Shit Place to Live...

40°F
Cloudy
Wind: NE at 2 mph
Humidity: 59%

Tue

49°F | 36°F

Wed

58°F | 49°F

Thu

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Fri

65°F | 49°F

War or Peace?

This is a very interesting article about the use of war as a tool to achieve what is perceived unachievable via peaceful political approach.

A very nice historical analysis of the result achieved via the military option. Too bad the likes of the Idiot in Chief lack the intellectual capacity to understand.

The Military Option

ALBERT EINSTEIN considered it a symptom of madness to repeat again and again doing something that has already failed and to expect a different result every time.

Most politicians and generals conform to this formula. Again and again they try to achieve their aims by military means and obtain contrary results. We Israelis occupy an honorable place among these madmen.

War is hell, as an American general pronounced. It also rarely achieves its aims.

By Uri Avnery-- an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is o a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

It's the Bullshit...

So it all Makes Sense Now...

The various Israeli ultra right wing governments in charge since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 have deliberately and consistently ignored International Law, UN Resolutions and terms of peace agreements and have continued the creation and expansion of the settlements in the occupied territories and elsewhere.

While the Palestinians are consistently blamed for the failure of this so called Peace Process, we now know that there may be others to blame before turning towards the Palestinians for an explanation of the utter failure in achieving peace in that region.

Israelis Claim Secret Agreement With US

A letter that President Bush personally delivered to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon four years ago has emerged as a significant obstacle to the president's efforts to forge a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians during his last year in office.

Ehud Olmert, the current Israeli prime minister, said this week that Bush's letter gave the Jewish state permission to expand the West Bank settlements that it hopes to retain in a final peace deal, even though Bush's peace plan officially calls for a freeze of Israeli settlements across Palestinian territories on the West Bank. In an interview this week, Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reaffirmed this understanding in a secret agreement reached between Israel and the United States in the spring of 2005, just before Israel withdrew from Gaza.

U.S. officials say no such agreement exists, and in recent months Rice has publicly criticized even settlement expansion on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which Israel does not officially count as settlements. But as peace negotiations have stepped up in recent months, so has the pace of settlement construction, infuriating Palestinian officials, and Washington has taken no punitive action against Israel for its settlement efforts.

Israeli officials say they have clear guidance from Bush administration officials to continue building settlements, as long as it meets carefully negotiated criteria, even though those understandings appear to contradict U.S. policy.

:)

He Told You to go Fuck Yourself!

Rice Suggests Carter Confused Peace Process

Ms. Rice also affirmed that the State Department had explicitly advised Mr. Carter not to meet with Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist group. Mr. Carter told National Public Radio on Monday that he had not received a clear signal from the Bush administration before leaving on his Middle East tour last week.

Really... This is a Real Political Ad

Ron Wyden (D-OR) is running this ad touting health care portability.

Space Junk Surrounding the Earth!

With all this shit floating around in orbit, it is a wonder we can send anything into space without hitting something...

Nope... I Felt Nothin'

Slept right through the 5.4 strong quake. Haven't had to say anything like this for at least thirteen years!!

Tremors rattle people awake across Chicago area

Tremors from a moderate earthquake centered in downstate Illinois rattled people awake across the Chicago area Friday morning, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or significant damage, authorities said.

The earthquake, which measured preliminarily 5.4 on the Richter Scale, struck at 4:36 a.m. near the town of West Salem, Ill., about 60 miles northwest of Evansville, Ind., according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

If the strength is confirmed, it would tie the 1968 earthquake as the strongest to ever be recorded in the region.

The tremors could be felt in downtown Chicago at the Tribune Tower, 435 N. Michigan Ave., for about 20 seconds beginning around 4:40 a.m. Numerous people from across the Chicago area reported being awakened by rattling windows and shifting furniture.

:)

How can anyone take anyone who is being carted around in a goofy vehicle such as this one seriously?

This is a perfect vehicle for mooning bystanders.

Huh? What American Faith?

Jesus Christ Super Star!!!

There is nothing American about Faith and there is no such thing as any particular Faith that is American. I don't know which of these two morons on the stage I should direct my wrath to... Both are equally deserving of it.
At White House, Pope Lauds Americans’ Faith

You Vote What you Eat?

A Chicken in Every Pot

Supporters of Barack Obama prefer Bear Naked cereal. Hillary Clinton’s fans like GoLean. For John McCain’s supporters, Fiber One is favored.

Did They Really Have to Kill it?

I know cougars don't belong in the City. In the weekend people in Wilmette (umm... just north of where I live!) reported seeing a cougar. There was plenty of notice for the animal control to be on the lookout with tranquilizers. Instead, the poor lost animal gets shot to death. On top of that, no one know who was the fuckhead who decided to shoot the cat and kill it.

Sometimes I am just so ashamed of belonging to this race called Human.

Story here.

A 150-pound cougar was shot and killed Monday evening in the Roscoe Village neighborhood on Chicago's North Side, officials said. (Tribune photo by Candice C. Cusic / April 14, 2008)

This is Just Hilarious!!!!

Just a Really Cool Photo!

Do You Really Want to Vote for Her?

Wal-Mart for President?

It was during those six years that Clinton served with the notoriously anti-union Rose Law firm in Little Rock, defending Wal-Mart against workers who tried to unionize. It was also during those six years that Clinton served with fellow board member John Tate, whose favorite saying was: "Labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living."

In this video, you can see Sam Walton, plain as the Wal-Mart logo's menacing yellow smile, as he presides over the grand re-opening of the company's original store in Rogers, Arkansas. Walton praises Clinton, "You're one of the finest lawyers—legal persons—that I've ever met or ever known. And without any question, you’ve added more to our board than any person we’ve ever had on that board.”

Walton then proudly reminds us that both Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill (then governor of Arkansas) helped start the company's "Buy American" program. In case Clinton forgets to tell you, Wal-Mart touted Buy American with signs and advertisements claiming their clothes and other goods were "Made in the U.S.A."

Buy American was a horrendous lie. Not only did Wal-Mart continue to get clothes from Asian sweatshops, but they also became the nation's biggest importer of Chinese goods, forcing U.S. manufacturers out of business. Oh wait, maybe Buy American referred to clothing produced in New York's Chinatown, where in 1991 (during Clinton's Wal-Mart tenure), labor inspectors found 16- and 17-year-old illegal Chinese immigrants working without pay.

Wayne's Woooooorld!

Umm... You can buy this in eBay!

All Will be OK in Six Months...

Where Are We?

Quotable

It’s all sort of ironic, when you think about it. When you fly, you are inspected quite thoroughly. Whereas the plane itself is perhaps occasionally vacuumed. See, with this administration, if a passenger blows up a plane, it’s a failure on the War on Terror. But if a plane just blows up on its own, eh, that’s the market self-regulating.

--Jon Stewart

Keep Voting For Republican or Democrat...

We deserve the government we get.

For Many, a Boom That Wasn’t

The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?

In the second half of the 20th century, the United States passed the test in a way that arguably no other country ever has. It became, as the cliché goes, the richest country on earth. Now, though, most families aren’t getting any richer.

“We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn’t do well,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. “But we’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth.”

Maybe That Explains it All...

... Maybe we can't finish it off with Iraq because there is still money to be made. I mean, if you are making money and have investments up to wazoo in the Project Iraq, I can see why you are reluctant in voting an end to this cash cow!

U.S. Lawmakers Invested in Iraq, Afghanistan Wars

Senator John Kerry, the Democrat from Massachusetts who staked his 2004 presidential bid in part on his opposition to the war, tops the list of investors. His holdings in firms with Pentagon contracts of at least five million dollars stood at between 28.9 million dollars and 38.2 million dollars as of Dec. 31, 2006. Kerry sits on the Senate foreign relations panel.

Members of Congress are required to report their personal finances every year but only need to state their assets in broad ranges.

Other top investors include Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Republican with holdings of 12.1 million - 49.1 million dollars; Rep. Robin Hayes, a North Carolina Republican (9.2 million - 37.1 million dollars); Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin (5.2 million - 7.6 million dollars); and Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat (2.7 million - 6.3 million dollars).

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Democrat and former governor of West Virginia who chairs the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, invested some 2.0 million dollars in Pentagon contractors, CRP says.

Other panel chiefs who invested in defence firms include Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Independent who presides over the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Rep. Howard Berman, the California Democrat who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

In all, 151 current members of Congress -- more than one-fourth of the total -- have invested between 78.7 million dollars and 195.5 million dollars in companies that received defence contracts of at least 5.0 million dollars, according to CRP.

RIP Charlton Heston - 1923-2008

I suppose we can pry that gun out of his hands now... :)

Some of his best scenes--although I think they pulled too many scenes from the Omega Man in the video below but still worth a look.

I Can't Believe This!

Cokie Roberts is such a right wing hack--listen to her talking about the notion presented by Senator McCain(of all people)that Americans want to "Win" and this notwithstanding the overwhelming majority of American who want simply an end to this Supreme Stupidity the Idiot in Chief has gotten us all into. It is just amazing that she appears as a "politics analyst" on NPR each Friday.

By the same token, we should hear a lot more from Vanden Heuvel. And why doesn't she appear on NPR on a regular basis.

I tell you... Liberal Media never ceases to amaze me!

Interesting Conversation

With respect to that Idiot Davis (see post below) I came upon this conversation in the comment section of Zorn's blog. Very interesting.

Observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades

I'd like to thank you for reporting on this. Davis' comments are exceedingly ignorant, intolerant, and abominable!

When will people realize that atheism is not a belief? It is the exact opposite of a belief! We all have the right not to have other people's beliefs imposed upon us. God is a belief. Prayer is a belief. Atheism is not.

ZORN REPLY -- I would differ a little bit about that...I would say that it's a belief that there is no supernatural intelligence that created and/or guides the world. It's not logically disprovable in that "God" is often simply the posited bottom of the bottomless riddle of existence. I don't see any point in quibbling about it beyond that, as, by its very nature, God is an untestable scientific hypothesis -- see Rusell's Teapot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

Eric -- I know you don't want to quibble too much about this point, but I think there is something to the comment that "atheism" is not a "belief." This is important, because many imagine that atheism is just another faith -- no more or less rational or reasonable than any other. Atheists of course disagree with that notion. The reason they disagree is because, contrary to popular misconception, they don't actually pretend to know -- that is, have faith -- that there is no God. They don't assert the lack of God as a certainty in the way that believers assert God's existence as a certainty. Atheists freely acknowledge that they can't disprove God's existence. They may speculate that God's existence is unlikely, and some, such as Richard Dawkins, make philosophical arguments for why it seems to him particularly unlikely, but they don't claim certain knowledge, as do all ardent believers. They're pretty clear about that.

So, many then ask, what differentiates atheists from agnostics? The main thing is that atheists are much less accepting of faith than agnostics. They don't look at God as a 50/50 proposition. They compare belief in God to belief in celestial teapots in order to show that the belief is irrational -- inconsistent with how we approach any other question of fact.

That's not because they know that there is no God or have faith that there is no God, but because they know that -- with respect to these questions of ultimate reality -- it's plain that nobody knows what they're talking about, and faith is merely wishing it so or pretending at knowledge.

What atheists are against, then, is not God so much as faith -- belief. Maybe that's where Kevin is coming from.

What a Fucking Idiot... And She is a Democrat?

I suppose if she ran under The Nazi banner she would not get elected in order to be in a position to spew hatred. I am happy to see that most comments on this article are in condemnation of her immoral and simple minded opinions.

Rep. Monique Davis (D-IL) and her Diatribe

The following exchange between atheist activist Rob Sherman of Buffalo Grove and Ill. Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) took place Wednesday afternoon in the General Assembly as Sherman testified before the House State Government Administration Committee.

I know from experience that many of you will side with Davis (update -- apparently I was wrong! ), but I ask you to consider what the outcry would have been if a lawmaker had launched a similar attack on the beliefs of a religious person.

Davis: I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings. And it’s really a tragedy -- it’s tragic -- when a person who is engaged in anything related to God, they want to fight. They want to fight prayer in school.

I don’t see you (Sherman) fighting guns in school. You know?

I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous--

Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?

Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!

Sherman: Thank you for sharing your perspective with me, and I’m sure that if this matter does go to court---

Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

Sherman didn't budge, continued his testimony related to Gov. Rod Blagojevich's oddly misdirected $1 million grant intended for Pilgrim Baptist Church, (story) and later told me he "felt like Rosa Parks."

Ai Caramba!

They Will Follow Us Home...

I Don't Know...

... Whether to smile or laugh out loud! I think I will laugh out loud.

Olympic Torch Goes Out, Briefly, in Paris

The Olympic torch was apparently extinguished and taken on board a bus to move it away from protesters.

Wow... I Had Not Heard of This

Ummm... The War on Terror is just not what it used to be.

IEDs go beyond Iraq, Afghanistan

WASHINGTON — Makeshift bomb attacks by insurgents — common in Iraq and Afghanistan — are on the rise in other countries, prompting concerns by military experts that the tactic is becoming the weapon of choice by terror groups worldwide.

There are 200 to 300 improvised explosive attacks each month outside Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the British Triton Report. Triton is part of the consulting firm HMS Ltd., which provides counter-IED training for the U.S. government and other governments and businesses. The IED threat outside Iraq and Afghanistan increased steadily in 2006 and 2007 and is on a pace to exceed those numbers in 2008, said Irene Smith, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO).

Now That's Better...

From Darkblack.

Rock & Roll Baby!

Charles Manson Goes Creative Commons for Record

Manson, ringleader of the "Manson family" cult that killed actress Sharon Tate and committed other ghastly crimes during the late '60s, always fancied himself a musician. His record One Mind -- which was originally released in 2005, according to CharlieManson.com -- gives everybody a glimpse of his musical artistry (as well as his whack-job theories) -- and the Creative Commons license means you're free to share and remix Manson's mad tracks.

According to a blurb on the website of Manson's label, Family Jams, "One Mind is pure Charlie, no additions, no corrections, no added opinions, filters or editing. This is all new material, the most recent as far as we know, consisting of songs, trance-poetry, conversations, raps, ramblings, musings and more."

With his out-of-tune acoustic guitar, warbling vocals and nutty intros ("This is a song about something that I'm not even thinkin' about," Manson says before "Angels Fear to Tread"), the jammin' jailbird sounds like a demented hobo on One Mind's 16 tracks. Can't wait for the killer remixes.

First he Pokes... Then They All Die!

Study sheds light on sex lives of octopi

The scientists discovered that octopi mating can take place several times a day once the creatures reach sexual maturity.

It usually begins with the male octopus poking the female with his long, flexible, hectocotylus arm and then slipping it into her mantle cavity.

Once the sperm packet has been deposited, the female retires to her den and lays tens of thousands of eggs, which she weaves into strings and attaches to the roof of her underwater dwelling. She keeps the eggs clean by blowing jets of water on them and is unable to leave her den to forage for food during this time.

After about a month, the eggs hatch and the weakened mother octopus dies. The father also dies within a few months of mating, leaving the newborns to fend for themselves.