Offensive and Reprehensible

It's pretty fucking sad when even a legend speaks up against Israel, that legend can be toppled.

Helen Thomas announced on Monday that she is retiring, moments after the White House Correspondents Association said it was considering stripping her of her front-row press room seat.

The 89-year-old so-called “dean of the White House press corps” had caused an uproar after making remarks in May suggesting that Israeli Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to Germany and Poland “or wherever they came from.”

I echo Helen Thomas. The Jews have no more right to that land than anyone else in the world. They have it only because they took it, and they did it with US money and military support. Without that, there would be no Israel.

Mr. Gibbs said he had not spoken directly with the president about it. But, he added: “Those remarks were offensive and reprehensible. She should and has apologized. Obviously those remarks do not reflect, certainly, the opinion of I assume most of the people in here, and certainly not of the administration.”

I think this Obama administration is offensive and reprehensible. I think the Israeli government and the IDF are offensive and reprehensible. I think my tax dollars going to prop up Israel is offensive and reprehensible.

[Al Jazeera] Price to pay for opposing Israel

Animal Farm Friday - Meow Mix: Homage to talking heads

If this doesn't drive you nuts...

America has begun to see Israel more as a burden than an asset

That being declared by the head of Israel's Mossad.

Most telling of all are the stirrings of disquiet in America, Israel’s most steadfast ally. Americans are still vastly more sympathetic to the Israelis than to the Palestinians. But a growing number, especially Democrats, including many liberal Jews, are getting queasier about what they see as America’s too robotic support for Israel, especially when its government is as hawkish as Binyamin Netanyahu’s. A gap in sympathy for Israel has widened between Democrats and Republicans. Conservatives still tend to back Israel through hell and the high seas. Barack Obama is more conscious that the Palestinians’ failure to get a state is helping to spread anti-American poison across the Muslim world, making it harder for him to deal with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. His generals have strenuously made that point. None other than the head of Israel’s Mossad, its foreign intelligence service, declared this week that America has begun to see Israel more as a burden than an asset.

Read the full post here.

The Israelis apparently do not understand the concept of meta-data in photos.

Idiots. (Click to embiggen.)

Neutrinos have mass? Uh oh.

That means a whole lot of re-working of the Standard Model. Time to get busy, physicists!

For the first time, physicists have confirmed that certain subatomic particles have mass and that they could account for a large proportion of matter in the universe, the so-called dark matter that astrophysicists know is there but that cannot be observed by conventional means.

The finding concerns the behavior of neutrinos, ghost-like particles that travel at the speed of light. In the new experiment, physicists captured a muon neutrino in the process of transforming into a tau neutrino.

That's pretty awesome on a fundamental level, but how about these little details?

Because the neutrino beam that is created is not affected by electrical or magnetic fields, the proton accelerator must be pointed directly at detectors in the laboratory under Gran Sasso mountain 453 miles away in central Italy, between the towns of L'Aquila and Teramo. When neutrinos are produced, they continue in the same direction of the proton beam, arriving at Gran Sasso in 2.4 milliseconds.

The detector at Gran Sasso is a massive apparatus made up of 150,000 "bricks" of photographic film interleaved with lead sheets. The total mass of the bricks, which are accompanied by electronic detectors and other apparatus, is about 1,300 tons.

Mind = Blown.

Anti-Israel does not mean Anti-Semitic

Time to Cut Israel Off

Lets see how long Israel can continue being such a bully when they run out of money.

Throw top BP Execs in prison!

Could not agree more!

Since the Supreme Court in January declared that "Corporate Personhood" is the law of the land, let's treat British Petroleum like a person and hold them accountable as we would any person for such devastating destruction to the people, land, environment and animals in American and Caribbean waters. - Mark Karlin for Buzzflash

The Low Bar now cross-posts on Facebook

Unless you prefer coming here for the pretty formatting, you can follow The Low Bar on Facebook at this URL:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Low-Bar/121062797933431

Now to figure out how to add a "Like" button to this thing...

Animal Farm Friday - Hawkward!

Evangelicals turning US Armed Forces into a Christian Taliban with consent of the Pentagon

That this is happening is pretty sickening, but at least there's one soldier fighting for our Constitution.

Michael L. "Mikey" Weinstein shares his hate mail with both friends and strangers the way elderly people show off photos of their grandkids. He has plenty of it to share. For the past four years, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has been doing battle with a Christian subculture that, he believes, is trying to Christianize the U.S. armed forces with the help of a complicit Pentagon brass. He calls it the "fundamentalist Christian parachurch-military-corporate-proselytizing complex," a mouthful by which he means holy warriors in contempt of the constitutional barrier between church and state.

The article goes on to highlight the systemic infection - nay, cancer - of Christian Evangelicals in the US Armed Forces that spreads all the way to the top, and notes that the Obama administration is of no help in this matter (unsurprisingly).

As an aside, this statement referring to a quote from a Pentagon spokesperson strikes me as odd:

Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith declined via email to comment on it directly but said that the Defense Department "places a high value on the rights of military members to observe the tenets of their respective religions. [It] does not endorse any one religion or religious organization, and provides free access of religion for all members of the military services."

I believe this can be interpreted to mean that if a Christian soldier wishes to crusade against non-Christians, or if a Muslim soldier decides to wage jihad against fellow soldiers who are infidels, that would be legal. I think she should have chosen her words more carefully.

Who says multi-tasking is impossible?

Animal Farm Friday on Monday - Kung Fu Bear

This bear can kick your ass bear-style, or Bruce Lee style. Take your pick!

UPDATE: Let me know if you don't get this song stuck in your head.

TED Talks: Sir Ken Robinson on the Learning Revolution

Fabulous! Entertaining and enlightening.

Animal Farm Friday 2 - Just Deserves! (Warning: Graphic Photo!)

Fuck you, matadors! Mess with the bull, get the mother fucking horn to the face!

Painting for Prophet

Animal Farm Friday - Monkey Love

This touches me, deeply.

Animal Farm Friday - Snakes Are Cool!

You've got to read this to believe it! Just how they created the study is worth the read!

So spitting cobras defend themselves by initially tracking an aggressor's movements. However, at the instant that an attacker triggers the cobra into spitting, the reptile switches to predicting where the attacker's eyes will be 200 ms in the future and aims there to be sure that it hits its target.

Thanks for paying your taxes...

Things you find in a closet

Farewell, Bill Moyers. Happy Retirement!

Bill Moyers sadly signed off for the last time at The Journal this past Friday. This quote is from that show:

Ed Murrow told his generation of journalists bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. So here, one more time, is mine: plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Plutocracy, the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy.

Plutocracy is not an American word but it's become an American phenomenon. - Bill Moyers, from his final broadcast at The Journal

Thank you, Mr. Moyers. Farewell!

Cure for PTSD - Good or Bad?

With nothing more than a little prick in the neck, post-traumatic stress disorder can be mostly cured, making it possible for soldiers to endure the horrors of combat without any of the lasting side-effects that should - ya know, in an ideal world - help to prevent such horrors from ever taking place.

But a small new study out of Walter Reed Army Medical Center might offer more than temporary relief — with nothing more than a quick jab to the neck.

It’s a procedure called stellate ganglion block (STB), and involves injecting local anesthetic into a bundle of nerves located in the neck. The bundle are a locus for the sympathetic nervous system, which regulates the body’s “fight-or-flight” stress response.

I'm all for helping soldiers ease their suffering, but this seems like a panacea to the Pentagon, one that could make them more likely to send soldiers into harms way since they don't have to worry about any lingering post-combat side-effects.

Animal Farm Friday - Soy Milk or Soy - wait! WTF?

Sorry. No non-human animals in this funny news clip of what else to call soy milk (or rice milk, etc.) instead of "milk".

The video is funny, but the topic pisses me off. I don't personally care for soy milk, or rice milk, or even milk from a cow generally speaking. But I hate the National Milk Producers Federation and other dairy organizations like them, for many, many reasons that I won't go into here, and this specific topic is one of them. Those jerks are as bad as cigarette companies when it comes to greed and general evilness. Attacking competitors in such a shameless way is clear evidence. I wonder when they'll start going after Milk of Magnesia.

Illegal Immigrants?

Art from Garbage

Believe it or not, this:



is made from this:



For more stunning examples of art made from the by-products of our excessive consumerism, check out the amazing work by Chris Jordan, a Seattle-based photographer (and former corporate lawyer).

On the Humanity and Inhumanity of American Soldiers in Combat

If you've seen the video of the massacre in Baghdad, where US forces are shown murdering innocent civilians, you know how gut-wrenching that situation was. The following article is no less gut-wrenching, but it sheds more light on the events of that day, and offers more detail on the humanity - and the inhumanity - of American soldiers in combat.

Iraq war veteran Ethan McCord, who is seen running with an Iraqi child in his arms in the video posted by WikiLeaks of a July 2007 massacre of civilians in Baghdad..., together with another former member of the company, Josh Stieber, have addressed an open “Letter of Reconciliation” to the Iraqi people taking responsibility for their role in this incident and other acts of violence.

I highly recommend reading the full interview.

Moohammed

Moehammed

"Man, you go through life, you try to be nice to people, you struggle to resist the urge to punch 'em in the face, and for what?" - Moe "Hammed" Syzlak

Animal Farm Friday - Flock? Herd? Pack? Pride?

A sample of the video footage I took with my GoPro Hero HD camera while swimming with some friends and some friendly sea lions off Anacapa in the Channel Islands last weekend.

So which is it, a flock of sea lions? A herd of sea lions? A pack of sea lions? A pride of sea lions?

FFRF FTW!

Freedom From Religion Foundation for the win!

Reagan’s Prayer Ritual Finally Ruled Unconstitutional

On Thursday, April 15, 2010, SR U.S. District Court Judge Barbara B. Crabb ruled that the National Day of Prayer Proclamation, instituted by Ronald Reagan in 1988, is unconstitutional. Freedom From Religion Foundation v George W. Bush was filed in Wisconsin in 2008 and has been progressing through the courts since that time. The subsequent ruling in the case was filed as Freedom From Religion Foundation v Barrack Obama & Robert Gibbs to reflect the change in administration after the 2008 elections. Judge Crabb explained her decision by stating that “…[the National Day of Prayer's] goes beyond mere ‘acknowledgement’ of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context.” She continued, “In fact, it is because the nature of prayer is so personal and can have such a powerful effect on a community that the government may not use its authority to try to influence an individual’s decision whether and when to pray.”

It totally boggles my mind that it took so long for this ruling to come. There are few things so black and white in the Constitution as the separation of church and state.

Holding Representatives Accountable

This is in the UK, but it would be awesome to have here, especially a handy tool like this!

That just about says it perfectly...

Animal Farm Friday - Size Matters!

Well, duh!

Animal Farm Friday Extra Shot - Good Doggy!

(tip to Ryan for sending that on)

Animal Farm Friday - Nature by the Numbers

As found via Noni Films via Facebook:

Truly dazzling!

Al Franken pwns KBR

From Daily Kos:

In one of Senator Franken's first pieces of legislation, he introduced an amendment that would have cut off federal contracts to any business that sought to enforce binding arbitration clauses against employees pressing Title VII civil rights claims.  Put simply, he wanted Jamie Leigh Jones and others in her position to get their day in court.  KBR's appeal asked the Supreme Court to rule that the Franken Amendment didn't apply to this case, but they got cold feet when the Amendment was enforced in two other actions by the Pentagon.

Jamie Leigh Jones is going to court thanks to Senator Franken.

WikiLeaks on Al Jazeera

“ WikiLeaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years ”
—  The National, November 19, 2009

(Jump to 15:00, or click this link)

Presently, WikiLeaks is under aggressive US/Icelandic surveillance.

Animal Farm Friday - Clash of the Lesser Evolved Primates

An homage to the idiots in Washington, but with no offense intended to the more highly evolved gorillas.

A Second Bill of Rights?

I had no idea. I need to go back to school.

The Second Bill of Rights was a proposal made by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944 to suggest that the nation had come to recognize, and should now implement, a second bill of rights. Roosevelt did not argue for any change to the United States Constitution; he argued that the second bill of rights was to be implemented politically, not by federal judges. Roosevelt's stated justification was that the "political rights" guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had "proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness." Roosevelt's remedy was to create an "economic bill of rights" which would guarantee:

• A job with a living wage
• Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies
• A home
• Medical care
• Education
• Recreation

Roosevelt stated that having these rights would guarantee American security, and that America's place in the world depended upon how far these and similar rights had been carried into practice. Later in the 1970s, Czech jurist Karel Vasak would categorize these as the ‘second generation’ rights in his theory of three generations of human rights.