September 2, 2010 by mike.
Initial reports say the crew got off and all are accounted for. Hopefully, this will not turn out to be another runaway well.
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September 2, 2010 by mike.
If there was ever any reason for us to invade Afghanistan, it got away along Osama Bin Laden when Bush let the Al Qaeda folks slip away into Pakistan from Tora Bora.
Now we are in a really disastrous situation in Afpakistan, an area that is home to both nuclear weapons and a lot of folks with a grudge against the US.
I never expected anything good from the Bush-Cheney folks, but I thought the Obama administration might make better choices, but I have been disappointed as Obama earns his warrior scout badge by escalating the death and destruction in Afghanistan.
Too bad about this Kabul Bank, though. Are we going to need to prop up another bank? Can we persuade Kabul Bank to merge with Goldman Sachs?
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September 1, 2010 by mike.
Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada spoke to a capacity crowd at the Olympia Center about why the Olympia Food Co-op decision to join the Palestinian Boycott Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement was a big deal. And up the road a piece in Seattle, a guy walked into a convenience store and assaulted the store employee who was wearing a turban.
I caught that story on Slate, who say they got it from Talking Points Memo, but the Slate link jumps to Gawker.
I think that assault story is part of the larger wave of Islamophobia that is being stoked by the right-wing as an election tactic and it’s a big story. But the possibility of pressing Israel to deal fairly with the Palestinians through the BDS movement, the tactic that has been used in the past against South African apartheid, against grapes to support the UFW and Cesar Chavez and more is also a big story.
Ali Abunimah was persuasive, rational, collected and engaging. He’s an articulate spokesman for Palestine.
Speaking of elections, Feingold seems to be in a tight race in Wisconsin, Murkowski got bumped by a tea partier who found some room to Murkowski’s right, and the prospects for the dems holding on to any congressional majorities continue to dim.
We progressives may feel it makes no difference when the dems are as hapless as they have been since the 2006 election when they were given a chance by the electorate, but then there is always the opportunity to look back and wonder if a President Gore would have used the 9-11 events to attack Iraq. Even though Obama again declared the mission complete in Iraq yesterday, we will continue to reap the dubious benefits of that military adventure for many years and we are facing deficit hawks who want to cut Medicare and Social Security, but have no reservations about deficits if we are putting boots on the ground, drones in the air, or bailing out the bankers.
Oh, weather report - there’s a hurricane approaching the east coast. Not just the political storm of tea parties in sequins, Hurricane Earl is currently pointed at North Carolina. Category 4, that’s a big storm. Earl also.
Cheers!
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August 29, 2010 by mike.
I think that covers our options.
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August 29, 2010 by mike.
Planet Earth’s attic is on fire.
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August 29, 2010 by mike.
From Peaceful Rivers:
Keeping Quiet
Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still.
This one time upon the earth, let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second, and not move our arms so much.
It would be a delicious moment, without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together in a sudden uneasiness.
The fishermen in the cold sea would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt would look at his torn hands.
Those who prepare green wars, wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors, would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers in the shade, without doing a thing.
There is more, of course, but you get the sense of it.
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August 29, 2010 by mike.
Talking Points Memo has the Robert Reich oped piece on intolerance. Intolerance, violence, bigotry seem to be in the air.
In times of fear, Americans will compromise their most basic civil rights for the false promise of security. Need an example? Look back at Japanese internment after the Pearl Harbor attack.
Reich’s piece is dead-on imho, but it is an uphill battle reaching the cerebral cortex of america when the reptile brain is responding so strongly to the fear-mongering.
What did FDR say? All we have to fear is what? Japanese among us? Mosques at Ground Zero? Communists in the State Department?
No, it was all we have to fear is fear itself. Come on, step up, be brave.
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August 28, 2010 by mike.
Yes, please. Check your hatred. Check your lunacy. Check your bigotry before you go any further.
In NY the conflict, rhetoric and hate crimes are building up in response to the fear-mongering, the wedge-politics of the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque - Cordoba House, a community center blocks away from the Twin Towers.
In Olympia, the home of slain activist Rachel Corrie, the boycott divestment and sanction movement is roiling the community and spilling over around the Northwest Coast. BDS Olympia has made the news for its work to persuade the Olympia Food Co-op to join the BDS movement.
Many folks who feel a special kinship with the State of Israel are in an uproar and the community is engaged in an animated and heated debate about Israel, Palestine, boycotts, two state/one state solutions and more.
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August 28, 2010 by mike.
I guess we should sing Happy Birthday. But it’s a little discouraging really.
Real Climate remembers climatologist Wally Broecker’s 1975 article in Science where he laid out the problem of CO2 accumulated heat on the planet.
Real Climate is for climate wonks. Always worth keeping an eye on the discussion there.
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August 27, 2010 by mike.
Two stories that are in the news caught my attention. The massive egg recall story reminds me why I buy my eggs from the Egg Lady in South Olympia. She has a pretty big operation, hundreds of chickens, but the chickens are free to run in a fairly large space. They look like happy chickens, if chickens experience joy walking around pecking at the ground. It’s not an industrial scene where the chickens are trapped in very tight spaces with lots of other chickens. This small farm operation looks good to me. The industrialization of farming has some risks as the recent massive egg recall suggests.
The other story that caught my attention was the judicial decision that has effectively stopped embryonic stem cell research again. There are lots of ways to look at this story, but I was thinking about the inconsistency of our political positions on the sanctity of life. Dvorak Uncensored was also contemplating the sharia law implications of the debate.
Folks who are emphatically opposed to stem cell research because they believe a fertilized egg is a human being don’t seem to get up in arms over genetically modified crops and animals. That upset is left to more liberal, tree hugging types who are not impressed with the inherent humanity of an embryonic stem cell line. And it continues down the line, progressives often don’t like the death penalty or drone attacks that take human life, but the conservatives who get apoplectic over human embryos seem less distressed by collateral damage, you know, children maimed and killed by proximity to our war on terror.
I am uneasy about the use of embryos as basic fuel for scientific research, but then I am uneasy about embryos in general. I have a sense there are too many of us walking and pecking on this small blue planet and I don’t see how this species can collectively sort out the question of how, when, why we can decide who gets to carry a human embryo to term, and as the environment degrades, we face the demand to feel compassion over and over again for large numbers of human beings displaced by extreme weather, flooding, by drought, by food shortage, and sea rise displacement is on the horizon. We are in this together, whether we are the folks displaced or the temporarily comfortable worrying about the folks dealing with flooding in Pakistan, or Tennessee or wherever.
Store owner Richard Dorer in the Tennessee link mentions that this is the second thousand year flood that has brought water into his store. I don’t know if he has his stats down quite right, but I am willing to wager that Mr. Dorer believes that something is different about weather patterns on the planet.
Connect the dots.
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