General Interest

(558 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)

Get your vomit buckets ready.

Oil, drugs, weapons. Supposedly the three hottest commodities on the planet right now.

We know the lengths corporate-controlled governments will go to follow through on their lust for oil. Illegitimate wars and assassinations. 1 million plus human beings dead. 4 million plus displaced.

Jeremy Hammond’s recent expose discusses how drug laundering was common and vital in giving shameless ballast to the world’s most powerful banks during the economic crisis.

Now, Tim Hepher of Reuters spotlights one more HUGE example of grotesque amorality to fathom. The sub-basements of evil our global leaderships have been frequenting for cold-blooded “advertising” and profit-making of the armaments trade. Heads of states have become the front-line hawkers the competition is so fierce.

Wieslaw Maslowski

Will Travis

Andrew J. Gunther

What do scientists predict the Earth will be like in a few decades? Computer models suggest deterioration of agricultural land, crumbling bridges and flooded roads, and population shifts away from low-lying cities such as Miami and Amsterdam. How fast will Arctic ice melt? What does that mean for the rest of the world? What are governments and businesses doing in the Bay Area and elsewhere to prepare for new water patterns that paradoxically may bring too much water at times in some areas and drought in others?
Source: Hot, Wet and Uncertain, Monday, July 12, 2010 5:24 PM

David Suzuki

David Suzuki Speaks Out

David Suzuki discusses the human environmental crisis and how it could be turned around in a generation.
Source: The Legacy of David Suzuki

Music includes Earth Anthem, star spangled banner, God Re-Floods Middle East, brother can you spare a dime, One Tin Soldier, When the Saints Go Marching In, We'll Meet Again

Play Program or Download below the fold

(562 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)

So the disasters of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars are not enough for America.

And calling out for the assassination of a legitimate sovereign head of a country and encouraging civil war bloodbaths from our senior US Senators has gotten as American as apple pie! The blood-letting mood begun earlier by a craven corporate media and a mendacious administration demonizing Gaddafi and myopically generalizing and romanticizing the strange and troubling rebellion coalition challenging him. Once again in American media, profound truth black outs, this time of barbaric racist violence against non-Libyan Africans wrongly accused of being mercenaries.

What does the Military Industrial Security Complex care, ultimately? They -- pro or anti-Gaddafi Libyans and millions more ultimately in Africa -- will all be toast eventually. Desperate and traumatized, those who manage to live from “Obama’s days not weeks humanitarian intervention" (HAH!) and the African bloodbaths to come. All bowed to the will of the Western corporatism colonization. Control of Africa, and all its juicy resources. Col. Gaddafi is an obstacle to that, so anything goes in oil, money and war.

From A status report on our intervention in Libya. Historians will find this farce fascinating.

Did you hear that mad dog Gaddafi is on the loose? Hide the women and children?
"We’re conned again. Just like “remember the Maine”, the Tonkin Gulf resolution, and Saddam’s nukes."

So far there is no real evidence that Gaddafi intended to massacre anybody in Libya. Nor was a genocide about to happen. It appears that the foreign intervention was started by the French but the war started as a civil war.

Without Congressional approval, Obama's war actions in Libya and Pakistan are a violation of the Constitution. "If Obama goes it alone, he must return to Bush-era assertions that the president, as commander-in-chief, can unilaterally launch the nation into war."

This is a historical moment where Americans are allowing the President to wage war at will for any reason. Future Presidents will refer to this moment to justify any war. The only Constitutional remedy is to impeach the President.

See Obama on presidential war-making powers

Whether or not you believe the story, the painting is interesting. Click the pic to enlarge the picture

The Last Supper - A Study of the Painting by Leonardo Da Vinci

"Persistence hunting" - running down antelope

The incomparable David Attenborough narrates this 7-minute segment from the BBC's Life of Mammals series. It documents how a man can chase a kudu for 8 hours until the animal collapses from exhaustion. A very thought-provoking and touching video.

Ancient gazelle "killing zones" documented in Syria

(567 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)

Sometimes I come across an electrifying article that inspires simultaneous dread, enlightenment and validation. An article providing that AHA moment, confirming my worst suspicions and connecting some troubling, global-big-picture dots. Dots-connecting that the pen-flashlight narrow, manipulatively selective, milli-second illuminations by Western corporate media don’t begin to help ordinary Americans or other Westerners achieve.

The last article that gave me the big AHA moment was by Ellen Brown in Asia Times entitled “Libya All About Oil, Or Central Banking?” Ms. Brown revealed that Libya it turns out is a threat to all those private international banksters out there because it, and Gaddafi, had the AUDACITY to establish a state-owned banking system. The outrageousness of such a legitimate act of economic independence!!!! Off with their heads!! (Which apparently is happening, since Geneva Conventions stopped mattering long ago and we are backing some unknown barbaric entities over there, but this is the era of “pragmatism” a/k/a America so on the wrong the side of history, but as long as the media calls our convenient proxies the good guys who seriously gives a shit any more? Might, after all, makes right. Gangsta rules.)

Matt Taibbi

David Swanson

Cindy Sheehan talks to both Matt Taibbi and David Swanson, author of "War is a Lie". Matt Taibbi is an U.S. journalist who reports on politics, media, finance, and sports for Rolling Stones and Men's Journal. David Swanson is a U.S. author, blogger, and activist.
Source: Double Trouble, December 5, 2010 (SOAPBOX #79)

Scott Horton Interviews David Swanson

David Swanson comments on how Americans routinely underestimate the depravity of their imperial government.
Source: Scott Horton Interviews David Swanson

Music includes Earth Anthem, This Land Is Your Land, Don't You Ever Let Nobody Drag Yo's Spirit Down, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Strange Fruit, Protest, Good Morning Vietnam, Greensleeves, The Stampede, We'll Meet Again

Some members of the Manhattan Greens compiled the comparative issues checklist below. I have also included thereafter some platform stances made by Howie Hawkins in 2008 while running for Governor, a statement taken off the national Green Party website about the profound economic inequality in America, and a list of the 10 key values of the Green Party.

Howie Hawkins (who ran against the craven Democratic winner, Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is every bit as seemingly Republican as Obama) recently revealed at a Manhattan forum that he achieved 60,000 votes in New York State. 50,000 were from Westchester County and above. Only 10,000 votes from beneath Westchester County. This includes Manhattan, mind you. HOW SHAMEFUL for this city's residents, so many who consider themselves sophisticated and educated. Progressive? HAH!!!

I remember as we passed out flyers last November before the election, there was a lot of disdain for us Green Party members. There was a lot of mumbling of "but you won't win" as an explanation for the unwillingness to vote Green. "Pragmatic" Democrats who were willing to, maybe hold their noses, but still vote for the sell-out Dems with their clear corporate, anti-humane values.

I

I wasn't going to do another post today, but this video is amazing. Go to full screen

The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Businessweek

More than 100 students at California State University, Sacramento are occupying a campus building for a second day to protest state budget cuts to higher education.

Really cool webpage from the University of New South Wales

Homopolar motors and generators are simpler than their multipolar cousins (see Electric motors and generators), but are very rarely used in practice. However, they illustrate the principles nicely, and a homopolar motor is both easy to make and easy to understand.

[...]

http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/homopolar.htm

Enzyme Crucial to DNA Replication May Provide Potent Anti-Cancer Drug Target

(572 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)

My Green Party friend, Daniel, encouraged me to write a blog about Obama’s budget speech for his website. I gulped. Just as with W, sustained Obama viewing makes me nauseous.

Except for a few enraging excerpts of the speech I glimpsed, provided by gaga MSNBC anchors, I thought I had escaped having to endure this particular pile of Obama say-anything bullshit. But I made myself sit down and listen to it on youtube last night. Every last, saccharine, mendacious word of it.

It gave me nothing. No hope. If Obama wanted to make a profound step, he would launch a WPA to fight unemployment. He would stop droning. He would end the ritualized torture of Bradley Manning. Reinstitute habeas corpus. End the corporate-agenda wars.

Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis had this to say about the seeming Obama doctrine in an article entitled "Endless War and Empire: Your Tax Dollars at Work":

Does hidden white privilege exist? Allan Johnson provides an alternative way of thinking about issues of privilege by examining what keeps us from seeing our own privilege and how that privilege harms others.

After 30 years of college teaching, Allan G. Johnson now devotes himself entirely to writing and public speaking. He has worked with more than 200 schools and organizations in 36 states.
Source: Leading From Where You Are: Unraveling Privilege, Power and Difference with Allan Johnson

Music includes Earth Anthem, All the Pretty Little Horses, Cisco Houston, Mariachi Tamazula-Alma Llanera, the day they caught Saddam Hussein, We'll Meet Again

Ellen Brown in Asia Times brings up some incredible and sensible revelations about the present demonization of Libya and the motivations for the western faux-humanitarian efforts to topple Gaddafi.

She begins her article, “Libya All About Oil, Or Central Banking?” with the interesting observation:

Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank - this before they even had a government. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:

I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.