Speak "intel"

Brought to you by my dear friend, Walter Callahan.

The Dumbest Things President Bush Said in 2007

10. "And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it."
--interview on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007

9. "I fully understand those who say you can't win this thing militarily. That's exactly what the United States military says, that you can't win this military."
--on the need for political progress in Iraq, Washington, D.C., Oct. 17, 2007

8. "One of my concerns is that the health care not be as good as it can possibly be."
--on military benefits, Tipp City, Ohio, April 19, 2007

7. "Mr. Prime Minister, thank you for your introduction. Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit." --addressing Australian Prime Minister John Howard at the APEC Summit. Later, in the same speech: "As John Howard accurately noted when he went to thank the Austrian troops there last year..."
--referring to Australian troops as "Austrian troops," Sept. 7, 2007

6. "My relationship with this good man is where I've been focused, and that's where my concentration is. And I don't regret any other aspect of it. And so I -- we filled a lot of space together."
--on British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Washington, D.C., May 17, 2007

5. "You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -- 1976."
--to Queen Elizabeth, Washington, D.C., May 7, 2007 (Watch video clip)

4. "The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear -- I'm a Commander Guy."
--deciding he is no longer just "The Decider," Washington, D.C., May 2, 2007 (Watch video clip)

3. "Information is moving -- you know, nightly news is one way, of course, but it's also moving through the blogosphere and through the Internets."
--Washington, D.C., May 2, 2007

2. "There are some similarities, of course (between Iraq and Vietnam). Death is terrible."
--Tipp City, Ohio, April 19, 2007

1. "As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured."
--on the No Child Left Behind Act, Washington, D.C., Sept. 26, 2007 (Watch video clip)

~Compiled by Daniel Kurtzman

The real meaning of compassion

I was amazed to find this:

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.

-- Thomas Merton

Amazed at who said it, I mean. Sounds like something a Buddhist would say, doesn't it? Of course, Merton was influenced by Buddhism. It's just another example of how close serious practitioners of the spiritual path actually turn out to be regardless of their respective belief systems.

Now if we could just get the politicians of the world to realize this....

Quote of the week

From Sojourners:

We have the technology to create the most highly advanced military system, but when these veterans come home they find an understaffed, under-funded and under-equipped VA mental-health system that has so many challenges to get through it that many just give up trying.

- Mike Bowman, father of Timothy Bowman, a 23-year-old Illinois National Guardsman who committed suicide eight months after returning home from Iraq. (Source: McClatchy Newspapers)

Finally someone is telling the truth

And that someone is Grist Magazine in an article entitled "Beyond the Point of No Return". We have reached it. And deep down I think most of us have known that for quite a while:

As the pace of global warming kicks into overdrive, the hollow optimism of climate activists, along with the desperate responses of some of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, is preventing us from focusing on the survival requirements of the human enterprise.

The environmental establishment continues to peddle the notion that we can solve the climate problem.

We can’t.

We have failed to meet nature’s deadline. In the next few years, this world will experience progressively more ominous and destabilizing changes. These will happen either incrementally — or in sudden, abrupt jumps.

Under either scenario, it seems inevitable that we will soon be confronted by water shortages, crop failures, increasing damages from extreme weather events, collapsing infrastructures, and, potentially, breakdowns in the democratic process itself.
...
From a more personal viewpoint, an acknowledgement of the reality of escalating climate change plays havoc with one’s sense of future. It is almost as though a lone ocean voyager were suddenly to lose sight of the North Star. It deprives one of an inner sense of navigation. To live without at least an open-ended sense of future (even if it’s not an optimistic one) is to open one’s self to a morass of conflicting impulses — from the anticipated thrill of a reckless plunge into hedonism to a profoundly demoralizing sense of hopelessness and a feeling that a lifelong guiding sense of purpose has suddenly evaporated.

This slow-motion collapse of the planet leaves us with the bitterest kind of awakening. For parents of young children, it provokes the most intimate kind of despair. For people whose happiness derives from a fulfilling sense of achievement in their work, this realization feels like a sudden, violent mugging. For those who feel a debt to all those past generations who worked so hard to create this civilization we have enjoyed, it feels like the ultimate trashing of history and tradition. For anyone anywhere who truly absorbs this reality and all that it implies, this realization leads into the deepest center of grief.

Yes, grief is the right word. What grieves me the most is that it was so unnecessary.

When I was a young girl during the height of the Cold War, I thought that the world would end because of fear and hostility. Turns out it will have been pure and simple greed after all.

UPDATE: Here's a comment to the above article I just found:

Most have heard that as global warming progresses, the methane gas which has been frozen in the Arctic perma-frost for millions of years, will be released into the atmosphere, as it already is doing. When the mixture of that gas reaches a certain critical point, ???, all animal life on Earth will die. Then some credible scientists are of the opinion, that eventually the atmosphere will become so explosive, that any spark will ignite the atmosphere and the planet will become a big ball of flames. The only humans who may be witness to the massive fire storm, will be any who may be still alive in a space station...

And then without earth for resupplying life support, they're gonners too.

It's worse than we thought

Oh dear, folks. This is really bad:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

"The Arctic is screaming," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colorado.

I'm so grieved for the polar bears. They will suffer and die with no idea why their world has stopped supporting them.

Environmental criminal

Oh dear, this is very disturbing. I just came across an article called "BP Set To Commit ‘The Biggest Environmental Crime in History’". Here's part of it:

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move “Beyond Petroleum” by finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of abandoning its “green sheen” by investing nearly £1.5bn to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness using methods which environmentalists say are part of the “biggest global warming crime” in history.

The multinational oil and gas producer, which last year made a profit of £11bn, is facing a head-on confrontation with the green lobby in the pristine forests of North America after Greenpeace pledged a direct action campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called “oil sands” that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Producing crude oil from the tar sands - a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay - found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of prime forest in northern Alberta - an area the size of England and Wales combined - generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling. The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK’s entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according to environmentalist activists.

The oil rush is also scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of tonnes of plant life and top soil is scooped away in vast open-pit mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers - up to five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas. The industry, which now includes all the major oil multinationals, including the Anglo-Dutch Shell and American combine Exxon-Mobil, boasts that it takes two tonnes of the raw sands to produce a single barrel of oil. BP insists it will use a less damaging extraction method, but it accepts that its investment will increase its carbon footprint.

Mike Hudema, the climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace in Canada, told The Independent: “BP has done a very good job in recent years of promoting its green objectives. By jumping into tar sands extraction it is taking part in the biggest global warming crime ever seen and BP’s green sheen is gone."

I wish I could say that I have hope for the earth but I don't. What's wrong with the oil executives? Don't they have children and grand-children too?

Geography

How many could find either Afghanistan or Iraq on a map before either war?

Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.

--Paul Rodriguez

Quote of the Day

From the Washington Post's letters to the editor:

In his speech on religion, Mitt Romney remarked that "freedom requires religion." This is like saying that "oranges require apples."

-- William Lorton

Vick sentencing

Well, Michael Vick is going to be sentenced today:

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- How much, if any, will Michael Vick's role as financier of a brutal dogfighting ring hurt him? What about his use of drugs while awaiting sentencing?

Or will he benefit from his public apology? His cooperation? His voluntary early start on his prison term?

Answers to these questions, among others, will determine how much time the suspended Atlanta Falcons quarterback will serve in prison for his role in a federal dogfighting conspiracy. And the only man who knows the answers is U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson, who will sentence Vick in a packed courtroom Monday while the disgraced NFL star's supporters and animal-rights activists rally outside.

Vick faces a maximum of five years in prison. Hudson is not bound by sentencing guidelines that suggest a year to 18 months, or prosecutors' recommendation.
...
Perhaps a bigger concern for Vick, according to Malone, is the extent of his involvement in executing dogs. Vick admitted helping kill six to eight pit bulls. Any details the judge learns about exactly what Vick did could weigh heavily in his decision, Malone said.

He didn't just help kill them. He tortured them. I really hope Judge Hudson sends a strong message.

UPDATE: He got 23 months. Not enough as far as I'm concerned.

True religion

Needless to say, I agree with this:

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast it is all a sham . . .

-- Anna Sewell from Black Beauty

Pelosi is a big disappointment

What has happened to decency in this country? I want you to know about an article entitled "Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002; In Meetings, Spy Panels’ Chiefs Did Not Protest, Officials Say". Here's how it gets started:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised.

Here's what a commenter said:

Well, that erases the last ounce of mystery about Pelosi’s refusal to launch investigations of the duplicitous duo in the Whitehouse.

I guess so. What a disappointment.

UPDATE: Here's what John Aravosis says about this over at AMERICAblog:

It's pretty clear that either one of the Republican members of Congress at the meeting, or the CIA, decided to leak what happened at a super-classified post-9/11 briefing in order to embarrass Pelosi and the Democrats. And I don't doubt for a minute that Bush approved the leak, as he always does.

It's also clear that had Pelosi raised any private objections during the meeting - remember, it took place in the first year after September 11 - Bush and the Republicans would have leaked that fact to the public (like they just did) and destroyed her career and marked her publicly as a traitor. No member of Congress, no American, could have spoken up about anything in the months after September 11 and survived. It's patently unfair to suggest that somehow because Pelosi didn't object then that she doesn't have the right to object now.

One final point. I hope this teaches Pelosi and Reid and all the Democrats that no matter what you do, this administration will mark you as a traitor and try to do destroy you. You might as well fight back and try to win, because if you don't, you'll sit back and lose.

Makes sense, actually.

There is no Planet B

And plenty of people in the world seem to know it. Take a look at these excerpts from an AP article entitled "World Climate Change Protests Kick Off":

LONDON - Skiers, fire-eaters and an ice sculptor joined in worldwide demonstrations Saturday to draw attention to climate change and push their governments to take stronger action to fight global warming.

From costume parades in Manila to a cyclist’s protest in London, marches were held in more than 50 cities around the world to coincide with the two-week U.N. Climate Change Conference, which runs through Friday in Bali, Indonesia.

Hundreds of people rallied in the Philippines wearing miniature windmills atop hats, or framing their faces in cardboard cutouts of the sun.

“We are trying to send a message that we are going to have to use renewable energy sometime, because the environment, we need to really preserve it,” high school student Samantha Gonzales said at the rally in the capital, Manila. “We have to act now.”
...
In London, demonstrators braved the cold, rainy December weather to descend on Parliament Square, wielding signs marked: “There is no Planet B.”
...
The London protest has singled out one particular target - President Bush - calling his administration the biggest obstacle to progress at the Bali talks. Organizers plan to underline the point by ending the protest in front of the U.S. Embassy.

The only protest in the US reported on was one in Fairbanks, Alaska. We're just too busy being in denial, I guess.

Friday cat blogging!

Harriet

Photo by Cynthia Burgess