Some xmas cheer....



H/T to Crooks & Liars.

Musician, visionary, artist, lover, father, New Yorker, and peacenik....

Silenced by a bullet 26 years ago.

I saw The U.S. vs. John Lennon this morning. Excellent movie, and so timely.

Why can't we give peace a chance?!

(H/T Crooks & Liars.)

Authenticity....

Johnny Cash shortly before his death, covering "Hurt," from Nine Inch Nails. Incredibly powerful.

And the rich get richer....

If you want to understand--really understand--what's been happening economically in the US during the past 60 years, read this article by Paul Krugman.

Krugman is no left-wing commie, in fact, he started off as a stern critic of Democratic economic policies in the 80's and 90's. In this article, he demystifies America's transformation from a nation in which the working-class could live fairly well, into one in which the working class has become the working poor, the middle class is vanishing, and the wealthy are living like pashas.

...During the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush joked that his base consisted of the "haves and the have mores." But it wasn't much of a joke. Not only has the Bush administration favored the interests of the wealthiest few Americans over those of the middle class, it has consistently shown a preference for people who get their income from dividends and capital gains, rather than those who work for a living.

Under Bush, the economy has been growing at a reasonable pace for the past three years. But most Americans have failed to benefit from that growth. All indicators of the economic status of ordinary Americans -- poverty rates, family incomes, the number of people without health insurance -- show that most of us were worse off in 2005 than we were in 2000, and there's little reason to think that 2006 was much better.

So where did all the economic growth go? It went to a relative handful of people at the top. The earnings of the typical full-time worker, adjusted for inflation, have actually fallen since Bush took office. Pay for CEOs, meanwhile, has soared -- from 185 times that of average workers in 2003 to 279 times in 2005. And after-tax corporate profits have also skyrocketed, more than doubling since Bush took office. Those profits will eventually be reflected in dividends and capital gains, which accrue mainly to the very well-off: More than three-quarters of all stocks are owned by the richest ten percent of the population.

The US is on its way to becoming a sort of Latin American economy, Krugman says, in which both income and political power are inequitably distributed to the wealthy few at the top.

Article here.

Did lack of division of labour doom the Neanderthals...?

I love reading and speculating about why the Neanderthals vanished, while we "modern humans" went on to spread across the globe.

A new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals, the stockily built human species that occupied Europe until the arrival of modern humans 45,000 years ago, has been proposed by two anthropologists at the University of Arizona.

Unlike modern humans, who had developed a versatile division of labor between men and women, the entire Neanderthal population seems to have been engaged in a single main occupation, the hunting of large game, the scientists, Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, say in an article posted online yesterday in Current Anthropology.

Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown those of the Neanderthals.

[...]

The meat of large animals yields a rich payoff, but even the best hunters have unlucky days. The modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic, with their division of labor and diversified food sources, would have been better able to secure a continuous food supply. Nor were they putting their reproductive core — women and children — at great risk.

Hmmmm...it's a thought-provoking hypothesis.

Complete story here.

Bye bye Bolton...!

Woke up to good news this morning:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — President Bush reluctantly accepted the resignation of the United Nations ambassador, John R. Bolton, on Monday, conceding that the envoy could not win Senate confirmation and signaling that the administration was unwilling to make another end run around Congressional opponents in order to keep Mr. Bolton in his job.

And so, slowly, recovery from the formidable damage done by Bush begins.

And The Decider isn't happy, his words belying his recently stated desire to promote bipartisanship.

“They chose to obstruct his confirmation, even though he enjoys majority support in the Senate, and even though their tactics will disrupt our diplomatic work at a sensitive and important time,” Mr. Bush said. “This stubborn obstructionism ill serves our country, and discourages men and women of talent from serving their nation.”

Ahhh, Mr President Lameduck McPeevish, I suggest you get used to it. You and yours are on their way out!!!

Complete story here.

I'm trying to fix the "beneath the fold" feature in the post below... please bear with me til I do...

From today's Guardian:

...Luis Padilla, 29, father of three, had been kidnapped, driven across the Mexican border from El Paso, Texas, to a house in Ciudad Juarez, the lawless city ruled by drug lords that lies across the Rio Grande. As his wife tried frantically to locate him, he was being stripped, tortured and buried in a mass grave in the garden - what the people of Juarez call a narco-fossa, a narco-smugglers' tomb.

Just another casualty of Mexico's drug wars? Perhaps. But Padilla had no connection with the drugs trade; he seems to have been the victim of a case of mistaken identity. Now, as a result of documents disclosed in three separate court cases, it is becoming clear that his murder, along with at least 11 further brutal killings, at the Juarez 'House of Death', is part of a gruesome scandal, a web of connivance and cover-up stretching from the wild Texas borderland to top Washington officials close to President Bush.

These documents, which form a dossier several inches thick, are the main source for the facts in this article. They suggest that while the eyes of the world have been largely averted, America's 'war on drugs' has moved to a new phase of cynicism and amorality, in which the loss of human life has lost all importance - especially if the victims are Hispanic. The US agencies and officials in this saga - all of which refused to comment, citing pending lawsuits - appear to have thought it more important to get information about drugs trafficking than to stop its perpetrators killing people.

The US media has virtually ignored this story, which implicates officials from the Immigration and Customs Executive ("ICE," previously US Customs), the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco, and the FBI, including officials very close to the White House.

Of course, why should the media cover it? We're not talking blow-jobs in the Oval Office or salacious texts to Congressional pages, but rather brutal kidnappings, torture and murder, all in the name of the "War on Drugs." (Remember that bastard, felonious progenitor of the "War on Terror"?)

More details below the fold on how the GW Bush administration has re-introduced morals to a White House. The facts are shocking, even to one who thought I'd moved beyond open-mouthed stupefaction when it comes to this administration.

Or complete story here.

When Lalo [Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, the US informant] arrived, two cops were already there. He went out to buy the quicklime and duct tape, and when he returned Santillan turned up with Reyes. The policemen jumped on the lawyer, beating him and trying to put duct tape over his mouth. Lalo, wearing his hidden wire supplied by Ice, recorded Reyes's desperate pleas for mercy. 'They [the police] asked me to help them get him to the floor,' reads a statement he made later. 'They tried to choke him with an extension cord, but this broke and I gave them a plastic bag and they put it on his head and suffocated him.' Even then, they were not sure Reyes was dead. One of the officers took a shovel 'and hit him many times on the head'.

When Lalo returned to El Paso on the day of Reyes's murder and told his Ice employers what had happened they were understandably worried. They knew that, if they were to continue using Lalo as an informant, they would need high-level authorisation. That afternoon and evening he was debriefed at length by his main handler, Special Agent Raul Bencomo, and his supervisor. Then he was allowed to go back to Juarez - Santillan had given him $2,000 to pay two cartel members to dig Reyes's grave, cover his body with quicklime and bury it.

Meanwhile the El Paso Ice office reported the matter to headquarters in Washington. The information went up the chain of command, eventually reaching America's Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John G. Malcolm. It passed through the office of Johnny Sutton, the US Attorney for Western Texas - a close associate of George W. Bush. When Bush was Texas governor, Sutton spent five years as his director of criminal justice policy. After Bush became President, Sutton became legal policy co-ordinator in the White House transition team, working with another Bush Texas colleague, Alberto Gonzalez, the present US Attorney General.

Earlier this year Sutton was appointed chairman of the Attorney General's advisory committee which, says the official website, 'plays a significant role in determining policies and programmes of the department and in carrying out the national goals set by the President and the Attorney General'. Sutton's position as US Attorney for Western Texas is further evidence of his long friendship with the President - falling into his jurisdiction is Midland, the town where Bush grew up, and Crawford, the site of Bush's beloved ranch.

'Sutton could and should have shut down the case, there and then,' says Bill Weaver, a law professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has made a detailed study of the affair. 'He could have told Ice and the lawyers "go with what you have, and let's try to bring Santillan to justice". That neither he nor anyone else decided to take that action invites an obvious inference: that because the only people likely to get killed were Mexicans, they thought it didn't much matter.'

In the days after Reyes's death, officials in Texas and Washington held a series of meetings. Finally word came back from headquarters - despite the risk that Lalo might become involved with further murders, Ice could continue to use and pay him as an informant. And although Santillan had already been caught on tape directing a merciless killing and might well kill again, no attempt would be made to arrest him.

[...]

Then, and on other occasions, Santillan told Lalo in advance he was going to hold a carne asada [code for a murder]. The deposition gives details of 13 murders, all but one of whose victims were later found buried at Number 3633. Each time Lalo crossed into Mexico his Ice handlers sought and obtained formal clearance from headquarters to allow their source to travel to a foreign country while working for a US agency. Throughout the period, Lalo says, he continued to talk to his handler Bencomo up to four times a day - usually in person, at the Ice El Paso office. He says his meetings with Santillan were all covertly recorded, while documents show that Ice had arranged for Lalo's phone to be bugged.

[...]

While Santillan and Lalo went on killing, Bencomo, his Ice colleagues and Assistant US Attorney Fielden were assembling their case. In December 2003 Fielden drew up a sealed indictment against Santillan. But although there was already some evidence of his involvement in killings, the indictment was only for trafficking, not murder. Before they could lure him to America and arrest him, they needed permission from the DoJ. They got it on 15 January, a day after Luis Padilla died.

But this did not bring the House of Death killings to an end. Under torture, one of Santillan's victims had revealed the address of Homer Glen McBrayer - a DEA special agent resident in Juarez who operated under diplomatic cover. At 6pm on 14 January, two men rang his doorbell continuously for 10 minutes. Afraid, his wife phoned him at work. McBrayer rushed home and ushered his wife and daughters into their car. As soon as they left the estate where they lived, they were stopped by a Mexican police car. Two civilian vehicles hemmed McBrayer's car in. Their occupants got out and waited while McBrayer talked to the cops. They were Santillan's men.

Having showed his diplomatic passport, McBrayer phoned a DEA colleague, who arrived within minutes. Unwilling, perhaps, to abduct two US agents, a woman and two children on a busy street, the cartel men backed off. As the standoff unfolded, Santillan twice called Lalo. He asked him to find out what he could about an American called Homer Glen - the corrupt police had not given McBrayer's surname. Santillan, claimed Lalo, said he thought he worked for the tres letras - code for the DEA - and intended to blow up his house.

The McBrayers were lucky to be alive, and the DEA, kept in the dark about the continued use of Lalo after the first murder six months earlier, reacted with fury. Even as Ice debriefed Lalo, it refused the DEA access to him and to recordings of the events of 14 January. Every principle governing informant handling and inter-agency co-operation appeared to have been flouted, and the Mexican government was not told of the carnage taking place on - and under - its soil.

[...]

The House Of Death suddenly seemed set to become a major national scandal. Bill Conroy, a reporter who works for an investigative website, Narconews.com, was about to publish an article about it. On 24 February, Sandy Gonzalez, the Special Agent in Charge of the DEA office in El Paso, one of the most senior and highly decorated Hispanic law enforcement officers in America, wrote to his Ice counterpart, John Gaudioso.

'I am writing to express to you my frustration and outrage at the mishandling of investigation that has resulted in unnecessary loss of human life,' he began, 'and endangered the lives of special agents of the DEA and their immediate families. There is no excuse for the events that culminated during the evening of 14 January... and I have no choice but to hold you responsible.' Ice, Gonzalez wrote, had gone to 'extreme lengths' to protect an informant who was, in reality, a 'homicidal maniac... this situation is so bizarre that, even as I'm writing to you, it is difficult for me to believe it'.

But Ice and its allies in the DoJ were covering up their actions, helped by the US media - aside from the Dallas Morning News, not one major newspaper or TV network has covered the story. The first signs came in the response to Gonzalez's letter to Gaudioso - not from Ice, but from Johnny Sutton.

He reacted not to the discovery of corpses at Calle Parsonieros, but with concern Gonzalez might talk to the media. He communicated his fears to a senior official in Washington - Catherine O'Neil, director of the DoJ's Organised Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Describing Gonzalez's letter as 'inflammatory,' she passed on Sutton's fears to the then Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and to Karen Tandy, the head of the DEA, another Texan lawyer.

Tandy was horrified by Gonzalez's letter. 'I apologised to Johnny Sutton last night and he and I agreed on a "no comment" to the press,' she replied on 5 March. Gonzalez would have no further involvement with the House of Death case and was ordered to report to Washington for 'performance discussions to further address this officially'.

Gonzalez was told that Sutton was 'extremely upset'. Gonzalez, who had enjoyed glittering appraisals throughout his 30-year career, was told he would be downgraded. On 4 May, DEA managers in Washington sent him a letter. It said that, if he quietly retired before 30 June, he would be given a 'positive' reference for future employers. If he refused, a reference would dwell on his 'lapse'. Gonzalez resigned, and launched a lawsuit - part of which is due to come to court tomorrow.

Complete story here.

Wow...!

OAKLAND, Calif., Dec. 1 — Until recently, many children who did not conform to gender norms in their clothing or behavior and identified intensely with the opposite sex were steered to psychoanalysis or behavior modification.

But as advocates gain ground for what they call gender-identity rights, evidenced most recently by New York City’s decision to let people alter the sex listed on their birth certificates, a major change is taking place among schools and families. Children as young as 5 who display predispositions to dress like the opposite sex are being supported by a growing number of young parents, educators and mental health professionals.

This is a fascinating article about new approaches taken by parents to nurture transgendered children, rather than force them to conform to the norms of their birth-sex.

My life would have been so very different had I been allowed to grow up as a boy!

Thing is, while a part of me wishes it had happened, mostly I'm glad my life took the path it did.

First, if I had been raised as a boy and therefore not gone into denial in my late teens and tried to live as a woman, I wouldn't have had my daughter--the light of my life! And what a huge, unimaginable loss that would have been. Being pregnant, giving birth, and mothering her are among the best experiences of my life.

And no, that doesn't make me doubt my manliness, but if it challenges yours, so much the better.

Being socialised as a girl against my will civilised me. In short, it forced me to learn to identify and deal with my emotions. When I was a kid and feeling most like a boy, I led a stunted emotional life. The only emotions I could name were happiness and anger. Grief, loss, empathy, fear, desire, sorrow, outrage, pain, and others were a huge, bewildering confusion that prompted me to behave reactively in ways I was totally unable to understand or take responsibility for.

This is allowed for boys (and men) and it was allowed for me when I was very young. The older I grew, however, the more society forced me as a girl to process my emotions, understand what I was feeling and why, and behave accountably. Which, over time, forced me to evolve as a person.

Don't get me wrong: I believe boys and men are just as capable of evolving as women. But society gives them a pass. If I'd been born a boy, not only would I have not been expected to process my feelings, I would have been pressured to cut off from them the older I grew. I likely would have become an angry, violent, macho jerk, as that's definitely the direction I was headed and the sort of community I was raised in.

I probably would have volunteered for the infantry in Vietnam (I wanted to at one point, but couldn't as a girl) which if I'd survived, would have fucked me up even more. I used to look at the many burnt-out vets homeless, addicted, and struggling on the streets of California, and think, "There but for the grace...."

Another thing, the standards my dad held me to as a girl were so much easier to meet than those applied to my brother. Consequently, I could do no wrong in my dad's eyes, whereas my brother was mercilessly criticised and belittled. You know how it is between fathers and sons, especially first-born sons. I avoided all that. My dad now regrets what he did, but my brother, in his 60's, is still affected by it.

Of course, this train of thought is running more toward if I'd been born a boy, not raised as a tranny boy. Presumably, if my parents had been enlightened enough to respect me as transgendered, they would have also ascribed to more humane and nuanced gender roles.

Now we're really drifting into fantasy, though, considering I was born and raised in the 1950's American West!

No, given the cards I was dealt, like I said earlier I'm grateful my life took the path it did. While it has been anything but easy, how many people in our gender-segregated society get to experience life as both a woman and a man?!

On the other hand, I'm also glad modern parents are nurturing their transgendered kids. I hope the trend grows. Any and all improvements in the way we practice gender are appreciated.

And while we're at it, let's advocate that everyone be treated with respect, dignity, and kindness regardless of sex, gender, age, race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, or disability --have I forgotten any?

Complete story here.

And, oh, that's me in that photo above--many decades ago--on the left (naturally!).

Mr (President) Geekazoid....

Don't tell my favourite blogger that, ummmmmmm, [squirm], uuhhhhhh, [shift nervously from foot to foot]...if I had to be honest [gaze away], well.... Ok! Ok! I never really liked Al Gore!!

But after seeing An Inconvenient Truth and reading this GQ interview, my feelings have evolved. Even allowing that in the past six years, a large percentage of his words may have been scripted and his appearances PR-managed, I'd still gladly vote for the guy if he ran in '08.

The GQ interview is worth reading for his assesment of Bush alone:

...But dammit, whatever happened to the concept of accountability for catastrophic failure? This administration has been by far the most incompetent, inept, and with more moral cowardice, and obsequiousness to their wealthy contributors, and obliviousness to the public interest of any administration in modern history, and probably in the entire history of the country!

Sentiments on self-serving delusions....

Dennis Perrin is, without doubt, one of the best bloggers out there.

Excellent writer: original, thought-provoking, gut-wrenchingly honest and always worth a read.

Would that America produced more with his grasp of history and powers of critical thinking.

The following gives a taste of his well placed moral outrage.

I will offer this: the notion that the US held "honorable intentions" as it tore the lid off of Iraq is not only self-serving piety, it's a widespread sociopathic delusion. Yet, US politicos from Chuck Hagel to Russ Feingold utter this line whenever possible, keeping a straight face while another thousand or so Iraqis are blown to bits, and a few dozen more US soldiers and Marines have their heads, arms or legs blown off by IEDs, or are felled by snipers. "Honorable"? Are you fucking kidding me? Criminal would be the first word out of my mouth, but then, I'm not trying to appease the fantasies of the political elite nor those among the greater mass who seriously buy into this insane logic.

The complete post also includes a video clip of Marx/Engels set to classic American cartoons.

Women's situation worsen in Afghanistan....

This article makes my blood boil. Remember Bush allegedly championing women’s rights after the US invaded Afghanistan? Well, like so much of his hypocritical posturing, this stance too has proven to be completely disingenuous.

It’s a fact that Afghani women’s rights were a low priority before the invasion. I’ve been following this issue since the Taliban took over Kabul in September, 1996. If you remember, that was when the mullahs forced women from all workplaces because it was "immoral" for females to be labouring outside the home. This included nurses and caregivers, which left children abandoned in orphanages where, with little or no warning, 10 and 12-year-old children struggled to care for toddlers.

So much for Taliban morality!

And now—surprise! surprise!—according to this Guardian article, the US government is once again making a low priority of woman's rights. While the situation improved a bit for women in Kabul immediately after the American invasion, it is now worsening everywhere across the country. Women and girls are facing such horrors and despair that they’re committing suicide at appalling rates.

.… "Afghan women are killing themselves now," she says, "there is no liberation for them." This is not just rhetoric: the Afghan Human Rights Commission recently began to document the numbers of Afghan women who are burning themselves to death because they cannot escape abuse in their families.

Women's troubles are part and parcel of a bleak picture of poverty, ignorance, prejudice, violence and suffering in Afghanistan that the NATO presence has done little to alleviate.

Everywhere I go, from the offices of big international organisations such as Oxfam, to government ministries, to little Afghan organisations, I hear anger and frustration. Anger at promised money that never arrived, even from blue-chip donors such as the World Bank. Anger at unaccountable donors who set up useful projects, but decided to move on after six months, leaving workers penniless and floundering. Anger at US aid that was tied to using US contractors with little knowledge of the country, so that, say, a vital health clinic in Badakhshan was built in a region where it would only be accessible by helicopter during the winter months. Anger at poor central planning and lack of transparency in the government.

These failures of development mean that people still do not have the clinics, schools, clean water and roads that they need to start rebuilding civil society after decades of war. Even in Kabul most areas are still desperately poor, with no functioning sewage system and just a few hours of electricity a night.

But because Afghani women are often treated no better than chattel, women and girls suffer much more than anyone else amid this horrendous situation.

Go. Read this story. And for more, check out RAWA's website.

(Photo by S'ra DeSantis)

Behind the Israeli contradictions....

...If my analysis is correct, Israel is willing to settle for peace and quiet rather than genuine peace, for management of the conflict rather than closure, for territorial gains that may perpetuate tensions and occasional conflicts in the region, but which do not jeopardize Israel’s essential security. Declaring “the right to be normal” thus becomes a PR move designed to blame the other side and cast Israel as the victim; it is not something that Israeli leaders sincerely expect. Indeed, their very policies are based on the assumption that functional normality—an acceptable level of “quiet,” a strong economy, a fairly normal existence for an insulated Israeli public most of the time—is a preferred quid pro quo to the concessions required for a genuine (and attainable) peace.

Interesting analysis that explains some of the contradictions. It's short. Make it required reading for all of Israel's American supporters. (H/T: Crooks & Liars.)

P.S. And for European supporters of Israel, too!

Only when the international community—led by Europe rather than the U.S., which appears to be hopeless in this regard—decides that the price is too high and adopts a more assertive policy toward the Occupation, will the ability of Israeli governments to manipulate it end. Since governments will not do the right thing without being prodded by the people, what the Israeli public needs for a peaceful resolution to the conflict is not the “support” of its supposed “friends” but the active intervention of international civil society.

Complete story here.

Hope for peace in Gaza...?

Palestinian militants have agreed to stop firing rockets into Israel in return for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a halt to targetted killings, it emerged last night.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, telephoned Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, and told him that all Palestinian factions had agreed to a ceasefire from 6am this morning.

Olmert replied that if there was no rocket fire from Gaza, Israeli forces could stop their operations and begin to withdraw from Gaza. The ceasefire could bring an end to a spate of violence which has seen the death of more than 100 Palestinians in Israeli operations and two Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian rockets within the past month. [emphasis mine]

I see this as a step forward. I remain pessimistic, however, about prospects of long-term peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

Even while this agreement was being finalised, Israeli troops killed one "militant" and wounded six Palestinians, including a 12-year-old boy shot in the head while standing outside his house.

Moreover, Israel continues to construct its hundreds-mile-long "security wall," essentially walling Palestinians into a huge prison, while the world looks on and does nothing. How would you like to live next to that (pictured above)?! Imagine the loss of an unobstructed view of sky and landscape, in addition to access to hospitals, jobs, relatives, olive groves and freedom of movement in your own community.

That the construction of this wall continues with no real objection on the part of world governments illustrates perfectly how little Palestinian lives matter in the political equation between Israel and Palestine. As long as this remains true, extremists on both sides will have access to a ready pool of volunteers in their desperate, asymmetrical war of suicide bombers vs. the Israeli state.

Complete story here.

Green Zone too unsafe for Bush....

...On Wednesday, assassins killed a bodyguard of Iraq's parliament speaker one day after a bomb exploded in the hot-tempered politician's motorcade as it drove into a parking lot inside the Green Zone.

The bomb attack on the motorcade of Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a hard-line Sunni Arab nationalist reviled by many Shiites, was a major security breach in the heavily guarded compound that houses the U.S. and British embassies and the Iraqi government. It was also the fourth assassination attempt against a high-ranking Iraqi government official in recent days. [emphasis mine]

So Bush is planning to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malik in Jordan instead of Baghdad next week. That is, unless al-Malik backs out due to threats from radical Shiites to boycott parliament if he goes.

I can't believe that the mainstream media is still quibbling over whether or not Iraq is engaged in a "civil war." Look at this (from the same story as above):

BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 101 Iraqis died in the country's unending sectarian slaughter Wednesday, and the U.N. reported that 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October, the highest monthly toll of the war and one that is sure to be eclipsed when November's dead are counted.

The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq also said citizens were fleeing the country at a pace of 100,000 each month, and that at least 1.6 million Iraqis have left since the war began in March 2003.

Life for Iraqis, especially in Baghdad and cities and towns in the center of the country, has become increasingly untenable. Many schools failed to open at all in September, and professionals — especially professors, physicians, politicians and journalists — are falling to sectarian killers at a stunning pace.

Lynchings have been reported as Sunnis and Shiites conduct a merciless campaign of revenge killings. Some Shiite residents in the north Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah claim that militiamen and death squads are holding Sunni captives in warehouses, then slaughtering them at the funerals of Shiites killed in the tit-for-tat murders.

Wednesday's death count included 76 bodies found dumped in four cities, 59 of them in Baghdad alone, according to police, who said at least 25 people had been gunned down.

The U.N. figure for the number of killings in October was more than three times the 1,216 tabulated by The Associated Press and nearly 850 more than the 2,867 U.S. service members who have died during the war. [emphasis mine]

Words fail me. I simply cannot express how horrified and sickened I am at what the country of my birth has wrought in Iraq.

In October when I visited my dad in California, I was reminded how luxurious life in the US is. How easy it can be there. How incredibly abundant and cheap material goods are! Walk into the Vons near my dad's house and you're greeted with an array of fresh fruits and vegetables, meats, canned goods, drugs, alcohol, sweets, magazines, deli items, household products, electrical gadgets, etc, etc! Unimaginable almost anywhere else in the world. And that's a small Vons, by local standards!

Most Americans don't think twice about all that abundance. They rumble from place to place in their obscenely huge trucks and SUVs, oblivious or not giving a damn that the flip side of their carelessly lavish lifestyle is Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico and other poverty-stricken, subjugated areas of the world that supply the cheap oil and cheaper labor to sustain them in the lap of ignorant luxury.

As much as I miss the ease and comfort of So Cal, the trade-off--supporting the horror in Iraq with my taxes in order to experience the luxuries of empire--isn't worth it to me. I'm grateful I have the option of Ireland. Where, to be fair, life is quite comfy by the standards of most of the world.

But it's a far cry from life in Cali.

News story here.

Chronicle/Chris Stewart

Mark your calendars...!

Living on their houseboat off the Marin County coast, anti-war activists Donna Sheehan and her partner, Paul Reffel, concocted a way for the world to communally create a lot of peaceful vibes.

They want everyone to have an orgasm on the same day.

On Dec. 22, they're asking the world to contribute in their own way to the Global Orgasm for Peace. Sheehan said not to worry if you don't have a partner.

Moreover, "You don't need a good reason to have an orgasm," [a quoted source] said. "Even a stupid one is OK."

I'll drink to that!

Not to mention, Donna, 76, and Paul (no stated age) are looking damned good for their ages. If you need yet another reason to take up peace activism and orgasms!

Story here. (H/T A Tiny Revolution.)

A bit of role-playing....

This is so perfect! (Can't remember where I first saw it....)

Go Harvey...!

How did I miss this in 2003?! The clapboard editing gimmick is annoying, but wow, what a clip!!!

Of course, here we are three years later and same-sex marriage remains the Republican's preferred dead horse.

(H/T to Salon Video Dog.)

Danny Hoch provides insight into Michael Richards' recent racist explosion on stage. (H/T to one of my favourite bloggers, Red State Son.)

Wingnuts....

This video footage of British scientist Richard Dawkins confronting the (now) infamous Ted Haggard chillingly illustrates evangelicals' snide smugness, muddy logic, frightening ignorance, and utter lack of intellectual curiosity.

What an arrogant prick Haggard is!

H/T to Crooks and Liars.

Kick their worthless asses out this Tuesday...!

There's been a lot of understandable pessimism, bitterness and fury directed at Democrats over the upcoming mid-term elections by bloggers I greatly respect. (Prime examples here and here.)

While I strongly agree with their opinions and have almost lost faith that the US will pull itself back from the edge of unequivocal despotism rather than leap into the abyss, I guess I haven't lost all hope yet, for this video stirred me.

Moreover, I did vote (absentee) before leaving California to return here to Dublin.

(Big H/T to Shakespeare's Sister for the video!)

Unique idea to save a whale...!

The World Society for the Protection of Animals is trying to save the life of an endangered fin whale by raising enough money to pay the Icelandic government, intent on killing the whale, the price it would receive for the meat.

Please help! Go bid 10 British pounds on eBay here. And spread the word to all your friends.

For more details, go here.

Yep they're smart...!

Elephants are self-aware enough to recognize themselves in a mirror.

And then we have cats:

Shell to sea...!

What first caught my attention about this campaign was the Rossport 5's arrest. Anytime average people are willing to go to prison for their beliefs, I pay attention.

The more I learned about Shell in Mayo, the more shocked I became. Many political campaigns have good and bad on both sides, but not this one. The Irish people are getting nothing out of this deal, while Shell is being handed a windfall.

Please spread the word about this to everyone you know.

I'm back....

Sorry I didn't post a "Gone Surfing" sign. I was visiting my dad and friends and catching waves in Southern California. I couldn't have asked for better weather! And the surf started off small, glassy and easy, then built during the two weeks I was surfing until the last three days, I paddled out in waves generated by Hurricane Paul off Baja. By then I was able to handle the overhead, awe-inspiring walls of translucent blue-green water. It was exhilarating!

No doubt about it, Southern California is a paradise--for the prosperous. I was blown away by the abundance and cheap prices of restaurants, produce from all over the world, petrol, electronics, clothing!

The flip side is that the lucky wealthy residents seem invested in keeping the real costs of that cheap affluence well hidden. No signs of war were visible, unless you count the ubiquitous stars and stripes on bumpers, front lawns, car lots and everywhere, and this despite the fact that my dad lives only 30 minutes from Camp Pendleton, home base of many of the Marines in Iraq.

The city council of Escondido, where he lives, just passed an ordinance permitting law enforcement to investigate tips that residents may be “illegal aliens.” The cops can demand immigration documents, forward same onto the Immigration authorities, and fine (perhaps jail) the landlords who rent to the “illegals.”

I was sickened to hear of this! Though not surprised. Escondido is one of the few places in San Diego County with rents low enough for poor Mexican immigrants to find housing. The ones with greencards will now face legalised harassment, while those without will be forced to live in fear or flee. To me, this mean-spirited law epitomises the So Cal attitude: the rich will hire undocumented immigrants as nannies, maids, gardeners, and handymen, but don’t expect them to allow them to live nearby! Tortilla Curtain (by T.C. Boyle) anyone?

I’m happy to be back in Dublin. Life, while good, is not nearly so easy here, but neither are people so determinedly ignorant.

Special thanks to feminists...!

I was tagged by my favourite blogger, Shakespeare’s Sister, to share Five Things Feminism Has Done for Me, with the hope being (according to Shakes) that feminist bloggers in America run with it as they have in Canada in response to the Canadian federal government's funding cuts to Status of Women Canada.

I’m delighted and honoured to be a part of this effort from the other side of the Atlantic! Sorry I’ve lagged in responding: it’s NOT due to lack of interest, but because one of my favourite friends from CA has been visiting while I’m preparing to return to CA for the first time in nearly three years on vacation, and consequently I haven’t had time for blogging lately. (Shhhh, don’t tell anyone: I’m trying to sneak this in now at work…)

1) First and foremost, feminism offered me the framework upon which to define myself, a necessary first step to clawing my way out of the darkness and confusion that resulted from growing up transgendered in a backward, red-necked American community in the 1950’s. The book that opened my eyes was The Women’s Room, by Marilyn French, still relevant and inspiring to young feminists after all these years. I read it in my late 20’s and the protagonist’s experiences, while different in specific detail, mirrored my own in emotional truth. The light bulb went off and suddenly I understood, at least partially, why I was depressed, frustrated, angry and, as I was isolated from feminists at the time, very lonely.

2) The oppression I experienced as a working-class girl and woman then provided the lens through which I viewed and analysed all subsequent oppressions, including against queers and trannies. I’ll never forget how harmful the ubiquitous set of restrictions, controls, expectations and general invisibility were as I was growing up. Even now, though I am perceived as a man, my fundamental identification and political passion (not to mention, romantic passion) remains primarily with women.

3) Some of the most transcendent emotional experiences, the greatest highs, I’ve ever had were in feminist gatherings or demonstrations before I put it together that I wasn’t a dyke, but rather an ftm. The first was at a Northern California Women’s Music Festival, it must have been around 1983. I know Women’s music festivals have a history of exclusion of trannies and others and problems with lack of sensitivity around race, class, disability and other issues. But I was blissfully ignorant at the one and only festival I attended, and what I felt was pure ecstasy to be OUT in a spectacular rural setting, listening to the icons of woman’s music in the company of hundreds of proud, feminist women. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite that euphoric again.

Add to that my first “Take Back the Night March,” around 1983 or 84 in San Francisco. My first Pride Parade. My first few times at a dyke bar. As proud as I am to be FTM and all the highs I’ve experienced with my FTM brothers, and there have been many, because we are such a tiny minority there is simply no equivalent to the experience of being a feminist woman in the company of the feminist masses.

4) My mom was born in the United States in 1918, before women had the right to vote. As a child, the only women professionals I ever saw were nurses and school teachers. I never saw women bus drivers, police officers, scientists, medical doctors, corporate executives, mayors, senators, or congresswomen. Likewise, electricians, plumbers, carpenters and members of other trades. Women are still far too underrepresented in almost all high-paying, high-profile professional fields and in politics, but compared to the era when I was a child, progress has been immense. All due to the sacrifice, struggle, commitment and courage of feminists.

5) The first time I got pregnant, by accident in 1975, abortion had just been legalised in my country of residence at the time, France. Contraception had been legal for only eight years. A woman’s ability to control reproduction is critical to her ability to determine and control her future. Likewise, the liberalization of marriage and divorce laws. These rights are far from perfect and far from universally available, and are under siege in places where they do exist. Without freedom to choose whom to marry and the ability to control when and with whom one has children, women become baby-making serfs. Progress to date on this issues has been thanks to feminists. And I, for one, remain eternally grateful.

You can't make this shit up...!

Mark Foley's slimy pursuit of Congressional pages perfectly illustrates the moral depravity at the heart of the Republican Party.

Republicans preach and strut, condemning queer families like mine, banning same-sex marriage because they say we’re "perverts," preventing us from adopting or fostering children, while they sneak into hotel rooms with both male and female prostitutes, divorce their wives when they’re undergoing chemotherapy, and sexually pursue high school students while heading Congressional committees charged with protecting children from pedophiles.

Throughout all, the one principle the holier-than-thou gang follows faithfully is protecting one another.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — Top House Republicans knew for months about e-mail traffic between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, but kept the matter secret and allowed Mr. Foley to remain head of a Congressional caucus on children’s issues, Republican lawmakers said Saturday.

What revolting hypocrites!

Not to mention, arrogant imbeciles. How in the name of William Henry Gates the Third could Foley have imagined he could send explicit emails to pages and never be caught?!

A quick net-search shows Foley has been fighting gay rumors for years. Watch Republicans denounce him now and turn this into a "Gays are molesters" issue. Bastards.

NYT story here.

Welcome to the future...

Even the middle-of-the-road Gray Lady recognised the danger of the Bush administration's Military Commissions Act of 2006.

From yesterday's editorial:

...Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

The editorial compares the bill to the Alien and Sedition Acts. Personally, I think this legislation is worse.

And while I'm glad I live outside the US, that doesn't make me safe.

This law gives the president power to name anyone an "illegal enemy combatant," subjecting both legal residents of the United States and foreign citizens living abroad to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal.

Irrestible....

This little guy is my current favourite at The Daily Kitten. (Though there are so many to chose from!)

(David Scull for The New York Times)

Death knell of a republic....

When I visit the US next week for the first time in more than two years, I'll be entering a country which no longer recognises a Constitutional guarantee of the writ of habeas corpus.

I’ll be entering a country which has legally codified the right to torture.

I’ll be entering a country which four years ago, granted Bush the power, formerly vested only in Congress, to declare war.

In other words, I’ll be entering a dictatorship: “an autocratic form of absolute rule by leadership unrestricted by law, constitutions, or other social and political factors within the state.” (Wikipedia.)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The Senate approved a measure on Thursday on the interrogations and trials of terrorism suspects, establishing far-reaching rules to deal with what President Bush has called the most dangerous combatants in a different type of war.

The bill would set up rules for the military commissions that will allow the government to proceed with the prosecutions of high-level detainees including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

It would make illegal several broadly defined abuses of detainees, while leaving it to the president to establish specific permissible interrogation techniques. And it would strip detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court. [emphasis mine]

The bill is the same as one that the House passed, eliminating the need for a conference between the two chambers. The House is expected to approve the Senate bill Friday, sending it to the president to be signed.

To say this makes me more than a bit nervous, is a huge understatement.

Chris Floyd has a few, more succinct words on the subject here.

And the NYT story is here.

Small victory...?

From today's Salon:

...At a time when substantive victories in Washington are rare, the failure of Congress to enact legislation authorizing warrantless eavesdropping -- thereby ensuring the continuation of the National Security Agency scandal, enabling various lawsuits challenging the legality of the president's actions to proceed, and virtually assuring full-scale investigations if Democrats take over one or both houses -- is significant.

According to Glenn Greewald in a later post in War Room the delay and probable victory for rule of law has nothing to do with Democrats' opposition (big surprise!) but rather Republican disarray.

If Friday sees no passage of a bill, however, the chance that the FISA issue will stay alive for the mid-term elections and--if Democrats regain control of Congress--lead to criminal indictments for members of the Bush administration is to be fervently hoped for.

(Salon requires subscription or ad viewing.)

Not with a bang, but a whimper....

Ok, if Congress passes the McCain-Warner (misnamed) compromise bill, I think we can agree that America as we knew it will be officially kaput.

The new America will be a nation without habeas corpus. A country which imprisons indefinitely without charges, trial or the chance to repudiate "evidence" against oneself. A homeland whose government sanctions and openly employs torture.

Or, as Glenn Greewald over at Salon puts it:

...Put another way, this bill would give the Bush administration the power to imprison people for their entire lives, literally, without so much as charging them with any wrongdoing or giving them any forum in which to contest the accusations against them. It thus vests in the administration the singularly most tyrannical power that exists -- namely, the power unilaterally to decree someone guilty of a crime and to condemn the accused to eternal imprisonment without having even to charge him with a crime, let alone defend the validity of those accusations. Just to look at one ramification, does one even need to debate whether this newly vested power of indefinite imprisonment would affect the willingness of foreign journalists to report on the activities of the Bush administration? Do Americans really want our government to have this power?

The changes that the administration reportedly secured over the weekend for this "compromise" legislation make an already dangerous bill much worse. Specifically, the changes expand the definition of who can be declared an "enemy combatant" (and therefore permanently detained and tortured) from someone who has "engaged in hostilities against the United States" (meaning actually participated in war on a battlefield) to someone who has merely "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States."

Expanding the definition in that way would authorize, as Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies points out, the administration's "seizure and indefinite detention of people far from the battlefield." The administration would be able to abduct anyone, anywhere in the world, whom George W. Bush secretly decrees has "supported" hostilities against the United States. And then they could imprison any such persons at Guantánamo -- even torture them -- forever, without ever having to prove anything to any tribunal or commission. (The Post story also asserts that the newly worded legislation "does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant," although the Supreme Court ruled [in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld] that there are constitutional limits on the government's ability to detain U.S. citizens without due process.)

[Salon requires subscription of ad-viewing.]

(Catherine Opie for The New York Times)

The kids are alright....

When Brian Sullivan — the baby who would before age 2 become Bonnie Sullivan and 36 years later become Cheryl Chase — was born in New Jersey on Aug. 14, 1956, doctors kept his mother, a Catholic housewife, sedated for three days until they could decide what to tell her. Sullivan was born with ambiguous genitals, or as Chase now describes them, with genitals that looked “like a little parkerhouse roll with a cleft in the middle and a little nubbin forward.” Sullivan lived as a boy for 18 months, until doctors at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan performed exploratory surgery, found a uterus and ovotestes (gonads containing both ovarian and testicular tissue) and told the Sullivans they’d made a mistake: Brian, a true hermaphrodite in the medical terminology of the day, was actually a girl. Brian was renamed Bonnie, her “nubbin” (which was either a small penis or a large clitoris) was entirely removed and doctors counseled the family to throw away all pictures of Brian, move to a new town and get on with their lives. The Sullivans did that as best they could. They eventually relocated, had three more children and didn’t speak of the circumstances around their eldest child’s birth for many years. As Chase told me recently, “The doctors promised my parents if they did that” — shielded her from her medical history — “that I’d grow up normal, happy, heterosexual and give them grandchildren.”

Needless to say, doctors' predictions proved far from the mark. I met Bonnie/Cheryl at a party in San Francisco just around the time she was starting ISNA (and I was eager to begin transition). She is an absolutely brilliant person and has accomplished so much in the short period of time since then. I remain ever in awe of her.

Bravo to her and the other brave people who have come out publicly in their fight to end the barbarous practice of non-essential surgery on babies!

Chase’s position — that cosmetic genital operations on intersex children should be stopped and that children should be made to feel loved and accepted in their unusual bodies — is still considered radical. Most people believe, reflexively, that irregular-looking genitals would be extremely difficult to live with — for a child on a sports team, for an adult seeking love and sex — so why not try to make them look more normal? Katrina Karkazis, a medical anthropologist at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford, interviewed 19 clinicians and researchers of various specialties who treat intersex individuals, 15 intersex adults and 15 parents of intersex children, and she found that a majority of the doctors and parents felt surgery was a good idea. “We chose surgery for my daughter mainly because we did not want her to grow up questioning her sexual identity,” one mother explained about her baby, who was born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a genetic defect of the adrenal glands that causes girls’ genitals to appear masculinized at birth. “We felt that she should look like a female, so we chose the clitoroplasty and the vaginoplasty. We felt that she would have a better self-image if she did not have a ‘phallic structure’ and ‘scrotum.’ ”

Within the medical community, Chase has been successful in tempering the explicitness with which people publicly make this argument. As Chase has explained innumerable times, intersex babies are not having difficulty with sexual identity or self-image. The parents are, and parental anxiety about the appearance of a child’s genitals should be treated with counseling, not with surgery to the child. [emphasis mine]

The article goes on to detail the discomfort some parents feel when their little "girl" starts to play with her enlarged clitoris around age two.

In other words, parents would rather subject a toddler to the physical pain and emotional trauma of surgery and risk destroying nerve sensation and their child's sexual functioning later in life, than deal with the reality that their child is a sexual being who may not fit into the neat little box the parent has constructed.

As for the prospect of children or adults living normal lives with “unusual” bodies, one of the most widely read articles I ever wrote was at Cheryl’s invitation for a special issue of Chrysalis focused on intersexuality.

In it, I explained a technique to shower in an open (male) gym setting when one lacks a penis. At the time I wrote it, I thought it would be read by all of 12 people. Instead, it is (to date) the sole piece I’ve written to be cited in a couple of professional books, journal articles and to have influenced (very slightly) a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Much to my chagrin (due to a playfully chosen title) it’s often the first link to come up when I’m googled

Chase's long-term goal is the eradication of infant genital surgery conducted for the sole purpose of altering appearance, a goal that the NYT article describes as "outlandish to many medical professionals and to most of the general public as well."

All I can ask is, "Why?!"

Go get 'em, Bill...!

Damn! This is one of the most satisfying news clips I've watched in years! Bill Clinton nails Fox News! Fantastic!

(H/T to Crooks & Liars, where you can view the complete clip. This is the longest clip I could find on You Tube.)

Must see...!

As usual, the trailer doesn't do this movie justice. I saw it today, and it's one of the most powerful movies I've ever seen. Absolutely incredible. GO SEE IT!

New music...!

My ex, Michael, turned me on to Iron and Wine today.



We were IM-ing, he in San Francisco, me in Dublin. How would I manage without the internet? Living as I do as many as 8 time zones away from so many of the people I love.

I've experienced many deaths in my life, from an early age. Lost my beloved nana when I was 14. My mom at 17. One of my first loves, in fact the man who set my feet on the path to eventually healing from my mom's death, at 22. Another first love, many years later at 44, when he crashed his airplane into the Pacific. Many friends passed away to AIDS when I was in my 30's. And others died from various causes throughout the years.

Breaking up can feel like death. Especially when the breakup is bitter, leaving no possibility of a gentle re-connecting after the initial searing pain dissipates. In those cases, the separation feels nonnegotiable, like death.

Blessedly, I'm still close to my sweetest, most extraordinary exes, Michael and Nicole. I was with each of them as a guy, Michael shortly after transition when manhood felt like a gift to be opened each morning as if it were Christmas; Nicole years later, after I'd settled more into my masculinity.

They are both much younger than me, although ftms tend to experience puberty and young adulthood at whatever age we find ourselves when we first start testosterone. Many of us look a good 15 or more years younger than we are, too. I got carded when I was 43: the waitress refused to sell me a beer because I didn’t have my id. Thus, my age difference with Michael and Nicole wasn’t an obstacle in the usual sense of shared interests, excitement for life, first times, and mismatched egos.

Where it did pose problems had to do with larger developmental issues. There simply are certain adventures and misdeeds a person needs to be footloose and fancy free enough to take on, else resentment and frustration sets in. No amount of love and longing can bridge that gap, believe me.

In each case, the breakup was extremely amicable, though far from painless. With Nicole, it required three attempts and me to remove myself to the other side of the Atlantic to finally make it happen. And yet, we still manage to think so much on the same wave length that out of the blue we’ll email each other simultaneously after a silence of weeks. And Michael still makes me smile like no other person in the world.

I will love them both as long as I live.

The truth about the military....

I wish this video had been available when my nephew was planning to enlist in the late 1980's into the Marines. I wrote him a long letter, trying desperately to dissuade him. But his parents, both Right-Wing Christians, supported his decision and signed the permission papers, as he was only 17.

He wasn't sent to war, but emerged from the military a wrecked man nonetheless. He was discharged early (I'm not sure why) and has been a total mess ever since. Can't hold down a steady job. Drifts from place to place. No friends. Never in a relationship. Holds scary extreme right views. He's fascinated with guns, knives and survivalist views.

Clearly, I can't blame the military for all his troubles. But (a) if he was that emotionally vulnerable, he should never have been allowed to enlist, especially as a teenager; (b) something happened, in basic training or during the couple of years he served, that sent him completely over the edge; and (c) the military could give a damn that they discharged a broken man back into society who can't cope, holds extremely anti-social views, and has advanced military training.

His latest attempt to pull his life together? More military training, this time under the auspices of a private contractor, and two tours in Afghanistan.

In other words, he's become a mercenary.



(H/T Red State Son.)

Oh my god....

I've been trying not to think about this, as the mid-term elections approach and my trip to the US nears. God save us, if Bush escalates this to a full-scale invasion of Iran. (H/T to AlterNet.)

Yep, that's him...!

...Rich draws a quick but brilliant sketch of Bush as a lazy, entitled boor, lacking in any real ideology beyond crony-capitalist Republicanism, who above all wanted to win and was accustomed to winning -- because he had always played with a rigged deck.

[snip]

"...Iraq was just the vehicle to ride to victory in the midterms, particularly if it could be folded into the proven brand of 9/11. A cakewalk in Iraq was the easy way, the lazy way, the arrogant way, the telegenic way, the Top Gun way to hold on to power. It was of a piece with every other shortcut in Bush's career, and it was a hand-me-down from Dad drenched in oil to boot."

Brilliantly apt description from a review of The Greatest Story Ever Sold, by Frank Rich in today's Salon. (Requires subscription or ad viewing.)

Another clever ad....

Ok, this is for alcohol. But loving the ocean the way I do, I find it really appealing.

Lovely vibrator ad....

I've been finding world events a bit much lately. It's all I can do to follow the news. Darfur. Gaza. Iraq. Afghanistan. An Inconvenient Truth. Bush at the UN. Bird flu.

Time to turn to You Tube again!

And what better place to start than this charming, faux-retro, pro-lesbian vibrator ad?

Go, Keith...!

Keith Olbermann at MSNBC has been on fire lately on the subject of George W. Bush! Too bad his mettle is so rare among American journalists.

What really happened...?

I just came across this interesting critique of the official 9/11 story (H/T to The Gaelic Starover).

It caught my eye in part because I had just commented on the very topic over at Salon today, in response to a review of What Terrorists Want, by Louise Richardson (requires subscription or ad-viewing).

In my comment, I queried whether we really know beyond a shadow of a doubt that bin Laden and al-Qaida were responsible for the attacks on 9/11.

Given the Bush administration's track record for lying, and the obvious benefits for bin Laden of claiming responsibility, I really wonder. I'm not a Bush-blaming conspiracy nut, far from it! But until bin Laden is given due process and a trial--something unlikely to happen--I believe the idea that a defined entity, "al-Qaida," under the leadership of bin Laden, planned and executed the attacks of 9/11 should be treated as open to question.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed explores the question in more depth.

Five years after the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania that shook the world, scepticism [sic] about the Bush administration account of what happened, as well as of the “War on Terror” in general, has increased exponentially. This has accompanied the emergence of all kinds of pet theories about what happened, some of them truly bizarre, others intriguing but vacuous, and perhaps a few based on compelling facts.

For someone not familiar with these theories, it’s difficult to know where, and why, to start. And particular variants of 9/11 “truth”, such as the “no planes” theory that the whole event was merely an audiovisual technicolor chimera concocted on our TV screens, don’t help.

But is it all just a pile of lunacy? If only it was, I could sleep much better at night. Unfortunately, beneath the mountain of theories and speculations, there remain disturbing and persistent anomalies that have yet to be resolved. In this respect, the mainstream media’s approach to criticism of the 9/11 official narrative has been wanting in the extreme, focusing largely on bizarre pet theories and fringe speculations, suggesting that anybody who has doubts about the official story must be delusional, dumb, or both.

His exploration is worth reading, if for no other reason than it raises issues I've not come across elsewhere. Such as the charge that al-Qaida's operational links to the CIA and DEA were (indeed, still are) very much alive and well in September 2001.

Read it here.

R.I.P.

From the Houston Chronicle:

Tyron Garner, one of two men [on the left, in the photo above, John Lawrence is on the right] whose 1998 arrests led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down bans on sodomy, has died, according to a spokesman for the legal firm that represented him.

Garner died early Monday at a Houston hospital, said Mark Roy, a spokesman for Lambda Legal in New York City. Garner had been suffering from meningitis and had been in his brother's care for the past six months.

Garner and Lawrence were arrested when police entered Lawrence’s apartment on September 17, 1998, responding to a false “weapons disturbance” call, and found the two men engaged in sex.

I wonder what role race played in the arrest. Would the Houston police have arrested two white men caught having consensual sex in the privacy of their home?

According to Wikipedia, Lawrence must have been around 44.

How very sad he's gone.

Complete story here.

Stop homophobia...!

This from the Guardian's Comment is Free:

Fifty-eight alleged lesbians and gays have been outed by the Ugandan newspaper, Red Pepper - the latest outrage in an on-going homophobic witch-hunt orchestrated by the government, police, media and churches of Uganda.

Uganda is the new Zimbabwe. President Yoweri Museveni is the Robert Mugabe of Uganda - a homophobic tyrant who tramples on the human rights of gays and straights alike.

Taking a lead from Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Museveni has found it politically convenient to demonise and scapegoat gay people as "the enemy within", thereby helpfully diverting attention from human rights abuses, poverty, unemployment, corruption, unfair elections and mass deaths from HIV.

In the latest tabloid outing, last Friday, 8 September, 13 supposed lesbians were exposed by Red Pepper. They include two boutique owners, a basketball player and the daughters of a former MP and a prominent Sheikh. Under the headline, "Kampala's notorious lesbians unearthed", the sleazy tabloid published a photo of two very glamorous, unnamed, scantily-dressed women embracing at a party. The article urged readers phone a hotline to "name and shame" any lesbians they know:

"To rid our motherland of the deadly vice (lesbianism), we are committed to exposing all the lesbos in the city. Send more names us (sic) the name and occupation of the lesbin (sic) in your neighbourhood and we shall shame her. Call: 0712XXXXXX," wrote Red Pepper.

Citizens who are happy, healthy, sexually fulfilled and free to pursue love and affection from partners of their choice do not fall prey to the manipulations of corrupt despots, like Yoweri Museveni, Robert Mugabe or, for that matter, GW Bush.

Which is why authoritarians and tyrants of all stripes seek to control and restrict the sexuality of the people they desire to dominate.

Campaigns like the one above also divert attention from society's genuine ills and the myriad ways crooked leaders fail their people.

My heart goes out to Uganda's LGBT folk. Please check out the entire column and write (a polite email) to the Red Pepper’s senior editor, Arinaitwe Rugyendo at: rugyendo@mail.redpepper.co.ug

Oh, this explains it...!

(H/T to Salon's Video Dog.)

President Smirky McTorturer....

There are five-year-olds who have greater reasoning and mental capacity than this president of the United States.

The mainstream media's not giving him quite as free a ride as they used to...

War criminal....

I (obviously) didn’t see Bush’s “9/11 address to the nation” last night, as I'm(thankfully!) out of the nation.

I heard snippets on the radio this morning, which were enough to put me off my feed. I could barely bring myself to read it in its entirety today.

I do not understand how anyone can be taken in by Bush! His nauseatingly overblown rhetoric is more appropriate to satirical works, like Orwell’s 1984, than to the speech of an honest-to-god sitting president.

Some quotes and my responses:

“Nineteen men attacked us with a barbarity unequaled in our history.”

No disrespect to those killed on 9/11/01, but America’s history is replete with barbaric acts, many perpetrated by its very own citizens. Against African slaves. Or Native Americans, who initially greeted European newcomers with generosity. Or Vietnamese peasants. The list is tragically long.

“Today, we are safer…”

Every objective measure challenges the veracity of that statement.

“Since the horror of 9/11, we've learned a great deal about the enemy. We have learned that they are evil and kill without mercy…”

First, as Bush has reiterated ad nauseam, we have not suffered another attack on American soil since 2001, thanks to his glorious efforts to protect the Homeland. (Otherwise known as good luck.) So, wouldn't it be more correct to say “On 9/11, we learned”?

More importantly, since we had killed, as of October, 2004, more than an estimated 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, wouldn't Bush’s words better describe us?

And finally, simplistically characterizing an enemy as evil killers is a timeworn propaganda tactic. I’m shocked anyone would be taken in by it.

“America did not ask for this war.”

Excuse me? America invaded an innocent country, Iraq, without provocation. (Twice, I might add.) And as for the attacks of 9/11, I abhor and condemn all terrorism, including those acts. But America's long history of meddling in the Middle East, arms sales, coups (such as the one that set up Saddam Hussein or the Shah in Iran), and partisan support of Israel against Palestine, made the US far from an innocent bystander.

“Every American wishes it were over. So do I.”

I seriously doubt that. The “War on Terror” is the primary means by which the Bush administration rammed through its radical authoritarian, proto-fascist agenda.

Not to mention, Bush, Cheney and their allies are making megabucks on the war and its historically high oil prices.

“Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone.”

Straw man argument. No one has seriously made such a ridiculous claim. Other than Bush and his supporters, in order to make their own points in the process of tearing it down.

“They are thrown into panic at the sight of an old man pulling the election lever, girls enrolling in schools, or families worshiping God in their own traditions. They know that given a choice, people will choose freedom over their extremist ideology.”

Give me a bucket, I'm going to hurl! If an Irish leader spouted such treacle, he or she would be jeered off the stage. Are Americans really so stupid?

“And then, on a bright September morning, it became clear that the calm we saw in the Middle East was only a mirage.”

Which calm was that exactly? The calm in Israel and Palestine? Or between Iraq and Iran? Or maybe the calm in Afghanistan under the Taliban? Oh, I know! The calm in Lebanon before Israel bombed the small country into rubble with US manufactured bombs, helicopters, and F16's last month!

“At the start of this young century, America looks to the day when the people of the Middle East leave the desert of despotism for the fertile gardens of liberty, and resume their rightful place in a world of peace and prosperity.”

That Bush can utter such words, given the monumental amount of deaths and destruction he is personally responsible for in the Middle East, is truly astonishing. [Re-reading this a few hours later, I realise that while it's ungrammatical, it effectively communicates my sputtering outrage!]

"The attacks were meant to bring us to our knees, and they did, but not in the way the terrorists intended. Americans united in prayer, came to the aid of neighbors in need, and resolved that our enemies would not have the last word. The spirit of our people is the source of America's strength. And we go forward with trust in that spirit, confidence in our purpose, and faith in a loving God who made us to be free.

Thank you, and may God bless you."

Unfuckingbelievable. The nation's founders are rolling over in their graves.

You gotta be kidding...!

SYDNEY, Australia Sep 12, 2006 (AP)— At least 10 stingrays have been killed since "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin was fatally injured by one of the fish, an official said Tuesday, prompting a spokesman for the late TV star's animal charity to urge people not take revenge on the animals.

[snip]

Stingrays are usually shy, unobtrusive fish that rummage the sea bottom for food or burrow into the sand.

They have a serrated spine up to 10 inches long on their tails, which they can lash when stepped on or otherwise frightened.[emphasis mine]

Are people completely insane?! To retaliate against a naturally timid, unobtrusive creature in supposed revenge for the life of an avowed conservationist?!

Crikey, indeed!!

Complete story here.

Incestuous amplification....

Pass this video on, too! Buy the book. (H/T again to Crooks & Liars.) And pray you live long enough to see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and the rest of their cronies in prison for war crimes.

Right on...!

This clip is being edited for use in various netroots campaigns across the US. Catchy tune and excellent idea!!! Pass it on. (H/T to Crooks & Liars.)

Alison Bechdel

My favorite cartoonist has been branching out, publishing a graphic memoir, Fun Home, to great acclaim this year and now, sharing an exhibit at the Pine Street Art Works in Burlington, VT, with artist friend, Phranc. Bechdel is exhibiting these amazing drawings on four-foot wide Kraft paper.

She made a movie of them:



Incredible stuff! Here's the post about the drawings on Bechdel's blog.

[Edited to fix html on 13/9/06.]

Brian's last public performance....

According to Wikipedia, this is footage from The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, Brian Jones' last public performance, filmed in December, 1968.

The film wasn't released for 25 years because Mick Jagger was unhappy with the band's performance.

It's certainly not their best. But I love the song and it's Brian's final public gig.

He was found motionless in the bottom of his Sussex, England, swimming pool around midnight July 3rd, 1969. (My mother killed herself in March of that year, half a world away in California.) Controversy surrounds the circumstances of Brian's death, but what isn't disputed is that he'd been on a downward spiral of drugs, alcohol and depression for some time.

And yep, that is John Lennon in the clip! I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I watched it. But according to Wikipedia, he and Yoko Ono performed in Rock and Roll Circus, along with many other outstanding performers.