Friday cat blogging!

Harriet
Photo by Cynthia Burgess

What secrets await us?

Here's something Lisa said on All Hat No Cattle:

I often wonder what secrets this administration has -- that we haven't found out about yet.

{{chills down my spine}}

Mine too.

Family values again

Oh my. The Religious Right is at it again:

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (AP) - The minister of a Baptist church has been charged with indecent exposure and driving under the influence, and police officers say he propositioned them.

Tommy Tester, 58, of Bristol, Va., was wearing a skirt when he was arrested last week after allegedly urinating in front of children at a car wash, police said.

Police also said Tester offered to perform oral sex on officers who were sent to the scene.

Authorities identified Tester as the minister of Gospel Baptist Church in Bristol and an employee of Christian radio station WZAP-AM in Bristol.

There was no immediate response Tuesday to calls to the church and Tester's home.

Okay, folks. Once more the problem is the HYPOCRISY. Does this man need our compassion? Probably. He's probably quite disturbed. But the Religious Right doesn't believe in compassion. That's the problem. He also needs to be taken off the streets, away from children and removed from ministry.

Women and anger

Well, this is a bummer. Take a look at some research findings as reported by the Reuters article "Workplace anger -- who wins?":

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- A man who gets angry at work may well be admired for it but a woman who shows anger in the workplace is liable to be seen as "out of control" and incompetent, according to a new study presented Friday.

What's more, the finding may have implications for Hillary Clinton as she attempts to become the first female U.S. president, according to its author Victoria Brescoll, a post-doctoral scholar at Yale University.

Her research paper "When Can Angry Women Get Ahead?" noted that Clinton was described last year by a leading Republican as "too angry to be elected president."

Previous research has indicated that anger can communicate that an individual feels entitled to dominate others, and therefore perhaps is. But Brescoll said such studies focused on men.

"As Senator Clinton's experience suggests, however, for a professional woman anger expression may lead to a decrease rather than an increase in her status," Brescoll wrote.

And, of course, without that "anger" or "dominance", women would probably be described as too passive or wimpy or too cold or too controlled. Sheesh.

The WSJ and Murdoch

Just in case you haven't been paying attention, I want to call your attention to an article entitled "Murdoch: Bad for Journalism, Bad for Democracy". Here's how it gets started:

Today’s news [August 1, 2007] that the Bancroft family has agreed to News Corp.’s $5 billion dollar buyout offer for Dow Jones, is a powerful reminder of how media consolidation is constantly eroding the foundational structures of our democracy. America’s founders understood that a truly free press — enlivened by diverse perspectives and beholden to the public interest — is the keystone to a flourishing democracy. With the purchase of the Dow Jones Co. and its flagship Wall Street Journal another vital voice is brought under the umbrella of one conglomerate — and one man — that already controls too much of what Americans see, hear and read every day.

Since Rupert Murdoch’s offer was made public, volumes have been written on what this historic deal might mean to journalism in America. A fair bit of the criticism and concern surrounding News Corp.’s bid for Dow Jones has focused on Murdoch himself and his well-documented penchant for employing his media outlets to advance his personal and business interests.

The Wall Street Journal is regarded as a bulwark of journalistic independence, seen by many as one of the most reliable sources of business news and a critical watchdog of corporate behavior. With less and less hard news being covered by the corporate media, newspapers like the Journal hold a powerful place in American society, helping to shape the national news agenda. Murdoch’s influence over editorial policy at the Journal will have profound effects on what we see and hear on the news. Those concerned about the journalistic independence and editorial integrity at the Journal have good reason to be worried.

Very troubling. The Wall Street Journal is right wing enough as it is. With Murdoch in charge it's going to be more like Fox News, I'm afraid.

Today's QuickVote

This is from CNN:

Are you worried the nation's infrastructure is crumbling?

Yes - 66%

No - 34%

For what it's worth, I'm worried.

How much suffering?

Marianne Williamson

I really want to recommend a very powerful article by Marianne Williamson entitled "A New Order of The Ages". Here's an excerpt:

In fact, America is going to change. The only question is whether we will choose to change by embracing wisdom - repudiating the lies of a dysfunctional, increasingly dangerous worldview of an economic system predicated on the goal of short-term economic gain for the privileged few - or we will be forced by circumstances to make a quantum leap into our next stage of growth, embracing humanitarian concern as the new organizing principle of human civilization. The only real question at this point is how much suffering will have to occur before we wake up to the lesson before us. We can change now, making the transition fairly peacefully (not that violence does not already rage); or we can refuse to change, thereby inviting a greater intensity of disaster with every day we wait.

Oh my. And oh yes. America is going to change.

Some facts we need to remember

Today I came across a speech by Peter Raven given to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Meeting in 2002. Their theme that year was "Science in a Connected World" and the speech is entitled "Science, Sustainability, and the Human Prospect". The numbers therefore may be a little out of date but the basic picture outlined below is accurate. Take a look at this excerpt:

The consequences of our environmental problems are severe. About a quarter of humanity survives on less than $1 per day. Depending on the criteria used, one-eighth to one-half of the world's people are malnourished. Some 14 million babies and young children under the age of four starve to death each year. In the world's poorest societies, women and children are uneducated and spend their time foraging for firewood or water. Such relationships are inevitable in a world in which 20% of us control 80% of the resources, and 80% of us have to make do with the rest.

Among the nations of the world, the role of the United States has become particularly dominant. Although we contain just 4.5% of the world's people, we control 25% of the world's wealth and produce 25 to 30% of its pollution. We are dependent on the stability and productivity of nations all over the world to maintain our level of affluence. It is remarkable, therefore, that the richest nation is the lowest per capita donor of international development assistance of any industrialized country.

Fourteen million babies starve EACH YEAR. Think what you would go through if one of your own children starved and you had to watch it. Now realize that every one of those babies had a mother - had a father.

Mercenaries again

I want to share with you an excerpt from an article entitled "A Very Private War". Needless to say, the situation this article describes is very worrying:

It was described as a “powder keg” moment. In late May, just across the Tigris river from Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, a heavily armed convoy of American forces was driving down a street near the Iraqi Interior Ministry. They were transporting US officials in what is known widely among the occupation forces as the “red zone” - essentially, any area of Iraq that does not fall inside the US-built “emerald city” in the capital. The American guards were on the look-out for any threat lurking on the roads. Not far from their convoy, an Iraqi driver was pulling out of a petrol station. When the Americans encountered the Iraqi driver, they determined him to be a potential suicide car bomber. In Iraq it has become common for such convoys to fire off rounds from a machine gun at approaching Iraqi vehicles, much to the outrage of Iraqi civilians and officials. The Americans say this particular Iraqi vehicle was getting too close to their convoy and that they tried to warn it to back off. They say they fired a warning shot at the car’s radiator before firing directly into the windshield of the car, killing the driver. Some Iraqi witnesses said the shooting was unprovoked.In the ensuing chaos, the Americans reportedly refused to give their names or details of the incident to Iraqi officials, sparking a tense standoff between the Americans and Iraqi forces, both of which were armed with assault rifles. It could have become even more bloody before a US military convoy arrived on the scene.

A senior US adviser to the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s intelligence division told the Washington Post that the incident threatened to “undermine a lot of the cordial relationships that have been built up over the past four years. There’s a lot of angry people up here right now.”

While there is ongoing outrage between Iraqis and the military over such deadly incidents, this one came with a different, but increasingly common, twist: The Americans involved in the shooting were neither US military nor civilians. They were operatives working for a secretive mercenary firm based in the wilderness of North Carolina. Its name is Blackwater USA.
...
No matter what their acts in Iraq, contractors cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts, thanks to US-imposed edicts dating back to Paul Bremer’s post-invasion Coalition Provisional Authority.

The internet is alive with videos of contractors seemingly using Iraqi vehicles for target practice, much to the embarrassment of the firms involved. Yet, despite these incidents, and although 64 US soldiers have been court-martialled on murder-related charges, not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for any crime, let alone a crime against an Iraqi. US contractors in Iraq reportedly have a motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.”

It's wrong, people. It's so, so wrong.

Another set of casualties

Oh, this truly breaks my heart. I want to call your attention to a Time Magazine article entitled "Fallout From the War at Home". Here's what is happening:

Rates of neglect and abuse of the children of servicemen and women rose 42% within the family when the enlisted parent was deployed on a combat mission, according to a new study led by senior health analyst Deborah Gibbs of RTI International, a research institute in North Carolina. Previous studies have shown an association between combat-related deployments and higher levels of stress in the family, and it is this stress that is thought to play a major role in the maltreatment of children by the parent who stays home.

The current study is the first to take a comprehensive look at how deployment affects child neglect and emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Backed by funding from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, the researchers harvested data from the U.S. Army Central Registry of 1,771 families worldwide with at least one instance of child neglect or abuse between Sept. 2001 and Dec. 2004, a period during which many soldiers were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The results show that a staggering 1,858 parents had maltreated their children during that period — boys and girls in equal numbers, with an average age of 6. Nearly 10% of those parents neglected or abused their children on more than one day.
...
Government statistics note that in 2004, 1.1 million children (under the age of 18) were maltreated in enlisted soldiers' families. Gibbs and colleagues cite another soon-to-be-published study that found "the rates of neglect in U.S. Army families increased sharply between 2001 and 2004, reversing a decade-long downward trend."

Oh, this horrible, horrible war.

A stolen election

I've been sure since election day that the 2004 election was stolen but here's even more evidence. An Alternet article entitled "In Violation of Federal Law, Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election Records Are Destroyed or Missing" explains:

In 56 of Ohio's 88 counties, ballots and election records from 2004 have been "accidentally" destroyed, despite a federal order to preserve them -- it was crucial evidence which would have revealed whether the election was stolen.

Two-thirds of Ohio counties have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential ballots and related election records, according to letters from county election officials to the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner.

The lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in Columbus.

The destruction of the election records also frustrates efforts by the media and historians to determine the accuracy of Ohio's 2004 vote count, because in county after county the key evidence needed to understand vote count anomalies apparently no longer exists.

"The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election," said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. "We're in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General's office."

"On the one hand, people will now say you can't prove the fraud," he said, "but the rule of law says that when evidence is destroyed it creates a presumption that the people who destroyed evidence did so because it would have proved the contention of the other side."

I don't believe for one minute that Bush fairly won EITHER election.

Tyranny, brainwashing and propaganda

Let's all give this some thought:

It is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, whilst the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871

The slaughter of war

Walt Calahan sent me the following quote from a BBC article entitled "Veteran, 109, revisits WWI trench".

Mr. Harry Patch, 109 years old, the last known surviving British soldier who fought in the trenches of World War I:

"Too many died. War isn't worth one life," said Mr Patch.

He said war was the "calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings".

Global warming and storms

I want to call your attention to a CNN article called "Tropical storms doubled due to global warming, study says". Here's an excerpt:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The number of tropical storms developing annually in the Atlantic Ocean more than doubled over the past century, with the increase taking place in two jumps, researchers say.

The increases coincided with rising sea surface temperature, largely the byproduct of human-induced climate warming, researchers Greg J. Holland and Peter J. Webster concluded.

Their findings were being published online Sunday by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

An official at the National Hurricane Center called the research "sloppy science" and said technological improvements in observing storms accounted for the increase.

From 1905 to 1930, the Atlantic-Gulf Coast area averaged six tropical cyclones per year, with four of those storms growing into become hurricanes.

The annual average jumped to 10 tropical storms and five hurricanes from 1931 to 1994. From 1995 to 2005, the average was 15 tropical storms and eight hurricanes annually.

Even in 2006, widely reported as a mild year, there were 10 tropical storms.

What do you want to bet that political pressure was put on the National Hurrican Center to criticize the research?

Thought for the day

Just a reminder:

Never argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and then beat you with experience.

The Guardian published an article on Monday entitled "Cheney pushes Bush to act on Iran" and in it I found this:

A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo."

Now here is David Cogwell's comment on that statement:

He doesn't mind leaving office with Iraq still in limbo, however. That kind of limbo is okay for Bush, chaos and bloodshed. The other kind of limbo -- Iran being defiant, not accepting the U.S. command -- he can't tolerate. The fundamentalist mind, he likes things simple, simple to him, a rich kid who's lived a life of ease, rarely cracked a book, never had to be accountable for his failures, always had Dad to bail him out. Now Cheney, who has always been wrong about virtually everything of significance, is winning out over those who would urge ... restraint? ... how about sanity?

Here's what I think is likely (not original with me, by any means): There's going to be another "terrorist" attack within the US and the Bush administration is going to blame it on Iran. That will create support for an all out attack on Iran and it will probably be nuclear. I dearly, dearly hope I'm wrong but that's what I think is going to happen.