A very good question indeed

The Sojourners people sent this out today:

Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

- Lillian Hellman

Good one, Jay!

I think he's onto something here:

I have a plan to end the war in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Here’s what we do. We bring all our soldiers home. We send in our investment bankers. They’ll screw up the place in six months. Six months!

- Jay Leno

So, is anybody actually surprised?

I simply give you the headline:

Information Secured Through Torture Proved Unreliable, CIA Concluded

Now go read the article - if you really think you need to.

The Pope's attitude toward condoms

Really, this is beyond reprehensible:

One of the world's most prestigious medical journals, the Lancet, has accused Pope Benedict XVI of distorting science in his remarks on condom use.

It said the Pope's recent comments that condoms exacerbated the problem of HIV/Aids were wildly inaccurate and could have devastating consequences.
...
"When any influential person, be it a religious or political figure, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record," it said.

The above excerpt is from an article on the BBC website.

The Lancet and the BBC are not exactly slouches in the publishing world.

The John Yoo memos

Naomi Wolf may well have a number of detractors but she's no crackpot (you know, of the David Icke variety). I want to direct your attention to her article entitled "Do the Secret Bush Memos Amount to Treason? Top Constitutional Scholar Says Yes". It is, quite frankly, chilling. Here's just a sample:

In early March, more shocking details emerged about George W. Bush legal counsel John Yoo's memos outlining the destruction of the republic.

The memos lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress.
...
The memos are a confession. The memos could not be clearer: This was the legal groundwork of an attempted coup. I expected massive front page headlines from the revelation that these memos exited. Almost nothing. I was shocked.

As a non-lawyer, was I completely off base in my reading of what this meant, I wondered? Was I hallucinating?

Astonished, I sought a reality check -- and a formal legal read -- from one of the nation's top constitutional scholars (and most steadfast patriots), Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been at the forefront of defending the detainees and our own liberties.

Please. Click through and read the transcript of their conversation. But be sure you're sitting down while you do. And maybe have some smelling salts handy.

Yeah, this concerns me too.

Our current moral condition

I want to beg you to go read the latest piece by Chris Hedges. It is entitled "America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout" and, long as I have been reading Hedges and have admired him, I'm still astonished by the insight expressed. Here is a sample of what he says:

We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
...
Frank Donoghue, the author of "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities," details how liberal arts education has been dismantled. Any form of learning that is not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools has been abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite or an economic system that serves the corporate state.
...
The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate.

Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and "leftist" professors, has really set out to destroy.

I truly believe this is an important essay. It was originally published on Truthdig and has been reprinted today over on Common Dreams. As I write, there are already eighty-six comments to the piece on the Common Dreams site.

I will tell you something else that disturbs me greatly. Tenure is disappearing in our universities. Not only that, the number of full time professorships is diminishing so that many higher education classes are taught by part time adjuncts who receive no benefits, have to work other jobs and (needless to say) have no time to do research and to write.

I'm sorry; it's the geek in me!

First, some "A guy walks into a bar" jokes:

Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks, "Would you like a beer?" Descartes replies, "I think not", then disappeared.

A neutron walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender sets the beer down and says, "For you, no charge!"

A professor walks into a bar and orders a double martinous. The bartender says, "you mean a double martini?" The professor says, "If I want more than one I'll ask for it."

Shakespeare walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a beer. "I can't serve you." says the bartender. "You're Bard!"

And now for some bumper stickers:

The generation of random numbers is too important to leave to chance.

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

Resistance is futile (if > 1 ohm)

There's no place like 127.0.0.1

And now this one - just because I live in Tulsa:

Forget world peace; visualize using your turn signal.

I'll get back to politics tomorrow, folks!

Just because it's funny

I don't know if this is true or not (about the Russians, I mean) but it does illustrate how we like to complicate things:

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 degrees Celsius. The Russians used a pencil.

Found here.

The (not so) hidden cost of greed

Okay, you great big greedy corporations. So you get to inflate your profits by shipping manufacturing overseas because that way you don't have to pay American wages. I guess it's worth it to you (for the short run, that is) but is it really worth it to the country? And if this sort of thing keeps up, your market is going to disappear on you:

(CNN) -- Officials are looking into claims that Chinese-made drywall installed in some Florida homes is emitting smelly, corrosive gases and ruining household systems such as air conditioners, the Consumer Product Safety Commission says.

The Florida Health Department, which is investigating whether the drywall poses any health risks, said it has received more than 140 homeowner complaints. And class-action lawsuits allege defective drywall has caused problems in at least three states -- Florida, Louisiana and Alabama -- while some attorneys involved claim such drywall may have been used in tens of thousands of U.S. homes.

Homeowners' lawsuits contend the drywall has caused them to suffer health problems such as headaches and sore throats and face huge repair expenses.

The drywall is alleged to have high levels of sulfur and, according to homeowners' complaints, the sulfur-based gases smell of rotten eggs and corrode piping and wiring, causing electronics and appliances to fail.

"It's economically devastating, and it's emotionally devastating," said Florida attorney Ervin A. Gonzalez, who filed one of the lawsuits. It would cost a third of an affected home's value to fix the dwelling, Gonzalez said.
...
"The breadth of this thing is a lot bigger than people think," said Chaikin of the Parker Waichman Alonso law firm in Bonita Springs. Chaikin said the problem is perhaps more easily recognizable in Florida because humidity exacerbates it.

Personally (and I'm not alone in this), I think it's a national security issue that so much of our manufacturing is done overseas.

Friday cat blogging!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Quote of the week

I am listening to this man right now on Bill Moyers Journal. He is so right:

[T]he only possibility of getting this country out of the crisis, the only possibility that really deep set reforms can occur (including the protection and renewal of the productive base of the economy) is labor has to become more powerful. We need more protests. We need more noise in the street. At the end of the day, political parties tend to legislate what social movements and social voices have already achieved in the factories or the streets or in the civil rights demonstration.

-- Mike Davis

For your entertainment

Until I get my own computer back! :-)