn’t question the whole nature of the war. Second, it gives the Democrats the flexibility to join into a “bipartisan consensus” to “adjust,” rather than end, the war. Indeed, the “neocon” fascist William Kristol said on FOX News that the Republican defeat could actually give Bush the political cover to put more pressure on the Iraqi government and to call for some sort of regional conference (both Democratic demands), while also increasing the number of troops (which Kristol and other Republican forces like McCain favor).
The Fall of Rumsfeld and the Rise—and Further Taming—of Nancy Pelosi
The fall of Donald Rumsfeld has to be seen in this light. Rumsfeld is most associated with his insistence on attempting to conquer and occupy Iraq with the minimum number of forces necessary. His exit is at least in large part a signal that this strategy is open for “re-evaluation.” Knocking down someone so high up is meant to show that Bush recognizes that all is not well, that they face serious problems and significant dangers, that some significant adjustments are necessary, and that he is going to have to forge a broader consensus among the ruling class to deal with all this.
The pledges of the Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi for “civility and cooperation” must also be seen in this light [see “Post Elections: Dissecting the Democrats”]. She is pledging to hold tight, to not do anything that could possibly endanger the stability of the whole thing, and to keep “her base”—those who do look to the Democratic Party as an agent of change—firmly in check. The people may have been voting to end the war and even to reverse the ugly direction of this regime—but Pelosi and the rest are already reinterpreting things and using their power to put a stamp on what people did—to fit it into and make it serve a whole other set of objectives than most people intended through their votes.
The elections, therefore, by themselves, will not signal a fundamental reversal of course on Iraq, still less a repudiation of the logic that led to the invasion. Instead—absent a massive movement in determined opposition—they will end up as a vehicle to adjust, sustain and rehabilitate this hated war.
The Democrats and the Bush Agenda
But Iraq is only one part of the Bush package. What about the other Bush horrors?
Where was the Democrat, for instance, who came out against the legalized torture and gutting of habeas corpus that was passed in September? Where were the “attack ads” that called out the Republicans for supporting such outrages?
Where was the Democrat who went on the offensive against the mounting moves toward a theocracy—the rule by Christian fundamentalist fascists? Where were the attack ads that called out a Republican for something like the “Terri Schiavo” incident?
Where was the Democrat who sounded the alarm against the Bush regime plans to invade Iran, or who criticized the support for the brutal Israeli invasion of Lebanon over the summer? Or who stood up for the rights of gay people to marry and dared to uphold the morality of a woman’s right to an abortion?
Instead, the Democrats not only tacitly—and in some cases openly—went along with the Bush agenda on these and other questions, they took great pains to claim the “war on terror” as their own, even as that “war on terror” forms the logical underpinning of a huge part of Bush’s agenda. [see “The (Deadly) Logic of the ‘War on Terror’”] And despite widespread sentiment to hold Bush accountable for his many and horrific crimes, Nancy Pelosi denounced on 60 Minutes any idea of impeaching Bush. That fact alone means that the crimes and outrages of the Bush regime—from its doctrine of pre-emptive war to its widespread use of torture and illegal imprisonment, among others—will now become legitimated and “normal.”
Many commentators have remarked that the current election is unlike 1994, when the Republicans took over Congress with a clear-cut program for radical overhaul. This is because the forces behind the Bush regime (and behind that 1994 takeover as well) have developed a “package” that speaks to some of the main underlying economic and political dynamics in the world—and the Democrats haven’t. This package includes aggressive international projection of the overwhelming military power of the U.S., a huge intensification of repression domestically, a drastic cut in government-funded social welfare programs, and the increasing buildup of a Christian fascist movement in the politics and culture of society (with some of the key forces in this mix pushing for an outright fascist theocracy).
The Democrats, try as some of them might, have not come up with either the program or the organized social and political forces to counter that—and they are not willing and they are not able, at this point, to oppose it with anything more than what Lenin once called “pious doubts and petty amendments.” The top Democratic leaders make their main priority the preservation of this system, no matter what horrors (and horrific compromises) this preservation may require—and at this point they are quite open about that. For the past several years they have been intent on keeping the outrage of the people suppressed and diverted into channels that end up shoring up the system, and even the Bush regime itself. This dynamic has not fundamentally changed through the election.
Moreover, we should step back here and look at the whole system that both Bush and the Democrats maintain is the “greatest country on in the world.” What, after all, is it that U.S. military force defends in the over 100 countries in which U.S. soldiers are based? Fundamentally, it is the “right” of U.S. capital to go anywhere and do anything, no matter how monstrous, in search of the highest possible profits; to dominate and despoil whole countries and even regions, sometimes if only to make sure that their rival imperialists do not; to drive people off their land in the blind pursuit of profit and then to use those same people as “cheap labor” either within their home countries or the imperialist countries themselves; to fortify repressive social orders and customs so long as they serve the needs of imperialist expansion; to crush whoever gets in their way, even fellow reactionaries and gangsters; and to violently and viciously suppress any revolutionary or radical movements that arise when people dare to throw off their chains, or even resist.
This very basic truth must be returned to, brought out and driven home to people, in a million different ways, as we get into with them what the Democratic victory will—and will not—mean.
The Bush Regime: Still Intolerable, Still Must Be Driven Out
To return to the questions at the beginning of this editorial, we must also ask all those we work with and meet: what do you think about the elections? And what are you going to do?
The elections are now over, but we still confront a criminal regime and the urgent need to drive it from power and repudiate its program. Everything it is doing is STILL intolerable!
Now is not time for political retreat or wait-and-see. The contradiction between the burning desires of the millions who voted against Bush and the war on one hand, and what Bush and the Democrats will actually do on the other, could drive many more into resolute opposition. But that depends on us—and on you. Left to itself, that contradiction will only become a source of despair and a force for further passivity and paralysis. We—and you reading this—have to find the ways to resist, and to recast the political terms in this situation.
We have to insist that what was unacceptable yesterday remains unacceptable today—and tomorrow. We have to work with World Can’t Wait to rally others to the basic indictments, as well as the political stand and the moral certitude expressed in its very powerful Call to drive out the Bush regime. Teach-ins, massive distribution of that call, getting out the materials from the Bush Crimes Commission, joining in and supporting resistance—all these are the order of the day.
Beyond that there is the urgent need to get the works of Bob Avakian into this situation—in college courses and on the campuses more broadly, into the communities of the oppressed, on the radio, into the bookstores and libraries, out among intellectuals and in intellectual journals, and hundreds of other ways. These works not only shed real light on the underlying dynamics of this whole situation and speak very directly to the huge political questions of the day, they also pose the way forward—both in regards to how a revolution could be made, and to the truly liberating character such a revolution must have—the ways in which it must build on but go way beyond the revolutions of the past. And with that, there is also the urgent need to get out this paper—to get the truth, every week, into many many more hands and build the scaffolding of the revolutionary movement.
The underlying dynamics of this system—the misery and horror it means to billions of people every day—have not changed. The ways in which these dynamics have brought forward the perverse Bush regime—and the ways in which that regime answers the “needs” of that system, with whatever “course corrections” are needed—have not changed. The great dangers—and the potential openings—posed by this whole course taken by imperialism have not changed. The acute need for revolution continues.
We must act.
Send us your comments.Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party,USACurrent IssuePrevious IssuesBob AvakianRCPTopicsAboutContactThree Main PointsWhat do we in the Revolutionary Communist Party want people to learn from all that is exposed and revealed in this newspaper?Read On…Our Ideology is Marxism-Leninism- MaoismOur Vanguard is the Revolutionary Communist PartyOur Leader is Chairman AvakianLA: Spanish DVD Screening May 20-->Español
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Working Person's View of Minimum Wage Increases
Yes: After years of stagnation, millions of workers will benefit
Monday, December 04, 2006
JOHN SWEENEY
Working people have been stretched to the limit and this year, on Election Day, they snapped back. By the millions, voters turned out to change the direction of our country and, in part, to end the congressional stalemate on the minimum wage. Raising it is an economic and a moral issue.
In every state where the minimum wage was on the ballot as an initiative, it passed, including in Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana and Nevada. By huge margins, voters rejected the current $5.15 an hour as too low.
With the addition of the six states, 28 states and the District of Columbia now have minimum-wage laws above the federal $5.15.
It’s time to bring everyone up. No one can live, let alone raise a family, on $11,000 a year, which is more than a full-time minimum-wage worker earns annually. America needs a raise.
And even though most union members earn well above the minimum wage because of their contracts, the union movement will do everything possible to work with the new leadership in Washington to pass a higher national minimumwage floor. Working families need it; working families deserve it.
Imagine working full-time, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, and not having enough money to pay rent, put gasoline in the car and eat. The idea is absurd, but for millions of Americans, it’s real.
Raising the minimum wage to $7.25 over 26 months will benefit an estimated 6.6 million workers directly and another 8.3 million indirectly, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
For 10 years, Congress has refused to approve a minimum-wage increase. But in that time, prices have skyrocketed. The costs of gasoline, food, housing, education and health care have increased, but wages have not. In fact, wages have gone down. The real value of the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest point since 1955. In terms of wages, we’ve gone back half a century.
At the same time wages have plummeted, productivity in the United States continues to soar. Since the most-recent economic recovery began in the fall of 2001, productivity has increased 13 percent. In other words, the economic pie is expanding, but workers’ wages are becoming an increasingly smaller slice of the pie.
Working people in America are squeezed.
Less than one-third of voters polled on Election Day believe they can pull ahead financially. The majority of Americans feel they are behind or simply breaking even. Scarier still, just one-third of people think life will be better for the next generation.
Voters in union households said the economy was one of two top factors behind how they cast their vote for the House, right up there with Iraq. Sixty-five percent said they are dissatisfied with today’s economy, according to Election Day polling done by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO. When workers voted for change this year, it was, in considerable part, a vote for economic change.
In the final four days leading up to the election, union volunteers knocked on more than 3 million doors and heard variations on the same theme: Working people are tired of being left behind. We’re tired of policies that promote the interests of corporations at the expense of families. And we’re sick and tired of politicians who do the same.
That theme echoed throughout the country on Nov. 7 th, when working people voted for a change in course and for candidates that support working-family issues, such as raising the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage is just a first step in getting America back on track. We need real economic change. From affordable health care and retirement security to good jobs and the freedom to form unions, we need bold, new answers to the questions working families confront every day.
The people have spoken. It’s time to get to work and it’s time to raise the minimum wage.
John Sweeney is president of the AFL-CIO.jsweeney@aflcio.org
Monday, December 04, 2006
JOHN SWEENEY
Working people have been stretched to the limit and this year, on Election Day, they snapped back. By the millions, voters turned out to change the direction of our country and, in part, to end the congressional stalemate on the minimum wage. Raising it is an economic and a moral issue.
In every state where the minimum wage was on the ballot as an initiative, it passed, including in Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana and Nevada. By huge margins, voters rejected the current $5.15 an hour as too low.
With the addition of the six states, 28 states and the District of Columbia now have minimum-wage laws above the federal $5.15.
It’s time to bring everyone up. No one can live, let alone raise a family, on $11,000 a year, which is more than a full-time minimum-wage worker earns annually. America needs a raise.
And even though most union members earn well above the minimum wage because of their contracts, the union movement will do everything possible to work with the new leadership in Washington to pass a higher national minimumwage floor. Working families need it; working families deserve it.
Imagine working full-time, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, and not having enough money to pay rent, put gasoline in the car and eat. The idea is absurd, but for millions of Americans, it’s real.
Raising the minimum wage to $7.25 over 26 months will benefit an estimated 6.6 million workers directly and another 8.3 million indirectly, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
For 10 years, Congress has refused to approve a minimum-wage increase. But in that time, prices have skyrocketed. The costs of gasoline, food, housing, education and health care have increased, but wages have not. In fact, wages have gone down. The real value of the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest point since 1955. In terms of wages, we’ve gone back half a century.
At the same time wages have plummeted, productivity in the United States continues to soar. Since the most-recent economic recovery began in the fall of 2001, productivity has increased 13 percent. In other words, the economic pie is expanding, but workers’ wages are becoming an increasingly smaller slice of the pie.
Working people in America are squeezed.
Less than one-third of voters polled on Election Day believe they can pull ahead financially. The majority of Americans feel they are behind or simply breaking even. Scarier still, just one-third of people think life will be better for the next generation.
Voters in union households said the economy was one of two top factors behind how they cast their vote for the House, right up there with Iraq. Sixty-five percent said they are dissatisfied with today’s economy, according to Election Day polling done by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO. When workers voted for change this year, it was, in considerable part, a vote for economic change.
In the final four days leading up to the election, union volunteers knocked on more than 3 million doors and heard variations on the same theme: Working people are tired of being left behind. We’re tired of policies that promote the interests of corporations at the expense of families. And we’re sick and tired of politicians who do the same.
That theme echoed throughout the country on Nov. 7 th, when working people voted for a change in course and for candidates that support working-family issues, such as raising the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage is just a first step in getting America back on track. We need real economic change. From affordable health care and retirement security to good jobs and the freedom to form unions, we need bold, new answers to the questions working families confront every day.
The people have spoken. It’s time to get to work and it’s time to raise the minimum wage.
John Sweeney is president of the AFL-CIO.jsweeney@aflcio.org
Bizzaro-Bush World
Bush: Iraq violence is al-Qaida plot
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press
RIGA, Latvia -
President Bush said Tuesday that an al-Qaida plot to stoke cycles of sectarian revenge in Iraq is to blame for escalating bloodshed, refusing to debate whether the country has fallen into civil war
“There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place — fomented, in my opinion, because of the attacks by al-Qaida causing people to seek reprisal," Bush said at a news conference with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves during a stop in Estonia.
Well Folks,
Yeah, that makes sense. The Hatfields and McCoys weren’t involved with a feud either. A Peabody Coal Co. plot to stoke cycles of sectarian revenge in West Virginia was to blame for the escalating bloodshed.
There was a lot of sectarian violence taking place — fomented, I understand, because Becky-Mae Williams (a young secretary employed by Peabody Coal ) was encouraged to flirt with all the boys in both families causing them to seek reprisals.
Yeah, uh huh, yep !!!
- Uke Man
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press
RIGA, Latvia -
President Bush said Tuesday that an al-Qaida plot to stoke cycles of sectarian revenge in Iraq is to blame for escalating bloodshed, refusing to debate whether the country has fallen into civil war
“There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place — fomented, in my opinion, because of the attacks by al-Qaida causing people to seek reprisal," Bush said at a news conference with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves during a stop in Estonia.
Well Folks,
Yeah, that makes sense. The Hatfields and McCoys weren’t involved with a feud either. A Peabody Coal Co. plot to stoke cycles of sectarian revenge in West Virginia was to blame for the escalating bloodshed.
There was a lot of sectarian violence taking place — fomented, I understand, because Becky-Mae Williams (a young secretary employed by Peabody Coal ) was encouraged to flirt with all the boys in both families causing them to seek reprisals.
Yeah, uh huh, yep !!!
- Uke Man
"Rule of Law"?? - "Rule of Fool" !!
Hey Folks,
The next time some pompous ass goes on about "Democracy," or "the Rule of Law," and how sacred they are or how they are the reason/justification for Mr. Pompous Ass's latest effort; spit on him.
As I've said many times here before, paraphrasing Leona Helmsley: as far as the ginks on top are concerned; taxes, morality, ethics, compassion, integrity, and both Democracy and "the rule of Law" are for the little people.
If the Bush regime in general hasn't made that point clearly enough, read the article below about a specific lost opportunity to defend democracy and the rule of law.
- Uke Man
November 24, 2006
When Votes Disappear
By PAUL KRUGMAN
You know what really had me terrified on Nov.
7? The all-too-real possibility of a highly
suspect result. What would we have done if the
Republicans had held onto the House by a
narrow margin, but circumstantial evidence
strongly suggested that a combination of vote
suppression and defective — or rigged —
electronic voting machines made the difference?
Fortunately, it wasn’t a close election. But
the fact that our electoral systemworked well
enough to register an overwhelming
Democratic landslide doesn’t mean that things
are O.K. There were many problems with
voting in this election — and in at least one
Congressional race, the evidence strongly
suggests that paperless voting machines failed
to count thousands of votes, and that the
disappearance of these votes delivered the
race to the wrong candidate.
Here’s the background: Florida’s 13th
Congressional District is currently represented
by Katherine Harris, who as Florida’s secretary
of state during the 2000 recount famously
acted as a partisan Republican rather than a fair referee.
This year Ms. Harris didn’t run for re-election,
making an unsuccessful bid for the Senate
instead. But according to the official vote count,
the Republicans held on to her seat, with Vern
Buchanan, the G.O.P. candidate, narrowly
defeating Christine Jennings, the Democrat.
The problem is that the official vote count isn’t
credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting
pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County,
which used touch-screen voting machines made
by Election Systems and Software, almost
18,000 voters — nearly 15 percent of those who
cast ballots using the machines — supposedly
failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly
contested Congressional race. That compares
with undervote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3
percent in neighboring counties.
Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota,
which interviewed hundreds of voters who
called the paper to report problems at the polls,
strongly suggests that the huge apparent
undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software.
About a third of those interviewed by the paper
reported that they couldn’t even find the
Congressional race on the screen. This could
conceivably have been the result of bad ballot
design, but many of them insisted that they
looked hard for the race. Moreover, more
than 60 percent of those interviewed by
The Herald-Tribune reported that they did
cast a vote in the Congressional race —
but that this vote didn’t show up on the ballot
summary page they were shown at the end
of the voting process.
If there were bugs in the software, the odds
are that they threw the election to the wrong
candidate. An Orlando Sentinel examination
of other votes cast by those who supposedly
failed to cast a vote in the Congressional
race shows that they strongly favored
Democrats, and Mr. Buchanan won the official
count by only 369 votes. The fact that
Mr. Buchanan won a recount — that is, a
recount of the votes the machines happened
to record — means nothing.
Although state officials have certified
Mr. Buchanan as the victor, they’ve
promised an audit of the voting machines.
But don’t get your hopes up: as in2000,
state election officials aren’t even trying to
look impartial. To oversee the audit, the state
has chosen as its “independent” expert
Prof. Alec Yasinsac of Florida State University —
a Republican partisan who made an appearance
on the steps of the Florida Supreme Court
during the 2000 recount battle wearing a
“Bush Won” sign.
Ms. Jennings has now filed suit with the same
court, demanding a new election. She deserves one.
But for the nation as a whole, the important
thing isn’t who gets seated to represent
Florida’s 13th District. It’s whether the voting
disaster there leads to legislation requiring
voter verification and a paper trail.
And I have to say that the omens aren’t good.
I’ve been shocked at how little national
attention the mess in Sarasota has received.
Here we have as clear a demonstration as
we’re ever likely to see that warnings from
computer scientists about the dangers of
paperless electronic voting are valid — and most
Americans probably haven’t even heard about it.
As far as I can tell, the reason Florida-13 hasn’t
become a major national story is that neither
control of Congress nor control of the White
House is on the line. But do we have to wait for
a constitutional crisis to realize that we’re in
danger of becoming a digital-age banana republic?
The next time some pompous ass goes on about "Democracy," or "the Rule of Law," and how sacred they are or how they are the reason/justification for Mr. Pompous Ass's latest effort; spit on him.
As I've said many times here before, paraphrasing Leona Helmsley: as far as the ginks on top are concerned; taxes, morality, ethics, compassion, integrity, and both Democracy and "the rule of Law" are for the little people.
If the Bush regime in general hasn't made that point clearly enough, read the article below about a specific lost opportunity to defend democracy and the rule of law.
- Uke Man
November 24, 2006
When Votes Disappear
By PAUL KRUGMAN
You know what really had me terrified on Nov.
7? The all-too-real possibility of a highly
suspect result. What would we have done if the
Republicans had held onto the House by a
narrow margin, but circumstantial evidence
strongly suggested that a combination of vote
suppression and defective — or rigged —
electronic voting machines made the difference?
Fortunately, it wasn’t a close election. But
the fact that our electoral systemworked well
enough to register an overwhelming
Democratic landslide doesn’t mean that things
are O.K. There were many problems with
voting in this election — and in at least one
Congressional race, the evidence strongly
suggests that paperless voting machines failed
to count thousands of votes, and that the
disappearance of these votes delivered the
race to the wrong candidate.
Here’s the background: Florida’s 13th
Congressional District is currently represented
by Katherine Harris, who as Florida’s secretary
of state during the 2000 recount famously
acted as a partisan Republican rather than a fair referee.
This year Ms. Harris didn’t run for re-election,
making an unsuccessful bid for the Senate
instead. But according to the official vote count,
the Republicans held on to her seat, with Vern
Buchanan, the G.O.P. candidate, narrowly
defeating Christine Jennings, the Democrat.
The problem is that the official vote count isn’t
credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting
pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County,
which used touch-screen voting machines made
by Election Systems and Software, almost
18,000 voters — nearly 15 percent of those who
cast ballots using the machines — supposedly
failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly
contested Congressional race. That compares
with undervote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3
percent in neighboring counties.
Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota,
which interviewed hundreds of voters who
called the paper to report problems at the polls,
strongly suggests that the huge apparent
undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software.
About a third of those interviewed by the paper
reported that they couldn’t even find the
Congressional race on the screen. This could
conceivably have been the result of bad ballot
design, but many of them insisted that they
looked hard for the race. Moreover, more
than 60 percent of those interviewed by
The Herald-Tribune reported that they did
cast a vote in the Congressional race —
but that this vote didn’t show up on the ballot
summary page they were shown at the end
of the voting process.
If there were bugs in the software, the odds
are that they threw the election to the wrong
candidate. An Orlando Sentinel examination
of other votes cast by those who supposedly
failed to cast a vote in the Congressional
race shows that they strongly favored
Democrats, and Mr. Buchanan won the official
count by only 369 votes. The fact that
Mr. Buchanan won a recount — that is, a
recount of the votes the machines happened
to record — means nothing.
Although state officials have certified
Mr. Buchanan as the victor, they’ve
promised an audit of the voting machines.
But don’t get your hopes up: as in2000,
state election officials aren’t even trying to
look impartial. To oversee the audit, the state
has chosen as its “independent” expert
Prof. Alec Yasinsac of Florida State University —
a Republican partisan who made an appearance
on the steps of the Florida Supreme Court
during the 2000 recount battle wearing a
“Bush Won” sign.
Ms. Jennings has now filed suit with the same
court, demanding a new election. She deserves one.
But for the nation as a whole, the important
thing isn’t who gets seated to represent
Florida’s 13th District. It’s whether the voting
disaster there leads to legislation requiring
voter verification and a paper trail.
And I have to say that the omens aren’t good.
I’ve been shocked at how little national
attention the mess in Sarasota has received.
Here we have as clear a demonstration as
we’re ever likely to see that warnings from
computer scientists about the dangers of
paperless electronic voting are valid — and most
Americans probably haven’t even heard about it.
As far as I can tell, the reason Florida-13 hasn’t
become a major national story is that neither
control of Congress nor control of the White
House is on the line. But do we have to wait for
a constitutional crisis to realize that we’re in
danger of becoming a digital-age banana republic?
Monday, November 27, 2006
Maybe Bush will pardon Saddam Hussein
November 25, 2006
No One to Lose To
By MAUREEN DOWD
(a ukethanks to Phyll)
Washington - After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre
of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and give an interview
headlined: “If I did it,here’s how the civil war in Iraq
happened.”
He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve,
arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his
team’s failure to comprehend that in the Arab world,
revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger
compulsions than democracy and prosperity.
But W. is not yet able to view his actions in subjunctive
terms, much less objective ones. Bush family retainers
are working to deprogram him, but the president is
loath to strip off his delusions of adequacy.
W. declined to tear himself away from his free-range
turkey and pumpkin moussetrifle at Camp David and
reassure Americans about the deadliest sectarian attack
in Baghdad since the U.S. invaded. More than 200
Shiites were killed and hundreds more wounded by car
bombs and a mortar attack in Sadr City. October was
the bloodiest month yet for civilians, and in the last
four months, some 13,000 men, women and children have died.
American helicopters and Iraqi troops did not arrive
for two hours after Sunni gunmen began a siege on
the Health Ministry controlled by the Shiite cleric
Moktada al-Sadr, who has a militia that kills Sunnis
and is married to the Maliki government.
Continuing the cycle of revenge yesterday, Shiite
militiamen threw kerosene on six Sunnis and set
them on fire, as Iraqi soldiers watched, and killed 19 more.
The New York Times and other news outlets have been
figuring out if it’s time to break with the
administration’s use of euphemisms like “sectarian
conflict.” How long can you have an ever-descending
descent without actually reaching the civil war?
Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of
civilizations, arguing that civil war is too genteel
a term for the butchery that is destroying a nation
before our very eyes. Anthony Shadid, The Washington
Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Iraq
coverage, went back recently and described “the
final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces
unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion.
There was civil-war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in
Lebanon a generation ago. Alongside it were gangland
turf battles over money,power and survival; a raft of
political parties and their militias fighting a
zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of
authority; social services a chimera; and no way
forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by
Americans who themselves are still seen as the final
arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government
of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps too easy a term,
a little too tidy.”
It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that
America’s troops should be in the middle of somebody
else’s civil war than to convince them that we need to
hang tough in the so-called front line of the so-called
war on terror against Al Qaeda.
With Iraq splitting, Tony Snow indulges in the
ludicrous exercise of hair-splitting. He said that
in past civil wars, “people break up into clearly
identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy.”
In Iraq, “you do have a lot of different forces that
are trying to put pressure on the government and
trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they
are operating as a unified force.” But Lebanon was
a shambles with multiple factions, and everybody
called that a civil war.
Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the
fighting is not taking place in every province and
because Iraqis voted in free elections. But that’s
like saying that the Battle of Gettysburg only took
place in one small corner of the country, so there
was no real American Civil War. And there were
elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln
was re-elected months before the war’s end.
The president’s comparison to how Vietnam turned out
a generation later, his happy talk that Iraq is going to
be fine, is preposterous.
As Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam
who wrote the PulitzerPrize-winning “A Bright Shining
Lie,” told me: “In Vietnam, there were just two sides
to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a
structure of command and an army and a guerrilla
movement that would obey what they were told
to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately
after the war ended. In Iraq, there’s no one like that for
us to lose to and then do business with.”
The questions are no longer whether there’s a civil
war or whether we can achieve a military victory. The
only question is, who can we turn the country
over to?
At the moment, that would be no one.
No One to Lose To
By MAUREEN DOWD
(a ukethanks to Phyll)
Washington - After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre
of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and give an interview
headlined: “If I did it,here’s how the civil war in Iraq
happened.”
He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve,
arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his
team’s failure to comprehend that in the Arab world,
revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger
compulsions than democracy and prosperity.
But W. is not yet able to view his actions in subjunctive
terms, much less objective ones. Bush family retainers
are working to deprogram him, but the president is
loath to strip off his delusions of adequacy.
W. declined to tear himself away from his free-range
turkey and pumpkin moussetrifle at Camp David and
reassure Americans about the deadliest sectarian attack
in Baghdad since the U.S. invaded. More than 200
Shiites were killed and hundreds more wounded by car
bombs and a mortar attack in Sadr City. October was
the bloodiest month yet for civilians, and in the last
four months, some 13,000 men, women and children have died.
American helicopters and Iraqi troops did not arrive
for two hours after Sunni gunmen began a siege on
the Health Ministry controlled by the Shiite cleric
Moktada al-Sadr, who has a militia that kills Sunnis
and is married to the Maliki government.
Continuing the cycle of revenge yesterday, Shiite
militiamen threw kerosene on six Sunnis and set
them on fire, as Iraqi soldiers watched, and killed 19 more.
The New York Times and other news outlets have been
figuring out if it’s time to break with the
administration’s use of euphemisms like “sectarian
conflict.” How long can you have an ever-descending
descent without actually reaching the civil war?
Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of
civilizations, arguing that civil war is too genteel
a term for the butchery that is destroying a nation
before our very eyes. Anthony Shadid, The Washington
Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Iraq
coverage, went back recently and described “the
final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces
unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion.
There was civil-war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in
Lebanon a generation ago. Alongside it were gangland
turf battles over money,power and survival; a raft of
political parties and their militias fighting a
zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of
authority; social services a chimera; and no way
forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by
Americans who themselves are still seen as the final
arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government
of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps too easy a term,
a little too tidy.”
It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that
America’s troops should be in the middle of somebody
else’s civil war than to convince them that we need to
hang tough in the so-called front line of the so-called
war on terror against Al Qaeda.
With Iraq splitting, Tony Snow indulges in the
ludicrous exercise of hair-splitting. He said that
in past civil wars, “people break up into clearly
identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy.”
In Iraq, “you do have a lot of different forces that
are trying to put pressure on the government and
trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they
are operating as a unified force.” But Lebanon was
a shambles with multiple factions, and everybody
called that a civil war.
Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the
fighting is not taking place in every province and
because Iraqis voted in free elections. But that’s
like saying that the Battle of Gettysburg only took
place in one small corner of the country, so there
was no real American Civil War. And there were
elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln
was re-elected months before the war’s end.
The president’s comparison to how Vietnam turned out
a generation later, his happy talk that Iraq is going to
be fine, is preposterous.
As Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam
who wrote the PulitzerPrize-winning “A Bright Shining
Lie,” told me: “In Vietnam, there were just two sides
to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a
structure of command and an army and a guerrilla
movement that would obey what they were told
to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately
after the war ended. In Iraq, there’s no one like that for
us to lose to and then do business with.”
The questions are no longer whether there’s a civil
war or whether we can achieve a military victory. The
only question is, who can we turn the country
over to?
At the moment, that would be no one.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Just some shots, Folks, from Friday's "emergency" Little Brother's gig
Besides the Uke Man we heard from The World's Greatest Losers and The Rooftop Smokers.A nice Friday night !!
Hey Folks,
Videos of the conference reported below can be found at:
http://beyondbelief2006.org/
- Uke Man
Videos of the conference reported below can be found at:
http://beyondbelief2006.org/
- Uke Man
Religion & Science / Faith & Reason
Hey Folks,
We are entering the Foxxx News / War on XXX-mas season; so let's discuss religion.
The conflict between Faith and Reason so clearly dominating our society and its politics is a major fight, one whose outcome will greatly affect our future.
I have heard that the US of A is the most "religious" country in the world. I'm certain that's true at least in comparison with Europe, and it's obviously been true enough to make a lot of political hay for demagogic politicians.
Most Americans I know never even think of some of the "awful," "unbelievable" things considered below in the Times piece.
They should ! And some will; but others, I'm sure, will start gathering literal or figurative kindling for a real or virtual burning of heretics.
I've made bold parts I found particularly interesting and added a few comments - in red - along the way.
- Uke Man
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
By GEORGE JOHNSON
Published: November 21, 2006 New York Times
Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.
Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.
Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told. Have you seen the South Park episode with Cartman in the future with warring science sects?
Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.
She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”
She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.
There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)
A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed. An important nuance here. Dawkins is logically on sound footing, but Konner, an anthropologist, understands the irrational side of humanity better, and sees the complexity of the situation.
After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.
That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.
With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”
“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”
By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.
Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.” I personally found this paragraph not entirely clear. The first quotation presents one of the best explanations for the success of religion: providing meaning to life within an incomprehensible existence. It also suggests that increasing scientific knowledge increases the feeling of meaninglessness. The second quotation suggests that religion should be weakened regardless of this characteristic. I can agree with that, but would like to hear more about how that age-old human problem would be addressed.
With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace [how can that be? How can an intellectual entity lose out to an emotional entity in "the intellectual marketplace"? , most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?
“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.” He makes a good point. Even if such an absolute goal were possible, it would be a very long undertaking. But I think he overstates the goal so that he can knock down the straw man. Increasing rationality and decreasing superstition IS a reasonable goal.
“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.” Here he implies that any attempt at increasing rationality "takes away" one's purpose. That is nonsense. I certainly agree that humanity needs a sense of purpose, but it is far from definite that a sense of purpose cannot exist without superstition. In fact, what kind of world is it; what kind of "thinking beings" are we if the only way we can survive or, at least, escape severely debilitating despair is to believe in imaginary creatures like "the fairy godmother" and imaginary places like Valhalla? Are we being done a favor by being allowed to clasp these phantoms to our breasts?
Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.
“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. Obviously true.
“Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.” Again very true - as far as it goes. As the next paragraph points out, it's one thing to say no one can either prove or disprove the existence of any particular god; and quite another to act as if one KNOWS there is a particular god because some book, teaching, authority, or tradition.
That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.” True. We fill our kids' heads with all sorts of made up entities (we do remove some folks - like the tooth fairy); why wouldn't they resist abandoning their invisible friends?
By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”
“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?” Good question, but with what would he say religion has been beating science, gays, public schools, pagans, etc. ? Steam shovels or just bull dozers?
His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.” Extremists on either end are not helpful. What is needed are rational thinkers throughout the spectrum. Fear and hatred tend to the emotional end of things.
Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.” Ahh, rationality!!
Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”
In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.” Well, isn't that the foundation of religious superstition: I don't understand something; so there must be a god - that explains it. All this shows me is that Newton was either covering up what he saw as a personal shortcoming or else his emotional life was not proportional with his intellectual life.
It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.
“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ” I wouldn't blame god for this phenomenon. Aging seems a more likely explanation. We humans seem to do really well in many ways at some point in our lives, but eventually we poop out - at least relative to what we pulled off in our earlier days.
“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. Absolutely !! “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.” It's a matter of courage or cowardice. Newton, for example, decided to make up an answer rather than accept the fact he didn't yet know and understand everything.
He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.
But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.
He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.
Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.
“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”
Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”
Well, as B.F. Skinner said, "That's an experimental question."
- Uke Man
We are entering the Foxxx News / War on XXX-mas season; so let's discuss religion.
The conflict between Faith and Reason so clearly dominating our society and its politics is a major fight, one whose outcome will greatly affect our future.
I have heard that the US of A is the most "religious" country in the world. I'm certain that's true at least in comparison with Europe, and it's obviously been true enough to make a lot of political hay for demagogic politicians.
Most Americans I know never even think of some of the "awful," "unbelievable" things considered below in the Times piece.
They should ! And some will; but others, I'm sure, will start gathering literal or figurative kindling for a real or virtual burning of heretics.
I've made bold parts I found particularly interesting and added a few comments - in red - along the way.
- Uke Man
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
By GEORGE JOHNSON
Published: November 21, 2006 New York Times
Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.
Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.
Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told. Have you seen the South Park episode with Cartman in the future with warring science sects?
Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.
She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”
She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.
There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)
A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed. An important nuance here. Dawkins is logically on sound footing, but Konner, an anthropologist, understands the irrational side of humanity better, and sees the complexity of the situation.
After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.
That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.
With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”
“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”
By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.
Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.” I personally found this paragraph not entirely clear. The first quotation presents one of the best explanations for the success of religion: providing meaning to life within an incomprehensible existence. It also suggests that increasing scientific knowledge increases the feeling of meaninglessness. The second quotation suggests that religion should be weakened regardless of this characteristic. I can agree with that, but would like to hear more about how that age-old human problem would be addressed.
With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace [how can that be? How can an intellectual entity lose out to an emotional entity in "the intellectual marketplace"? , most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?
“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.” He makes a good point. Even if such an absolute goal were possible, it would be a very long undertaking. But I think he overstates the goal so that he can knock down the straw man. Increasing rationality and decreasing superstition IS a reasonable goal.
“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.” Here he implies that any attempt at increasing rationality "takes away" one's purpose. That is nonsense. I certainly agree that humanity needs a sense of purpose, but it is far from definite that a sense of purpose cannot exist without superstition. In fact, what kind of world is it; what kind of "thinking beings" are we if the only way we can survive or, at least, escape severely debilitating despair is to believe in imaginary creatures like "the fairy godmother" and imaginary places like Valhalla? Are we being done a favor by being allowed to clasp these phantoms to our breasts?
Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.
“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. Obviously true.
“Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.” Again very true - as far as it goes. As the next paragraph points out, it's one thing to say no one can either prove or disprove the existence of any particular god; and quite another to act as if one KNOWS there is a particular god because some book, teaching, authority, or tradition.
That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.” True. We fill our kids' heads with all sorts of made up entities (we do remove some folks - like the tooth fairy); why wouldn't they resist abandoning their invisible friends?
By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”
“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?” Good question, but with what would he say religion has been beating science, gays, public schools, pagans, etc. ? Steam shovels or just bull dozers?
His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.” Extremists on either end are not helpful. What is needed are rational thinkers throughout the spectrum. Fear and hatred tend to the emotional end of things.
Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.” Ahh, rationality!!
Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”
In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.” Well, isn't that the foundation of religious superstition: I don't understand something; so there must be a god - that explains it. All this shows me is that Newton was either covering up what he saw as a personal shortcoming or else his emotional life was not proportional with his intellectual life.
It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.
“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ” I wouldn't blame god for this phenomenon. Aging seems a more likely explanation. We humans seem to do really well in many ways at some point in our lives, but eventually we poop out - at least relative to what we pulled off in our earlier days.
“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. Absolutely !! “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.” It's a matter of courage or cowardice. Newton, for example, decided to make up an answer rather than accept the fact he didn't yet know and understand everything.
He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.
But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.
He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.
Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.
“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”
Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”
Well, as B.F. Skinner said, "That's an experimental question."
- Uke Man
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Eenie,Meenie, Mienee,Mo; the Ginks decide Who must Go!!
Hey Folks,
I've always "known" in my bones that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was bumped off by the ruling class. I've always suspected that John F. Kennedy was too. Now this report on Robert Kennedy.
I find it most ironic that - in contrast to our historical, domestic assassinations - our government and talking heads are more than willing to entertain the "conspiracy theory" that Alexander Putin recently ordered the assassination of a renegade Soviet spy.
Maybe they should look closer to home.
- Uke Man
http://www.truthout
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2006/11/who_shot_bobby_kennedy_1.html
CIA Role Claimed in Kennedy Killing
BBC News
Tuesday 21 November 2006
New video and photographic evidence that puts three senior CIA operatives at the scene of RobertKennedy's assassination has been brought to light.
The evidence was shown in a report by Shane O'Sullivan, broadcast on BBC Newsnight.
It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968.
The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles.
"Decoy"
Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary on an anti-War ticket and was set to challenge Nixon for the White House when he was shot in a kitchen pantry.
A 24-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested as the lone assassin and notebooks at his house seemed to incriminate him.
However, even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember the shooting and defence psychiatrists concluded he was in a trance at the time.
Witnesses placed Sirhan's gun several feet in front of Kennedy but the autopsy showed the fatal shot came from one inch behind.
Dr Herbert Spiegel, a world authority on hypnosis at Columbia University, believes Sirhan may have been hypnotically programmed to act as a decoy for the real assassin.
Evidence
The report is the result of a three-year investigation by filmmaker Shane O'Sullivan. He reveals new video and photographs showing three senior CIA operatives at the hotel.
Three of these men have been positively identified as senior officers who worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's Miami base for its SecretWar on Castro.
David Morales was Chief of Operations and once told friends:
"I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard."
Gordon Campbell was Chief of Maritime Operations and George Joannides was Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations.
Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the Congressional investigation into the JFK assassination. Now, we see him at the Ambassador Hotel the night a second Kennedy is assassinated.
Memory
Monday, 20 November would have been BobbyKennedy's 81st birthday. In Los Angeles, his son Maxhas just broken ground on a new high-school project inmemory of his father on the old Ambassador Hotel site.
Paul Schrade, a key figure behind the schoolproject, was walking behind Robert Kennedy that nightand was shot in the head. He believes this newevidence merits fresh investigation:
"It seems very strange to me that these guyswould be at a Kennedy celebration. What were theydoing there? And why were they there? It's ourobligation as friends of Bob Kennedy to investigatethis."
Ed Lopez, a former Congressional investigator whoworked with Joannides in 1978, says:
"I think the key people at the CIA need to goback to anybody who might have been around back then,bring them in and interview them, and ask - is thisGordon Campbell? Is this George Joannides?"
I've always "known" in my bones that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was bumped off by the ruling class. I've always suspected that John F. Kennedy was too. Now this report on Robert Kennedy.
I find it most ironic that - in contrast to our historical, domestic assassinations - our government and talking heads are more than willing to entertain the "conspiracy theory" that Alexander Putin recently ordered the assassination of a renegade Soviet spy.
Maybe they should look closer to home.
- Uke Man
http://www.truthout
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2006/11/who_shot_bobby_kennedy_1.html
CIA Role Claimed in Kennedy Killing
BBC News
Tuesday 21 November 2006
New video and photographic evidence that puts three senior CIA operatives at the scene of RobertKennedy's assassination has been brought to light.
The evidence was shown in a report by Shane O'Sullivan, broadcast on BBC Newsnight.
It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968.
The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles.
"Decoy"
Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary on an anti-War ticket and was set to challenge Nixon for the White House when he was shot in a kitchen pantry.
A 24-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested as the lone assassin and notebooks at his house seemed to incriminate him.
However, even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember the shooting and defence psychiatrists concluded he was in a trance at the time.
Witnesses placed Sirhan's gun several feet in front of Kennedy but the autopsy showed the fatal shot came from one inch behind.
Dr Herbert Spiegel, a world authority on hypnosis at Columbia University, believes Sirhan may have been hypnotically programmed to act as a decoy for the real assassin.
Evidence
The report is the result of a three-year investigation by filmmaker Shane O'Sullivan. He reveals new video and photographs showing three senior CIA operatives at the hotel.
Three of these men have been positively identified as senior officers who worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's Miami base for its SecretWar on Castro.
David Morales was Chief of Operations and once told friends:
"I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard."
Gordon Campbell was Chief of Maritime Operations and George Joannides was Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations.
Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the Congressional investigation into the JFK assassination. Now, we see him at the Ambassador Hotel the night a second Kennedy is assassinated.
Memory
Monday, 20 November would have been BobbyKennedy's 81st birthday. In Los Angeles, his son Maxhas just broken ground on a new high-school project inmemory of his father on the old Ambassador Hotel site.
Paul Schrade, a key figure behind the schoolproject, was walking behind Robert Kennedy that nightand was shot in the head. He believes this newevidence merits fresh investigation:
"It seems very strange to me that these guyswould be at a Kennedy celebration. What were theydoing there? And why were they there? It's ourobligation as friends of Bob Kennedy to investigatethis."
Ed Lopez, a former Congressional investigator whoworked with Joannides in 1978, says:
"I think the key people at the CIA need to goback to anybody who might have been around back then,bring them in and interview them, and ask - is thisGordon Campbell? Is this George Joannides?"
Tennis, anyone ???
Hey Folks,
Canada can afford National Health Care and STILL throw millions of dollars down the advertising hole, subsidizing Russian golf swings!!
We can put a man in space, but getting him into a hospital still needs work. Maybe there are too many wealthy Americans too busy playing too much golf to notice.
- Uke Man
Russian cosmonaut slaps golf ball into orbit
By Erwin Seba Thu Nov 23, 8:53 AM ET
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin smacked a golf ball into orbit off the International Space Station on Wednesday to raise money for the Russian space program during a spacewalk cut short by a balky spacesuit. Tyurin, the station's flight engineer, made a one-armed swing with a gold-plated six-iron to send the lightweight ball on a journey estimated to take it around the Earth at least 48 times before it burns up in the atmosphere.
He spent 16 minutes setting up the shot off a ladder on a Russian docking module with the help of U.S. astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and the guidance of Russian flight controllers.
"OK, there it goes," said Tyurin, who has played golf twice in his life. "It went pretty far. It was an excellent shot."
Canadian golf club maker Element 21 Golf Co. paid the cash-strapped Russian space agency an undisclosed amount of money for Tyurin's golf exhibition, which was filmed for a future commercial.
Fixing a malfunctioning cooling line in Tyurin's Russian-made spacesuit delayed him and Lopez-Alegria from leaving the space station airlock by an hour, using up part of the carbon dioxide absorption capability of their suits.
Russian flight controllers ordered the pair back into the station's airlock about an hour short of the six hours planned for the spacewalk.
The spacewalkers were never in danger as they still had reserves of carbon dioxide absorbing materials available.
After the orbital golf exhibition, Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria struggled for more than an hour in an unsuccessful attempt to retract an antenna on the Russian Progress supply ship that is docked with the station.
"We just cannot free it," Station Commander Lopez-Alegria told flight directors. "No way."
While not an immediate threat to the astronauts' safety or the station, the Progress is scheduled to leave the station in January and the supply ship or the station could be damaged by the antenna during undocking.
A future spacewalk will likely be made to retract the antenna as Russian experts further study the problem, a NASA spokesman said.
The pair successfully moved another antenna so it can communicate with the European Space Agency's automated supply vessel, scheduled to dock with the station in mid-2007.
The men also deployed an experiment that will study charged and neutral particles generated in low-Earth orbit by solar flares.
Canada can afford National Health Care and STILL throw millions of dollars down the advertising hole, subsidizing Russian golf swings!!
We can put a man in space, but getting him into a hospital still needs work. Maybe there are too many wealthy Americans too busy playing too much golf to notice.
- Uke Man
Russian cosmonaut slaps golf ball into orbit
By Erwin Seba Thu Nov 23, 8:53 AM ET
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin smacked a golf ball into orbit off the International Space Station on Wednesday to raise money for the Russian space program during a spacewalk cut short by a balky spacesuit. Tyurin, the station's flight engineer, made a one-armed swing with a gold-plated six-iron to send the lightweight ball on a journey estimated to take it around the Earth at least 48 times before it burns up in the atmosphere.
He spent 16 minutes setting up the shot off a ladder on a Russian docking module with the help of U.S. astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and the guidance of Russian flight controllers.
"OK, there it goes," said Tyurin, who has played golf twice in his life. "It went pretty far. It was an excellent shot."
Canadian golf club maker Element 21 Golf Co. paid the cash-strapped Russian space agency an undisclosed amount of money for Tyurin's golf exhibition, which was filmed for a future commercial.
Fixing a malfunctioning cooling line in Tyurin's Russian-made spacesuit delayed him and Lopez-Alegria from leaving the space station airlock by an hour, using up part of the carbon dioxide absorption capability of their suits.
Russian flight controllers ordered the pair back into the station's airlock about an hour short of the six hours planned for the spacewalk.
The spacewalkers were never in danger as they still had reserves of carbon dioxide absorbing materials available.
After the orbital golf exhibition, Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria struggled for more than an hour in an unsuccessful attempt to retract an antenna on the Russian Progress supply ship that is docked with the station.
"We just cannot free it," Station Commander Lopez-Alegria told flight directors. "No way."
While not an immediate threat to the astronauts' safety or the station, the Progress is scheduled to leave the station in January and the supply ship or the station could be damaged by the antenna during undocking.
A future spacewalk will likely be made to retract the antenna as Russian experts further study the problem, a NASA spokesman said.
The pair successfully moved another antenna so it can communicate with the European Space Agency's automated supply vessel, scheduled to dock with the station in mid-2007.
The men also deployed an experiment that will study charged and neutral particles generated in low-Earth orbit by solar flares.
Friday, November 24, 2006
Stepping in @ Little Brother's TONIGHT
Hey Folks,
A last minute deal. Some moronic, so-called promoter dropped his bands off the Little Brother's Friday night marquee at 4:00 this afternoon. The call went out, and the Uke Man is up to the challenge!!!
If you're out and about, I'll be going on at 10:00. See you there - 1100 N. High Street, Columbus.
- Ukulele Man
A last minute deal. Some moronic, so-called promoter dropped his bands off the Little Brother's Friday night marquee at 4:00 this afternoon. The call went out, and the Uke Man is up to the challenge!!!
If you're out and about, I'll be going on at 10:00. See you there - 1100 N. High Street, Columbus.
- Ukulele Man
