Robber or Emporer, Pirates or Coast Guard?

Another interesting article which warrants further research, but the author's claim that the Somali pirates - while some may be nothing more than thugs - are actually a Volunteer Coast Guard attempting to defend their shores against European ships illegally fishing their waters at one end and dumping toxic nuclear waste at the other, or at least trying to collect a tax on those vessels.

The article has this great quotation:

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?

Sort of sums up the world writ large. One peoples' terrorist is another peoples' freedom fighter. One peoples' liberator is another peoples' conqueror. One nation's protector is another nation's criminal.

Or better yet: One peoples' torture is another peoples' harsh interrogation technique.

"As the Arabs see the Jews"

I can't vouch for the authenticity of this letter by King Abdullah of Jordan (which once controlled part of Palestine), but this particular passage really stands out for me:

I was puzzled for a long time about the odd belief which apparently persists in America that Palestine has somehow "always been a Jewish land." Recently an American I talked to cleared up this mystery. He pointed out that the only things most Americans know about Palestine are what they read in the Bible. It was a Jewish land in those days, they reason, and they assume it has always remained so.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is absurd to reach so far back into the mists of history to argue about who should have Palestine today, and I apologise for it. Yet the Jews do this, and I must reply to their "historic claim." I wonder if the world has ever seen a stranger sight than a group of people seriously pretending to claim a land because their ancestors lived there some 2,000 years ago!

"As the Arabs see the Jews"
His Majesty King Abdullah,
The American Magazine
November, 1947

What do you think the reaction would be by most Americans if Native Americans claimed rights to this land that they have lived on for thousands of years? Oh right. We'd do to them what the Israeli's are doing to the Palestinians.

Again, I'll say it. Israel is nothing more than America's proxy in the Middle East. No Western country has been able to conquer the Middle East ever, so rather than continue fighting directly, we instead arm to the teeth others that will fight. We promise the Jews their "Promised Land" and give them the bombs to take it from the Arabs. In return, they do the dirty work of conquering the Arabs.

But once again, we see that the Arabs will not be conquered. Occupied, oppressed, starved, beaten, and bombed to bits, but not conquered.

Top 5 Lies About Israel’s Assault on Gaza - by Jeremy R. Hammond

Here are the lies:

Lie #1) Israel is only targeting legitimate military sites and
is seeking to protect innocent lives. Israel never targets civilians.

Lie #2) Hamas violated the cease-fire. The Israeli bombardment
is a response to Palestinian rocket fire and is designed to end such
rocket attacks.

Lie #3) Hamas is using human shields, a war crime.

Lie #4) Arab nations have not condemned Israel’s actions because they understand Israel’s justification for its assault.

Lie #5) Israel is not responsible for civilian deaths because
it warned the Palestinians of Gaza to flee areas that might be targeted.

Here are the details about the lies.

Role Reversal

In this current war between David and Goliath, the mythical David has become Goliath. And while this new Goliath is being pelted with stones just as David once threw, this new Goliath now retaliates with 2,000 lb. bombs, gratefully supplied to them by an even bigger giant. As far as I am concerned, this war is no longer Israel against Palestine; this war is the United States against Palestine, and Israel is our proxy.

The plain and simple truth is that without US money and military weaponry and bombs, this war on Gaza would not be happening. Truth be old, none of Israel's wars would have been possible without the support of the US.

Israel v. Palestine: Which is the true aggressor?

"Everybody has their Jews..."

Brian Eno nails it:

Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly...and, surprise, surprise - they turn hostile.

Animal Farm Friday - Strange Locomotion

Equal Opportunity Douchebags

I can't decide if the GOP's Norm Coleman is the foil to the Democrat's Rod Blagojevich. Do they cancel each other out in terms of douchebaggery? Are they both equally huge drags on their respective parties? Tough questions to answer.

When stupid meets smart

Here's a great example of why stupid people should keep their mouths shut unless they are asking questions with the intention of learning. But like most stupid people, instead of knowing that he is stupid, Joe Scarborough gets on his soapbox and professes his ignorance ever more loudly, all the while attempting - and failing - to demonstrate that Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski doesn't know what he's talking about with regards to the Middle East Peace Agreements, even though Dr. Brzezinski knows volumes about Middle East negotiations, given that he brokered the Camp David Accords.

Money quote: "You have a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on [with the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations], that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you."

The Sky in Motion

This site - The Sky in Motion - has a collection of some of the most stunning videos created by assembling thousands of high resolution time lapse photographs. (Click on "Playlist" on the left for the whole collection.)

Just amazing! What I wouldn't give to be able to see the world like this with my own eyes.

Clean Nukes?

Strange (or is it?) that the Corporate-Run Media isn't picking up on the story of Thorium, a safer nuclear fuel.

The short story of Thorium is that it was explored along side Uranium as a fuel for nuclear bombs, but wasn't as efficient for making weapons-grade Plutonium. But proponents of Thorium back in the Cold War days were focused more on energy, but the rest of the world was focused on bombs. So Thorium got deep-sixed. But there are tons of this stuff in cold storage, and some smart scientists are making the case to bring this stuff back out and use it for safe nuclear energy.

Enter Thorium. Half a century ago, a different kind of nuclear reactor was invented, one that burns Thorium - an inexhaustible supply of fuel, and much cheaper than the enriched-uranium fuel used by current reactors. It can even use the nuclear waste from other reactors as fuel! The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR for short, operates at low pressures, so it could never explode like the reactor at Chernobyl, and its liquid-fuel design makes it physical impossible to overheat, like the reactor at Three Mile Island.

If you have an hour to spare, watch this video from Google Tech Talks.

Twilight for the US?

It has been predicted.

Could not have said it better

It's no secret that I think David Gregory, the replacement for Tim Russert on MTP, is a complete tool. However, I haven't had the time, nor the inclination, to waste on explaining just why. But thanks to the inimitable Glenn Greenwald, I don't have to. Glenn sums up quite well exactly why Gregory is ridiculous and pathetic.

Several months before he was named as moderator of Meet the Press, David Gregory went on MSNBC
to categorically reject Scott McClellan's accusations that the American
media failed to scrutinize the Bush administration's pre-war
claims.  Gregory vigorously praised the job which he and his "journalistic" colleagues did in the run-up to the Iraq War -- the period which Salon's Gary Kamiya called
"one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media." 
Proclaimed Gregory, with a straight face:  "Questions were asked. I
think we pushed.  I think we prodded.  I think we challenged
the President.  Not only those of us in the White House Press Corps did
that, but others in the media landscape did that."  Most revealingly of
all, Gregory said:

I think there are a lot of
critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is
bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do
our job.  I respectfully disagree.  It's not our role.

Indeed. 
Perish the thought that a reporter should point out when government
officials are making "bogus" claims and are lying a country into a war.

Thanks, Glenn.

Star Farming

While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now
believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in
physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns
at the heart of the sun.

In the spring, a team will begin attempts to ignite a tiny man-made star
inside a laboratory and trigger a thermonuclear reaction.

Its goal is to generate temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius
and pressures billions of times higher than those found anywhere else on
earth, from a speck of fuel little bigger than a pinhead. If successful, the
experiment will mark the first step towards building a practical nuclear
fusion power station and a source of almost limitless energy.

Whoa.

Pale Blue Dot

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
-Carl Sagan

Be humbled.

Animal Farm Friday - Belated but worth it

Sounding the alarm in the cutest damn way possible!

Plagiarized Messiah

All those Bomb-bomb-bomb Iran, Bible-thumpin' neo-cons might be a bit disappointed to learn that those Persians had their own Jesus 600 years earlier. You could almost say that the Christians plagiarized the Persians, and took all of the stories of Mithras and applied them to Jesus.

The Christian Father Manes, founder of the heretical sect known as Manicheans, believed that Christ and Mithra were one. His teaching, according to Mosheim, was as follows: "Christ is that glorious intelligence which the Persians called Mithras ... His residence is in the sun" (Ecclesiastical History, 3rd century, Part 2, ch. 5).

Goodybe Shelfari, Hello Good Reads!

It seems that Shelfari has a bias towards Mormons and against Atheists.
In a discussion between atheists in a book group (a group named
Atheists on Shelfari), some Mormons asserted themselves into the
conversation, then apparently had their feelings hurt because their
arguments couldn't stand up to logic and reason. So they whined to
Shelfari (Amazon.com), which resulted in some members of my group
being banned.



If a person of religious faith enters into a discussion between
non-believers, then obviously that religious person is looking for a
fight. But to then go whine and complain to the host that someone from
that group hurt your feelings, is absolutely pathetic. Shelfari has
completely overreacted, especially in choosing sides in this dispute.
Fairness would dictate that if any member was to be banned, it would be
all of the members in the discussion. But banning members from
exercising their rights to free speech because the feelings of another
group were hurt is morally shameful. Indeed, that a site based on the
open exchange of ideas and readers' opinions about the books they read,
and the subject matter contained within these books would suppress the
free speech of its members is astonishing. The irony is breathtaking.



Time to leave Bezos to twiddle his Kindle. I want nothing to do with any service or organization that engages in censorship.



Hello GoodReads.com


Follow up:

Making the switch was incredibly easy. I just exported my library from Shelfari as a .xsl file, then imported it into my GoodReads.com library. It even captured my ratings and other notes I had written.

Quote of the Day

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al
Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a
propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an
identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the
TV watcher to accept a unified international leadership for a war
against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US."

Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook

Just for the record

I think Dan Lungren is fucking dick.

Jerry Brown is a hero!

He's fighting the Good Fight!

(I voted for Jerry Brown against Bill Clinton, and I wonder where this country might be if he had won.)

My next new car

Well, not a car per se, but I better start saving now!

Animal Farm Friday - Super Holiday Bonus: Wet Pussy!

Another one that just couldn't wait. It's way cool, and I couldn't resist the double entendre.

We are NOT all Georgians!

Though it would be hard to tell that it was Georgians - and not Americans - who got their asses kicked by the Russians in South Ossetia by all the U.S. military equipment, machines, uniforms, and supplies left behind.

Konashenko pulls a green compass out of his shirt pocket and opens it. It’s a U.S. military model. “This is a little trophy — a gift from one of my soldiers,” he says. “Everything that the Georgians left behind, I mean everything, was American. All the guns, grenades, uniforms, boots, food rations — they just left it all. Our boys stuffed themselves on the food,” he adds slyly. “It was tasty.” The booty, according to Konashenko, also included 65 intact tanks outfitted with the latest NATO and American (as well as Israeli) technology.

What I want for Christmas

If I celebrated Christmas, I would want this.

Another reason why I hate the Third Way

Creepy posts like this one where the acting-CEO of Center for American Progress more or less attacks one of her employees, none other than the awesome Matt Yglesias, and did so on his blog. The impression I get is that some cry-baby Third Way idiots strong-armed her into it, but it's about the least professional thing she could have done. 

Death to Third Way!

Because everything is better with bacon

Even this blog.

(More)

Animal Farm Friday on Monday - Super Squirrel

Mom brings it!

Animal Farm Friday - Cute Overload

I'm looking forward to a snowy weekend, and to someday getting a Wheaten Terrier, so here's a little of both! The Wheaten Snowplow! (Thanks, Kitten!)

Flying Spaghetti Monster holiday lights

Sweet!

Atheist billboards

More...

And there is no statute of limitations for war crimes.

The Senate's bipartisan report,
issued with no dissents, reiterates and adds factual context to what we
already know. And there is no equivocation in the report.

The person who authorized all the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib,
the man who gave the green light to the abuses in that prison, is the
president of the United States, George W. Bush.

Monday Funny - Obey Your TV

Most awesomest Wikipedia page ever!

A bounty for the learned and the unlearned.

Sunday Funny - Too bad he missed!

George W. Bush is an impotent dog! He ruined this country, and he ruined Iraq. At least this one Iraqi had the courage to make a strong statement about it!