Ah, that Leno!

Take a look:

The psychological profile of that government bioterror scientist who just committed suicide — you know, the guy that was going to be charged with the 2001 anthrax mailings, you know this story? Well according to the report, he had a history dating back to his college days of homicidal threats, actions and plans, and that he was a sociopath. Gee, you’d think that kind of background that would have disqualified him from something like, I don’t know, handling anthrax for the government!

- Jay Leno

Oh, yes. It's the predictable "lone nut". Riiiiight.

John Aravosis over at AMERICAblog posts the following that he labels "Oh please":

"US: Ivins solely responsible for anthrax attacks." And he just killed himself, so he really can't defend himself. How convenient.

I agree with you, John. I don't believe it for a minute. Not one minute.

Hiroshima Day

Please watch this. It's only 90 seconds long:



(Hat tip to Charlotte Alexandre)

Meat and the climate

Well, the good news is that I'm seeing a lot more articles about this issue these days. The one I've found today is called "Eating Meat Is Worse Than Driving a Truck ... for the Climate". Here are just a few points that are made:

...seven pounds of corn equals one pound of beef; six-and-a-half pounds of corn equals one pound of pork; two and six-tenths pounds of corn equals one pound of chicken. (Meat industry estimates are lower but generally refer to the amount of corn necessary to make the live animal gain a pound, not the amount necessary to get a pound of food in the meat case.) Corn is a dietary staple in parts of the world like Mexico, but not here in the United States, where the answer to "What's for dinner?" is supposed to be "beef." Talk about feeding SUVs or people is deceptive, since it masks the intermediate step of feeding animals a whole lot of corn to get one steak dinner.
...
Internationally, two-thirds of the earth's available agricultural land is used to raise animals and their feed crops, primarily corn and soybeans, and the trend is accelerating as people in Latin America and Asia increasingly demand an Americanized diet rich in meat. The need to grow more animal feed and more animals has been devastating rainforests and areas like Brazil's Cerrado region,
the world's most biologically diverse savannah...
...
All those steer feedlots and factory buildings crammed with pigs and chickens produce immense amounts of animal wastes that give off methane. On an equivalent basis to carbon dioxide, methane is twenty-three times more potent as a greenhouse gas. When you add in the production of fertilizer and other aspects of animal farming (including land use changes, feed transport, etc.) livestock farming is responsible for nearly one-fifth of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions...

And don't forget the transportation of animals to slaughter and the energy costs of processing the meat the transportation of the meat (in refrigerated trucks) to market. The energy costs are huge.

Once more, for the 55th time: If you can't bear the thought of giving up meat, at least cut back. Keep one vegetarian day a week, then two, then three. Maybe you'll want to stop there. At least it's something. Truly that level of moderation WILL make a difference.

Cloned puppies

This saddens me so much. Take a look at the first part of an AP article entitled "Puppies mark birth of commercial pet cloning":

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- A U.S. woman received five puppies Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pitbull, becoming the inaugural customer of a South Korean company that says it is the world's first successful commercial canine cloning service.

Seoul-based RNL Bio said the clones of Bernann McKinney's dog Booger were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created the world's first cloned dog in 2005.

"It's a miracle!" McKinney repeatedly shouted Tuesday when she saw the cloned Boogers for which she paid $50,000. "Yes, I know you! You know me, too!" McKinney said joyfully, hugging the puppies, which were sleeping with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed breed dogs.

There are so many homeless dogs up for adoption. The best way we can honor our beloved animals who have gone on to the next life is to take in another one who is languishing in a shelter or who would be put down otherwise. Think of all the homeless dogs who could be saved with that $50,000.

Leno

Okay. This is rich:

Yesterday, President Bush announced there are going to be some big changes in intelligence in the White House. Yeah, he's leaving.

--Jay Leno

Assault on birth control

Please take a look at an article from The Nation entitled "Stealth Assault on Reproductive Rights" by Katha Pollitt. Here's how it gets started:

When pro-choicers accuse anti-choicers of being anti-contraception they’re often taken as crying wolf — even though no anti-choice organization explicitly endorses birth control and despite the prominent anti-choice role of the Catholic Church, which explicitly bans contraception. After all, goes the complacent point of view, most women, and most couples, use some form of birth control. Opposition to it seems like something out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel whose futuristic vision of women’s subjection to rightwing Christian patriarchs no less a shrewd social critic than Mary McCarthy found preposterous when she reviewed it in the New York Times Book Review in 1986.

The Bush Administration seems bent on giving Atwood material for a sequel. Last month, Health and Human Services issued a draft of new regulations which would require health-care providers who receive federal funds to accept as employees nurses and other workers who object to abortion and even to most kinds of birth control. This rule would cover some 500,000 hospitals, clinics, and other medical facilities– including family planning clinics, which would, absurdly, legally be bound to hire people who will obstruct their very mission. To refuse to hire them, or to fire them, would be to lose funds for discriminating against people who object to abortion for religious or –get this — moral beliefs.

This represents quite an expansion of health workers’ longstanding right not to be involved in abortion. And, incidentally, this respect for moral beliefs only goes one way. A Catholic hospital has no corresponding obigation to hire pro-choice workers or accomodate their moral beliefs by permitting them to offer emergency contraception to rape victims or hand out condoms to the HIV positive; a “crisis pregnancy center” would not have to hire pro-choice counsellors who would tell women that abortion would not really give them breast cancer or leave them sterile. Only anti-choicers, apparently, have moral beliefs that entitle them to jobs they refuse to actually perform.

I read The Handmaid's Tale some time ago and it gave me cold chills because I could easily see the religious right taking us in that direction.

What can I say? I'm so glad I'm 59 years old and well past child-bearing age. But what about younger women today? These are perilous times in so many ways.

Okay. This is the situation.

No kidding:

As we meet, our country is in the sixth year of a two-front war. Our economy is struggling. Our planet is in peril. These challenges, and many others, demand new leadership.

— Preamble to draft of the 2008 Democratic Party platform

Why liberalism is opposed so fiercely

Clark Shackelford sent me the following quotation this morning:

Liberalism is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to be wondered that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

Republican slime

Please go read an OpEdNews article entitled "McCain is the Candidate Who Snubs Our Troops, Not Obama". Here's how it gets started:

John McCain seems to be turning a classic Rovian tactic on its head. In the past, Republican candidates under Rove's influence attacked their opponents on the opponents' strengths. For example, George W. Bush and his surrogates went after John Kerry, a war hero, for his service, mocking him with purple band-aids. McCain seems to be attacking Barack Obama on his own (McCain's) weaknesses.

McCain's strong opposition to the new GI bill is still fresh in my memory. Senator Jim Webb's work in securing educational benefits for veterans was nothing less than heroic, and in an election year, few Senators dared vote against it. But McCain claimed that expanded benefits for vets was too nice, arguing it might encourage too many troops to leave the military to cash in on their benefits--despite research showing that the GI bill would balance any losses from troops leaving the military with the new recruits it attracted.

And take a look at this paragraph:

McCain's critiques metastasized once Obama reached Germany, when he charged Obama with going to the gym instead of visiting wounded troops because he was not allowed to bring cameras along. This is a blatant lie. A Pentagon policy prohibited Obama from going as it would be viewed as a campaign trip, and reports say there was no evidence Obama intended to bring cameras. What's more, McCain was denied visiting a military base under the same rule in April.

And, of course, the McCain campaign was planning to criticize Obama if he HAD visited the wounded troops by accusing him of using them for campaign props

McCain should be ashamed of himself. I say it's slime and I say to hell with it.

UPDATE: Double bind: "a dilemma in communication in which a person receives two or more conflicting messages and one message denies the other, a situation in which the person will be put in the wrong however they respond, and the person can't comment on the conflict, or resolve it, or opt out of the situation."

Quote of the year as far as I'm concerned

Take a look:

The best definition of evil I've ever heard is that it is simply the absence of empathy.

-- Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney

What a curse!

Cassandra

Artist: Evelyn De Morgan

I've had my mind on Cassandra today - the prophetess who was cursed by Apollo by being given the gift of foresight only never to be believed.

I identify with her - have for a long time.

Someone apologized to me this morning. Eight years ago I predicted pretty much everything that has happened with the Bush administration and this person did not believe me - in fact, thought my warnings were really psychiatric symptoms!

What can I say?

Sigh.

Just sigh.

(By the way, if you really want to understand Cassandra, read The Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I recommended it to a priest friend in South African who gave a copy to all her female priest colleagues. The book powerfully explores what priesthood is all about and the special difficulties women face in the vocation. Bradley was actually a wonderfully astute theologian although she is seldom credited as such.)

Wal-Mart tells workers how to vote

Ha! As if you need another reason not to shop at Wal-Mart. I got this email today:

Today marks a new low for Wal-Mart. No, not low prices; low and dirty anti-worker tactics. We’ve known for years that Wal-Mart has violated labor and anti-discrimination laws and ruthlessly fought efforts by its workers to form unions. And now, according to The Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart is so intimidated by the very possibility of a unionized workforce that its supervisors have been holding mandatory meetings essentially telling employees to vote against Democrats and Sen. Barack Obama this November.

Wal-Mart is taking this outrageous step because the Democrats and Barack Obama have committed to pass the Employee Free Choice Act to restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for fair wages, health care, decent working conditions and a real voice on the job. All of America’s workers have the right to freely decide whom to vote for independent of employer pressure and intimidation.

Tell Wal-Mart to stop intimidating workers TODAY!

Wal-Mart’s reported actions are just one piece of a large and well-organized effort by corporate America to continue exploiting America’s workers by preventing them from forming unions. With our economy struggling and workers’ wages stagnant, it is critical that we fight workplace intimidation and other heavy-handed corporate tactics. CEOs and Big Business already have too much influence in our political system and telling their employees whom to vote for is simply unacceptable.

Corporate giants like Wal-Mart have been suppressing workers’ wages and passing along health care costs to hardworking taxpayers like you for years. Wal-Mart executives are getting rich, while we’re being left behind. They understand what is at stake in this election, and so do we—a real voice at work for:

* Fair pay;
* Health care for all;
* Equal treatment;
* Safe workplaces; and
* A secure retirement.

And Wal-Mart is ready to use its incredible corporate power as America’s largest private employer to corrupt the political system to safeguard its profits.

Thanks for your support.

In solidarity,

Working Families e-Activist Network, AFL-CIO

P.S. For more on Wal-Mart’s workplace intimidation, check out the AFL-CIO Now blog and our friends at Americans Rights At Work.
~~~~

I am beyond outraged by this. For those of you who don't know, I am a former member of The American Federation of Musicians, The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. Thank God I had my unions to stand up for me when I was in the music business and the teaching profession. (Heck, if there were a union for nuns I'd sign up in a heart beat!)

Friday cat blogging!

Photo by Cynthia Burgess

(Cynthia's blog is here.)

The evils of "free trade"

I want to call your attention to an article called "Do You Want Free Trade – or Fair Trade that Helps the Poor?" that is published today on Common Dreams. Let's face it: Free trade benefits the rich and hurts the poor. And how people with even a rudimentary conscience can justify that is beyond me. Take a look at how this article gets started:

Whenever the world trade talks begin to seem like a coma-inducing bore-a-thon, I am jolted back to consciousness by the throat-stripping smell of rubbish; miles of rotting rubbish. A few years ago I found Adelina - a skinny little scrap of an eight-year-old - living in a rubbish dump, where this stench made her eyes water all the time. It is this smell - and her sore, salty eyes - that hung over the corpse of the Doha trade talks this week.

Just outside the Peruvian capital of Lima, there is a groaning valley of trash, and, inside it, hordes of children try to stay alive. Adelina spends her days picking through the refuse looking for something - anything - she can sell on for a few pennies. Then she returns to the few steel sheets she calls home to sleep on a crunchy carpet of cans. She has never left the rubbish dump; its walls are the walls of her consciousness. She told me three of her friends had recently died by falling into the rubbish, or being pricked by fetid needles, or slipping on to broken glass. I asked her how often she eats, and she shrugged: “I don’t like to eat much anyway.” She will be 10 now, if she has survived.

When we juggle the dry, dull statistics of world trade, we are really asking if Adelina will remain in her rubbish dump - and if her children, and grandchildren, will live and die there.

The way we - the rich world - organise the world trading system today traps Adelina. But it just broke. This week, in Switzerland, the poor countries of the world refused to play along with the Doha trade negotiations. The mass movement of ordinary people demanding our governments Make Poverty History that rose up in 2005 needs urgently to reconvene.

To help Adelina, we need to start with a basic question: how do poor countries turn into rich countries? The institutions that dominate world trade - especially the World Trade Organisation (WTO) - have a simple answer: all markets, all the time. They tell poor countries to abolish all subsidies, protections and tariffs that protect their own goods. If you fling yourself naked at the global market, you will rise. If the poor countries disagree, they are cajoled to do as we say.

There’s just one problem: every rich country got rich by ignoring the advice we now so aggressively offer. If we had listened to it, Britain would still be an agrarian economy manufacturing raw wool, and the US would be primarily farming cotton.

Do click through and read the rest of the article. Very illuminating.