August 2011
Jupiter at west quadrature on August 1, 2011 →
The planet Jupiter reaches west quadrature tomorrow, on Monday, August 1. Any celestial object is said to be at west quadrature whenever it lies 90 degrees west of the sun in our sky. For…
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“The maniacal Tea Party freshmen are trying to burn down the House they were...”
– Maureen Dowd ”Tempest in a Tea Party” - NYTimes.com 7/30/11
July 2011
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Progressive Co-Chair Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva... →
wilwheaton:
This deal trades peoples’ livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals, and I will not support it. Progressives have been organizing for months to oppose any scheme that cuts Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, and it now seems clear that even these bedrock pillars of the American success story are on the chopping block. Even if this deal were not as bad as...
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Writers Cited in Breivik Manifesto Have Spoken at... →
In light of the “pall” cast by Islamophobia over terrorism training for local police, we have to ask toward what our tax dollars are going. We’re not only supplying the capacity, we’re helping fuel right-wing Christian fundamentalism.
Chris Rodda print page Wed Jul 27, 2011 at 12:44:40 PM ESTIn February 2009, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) received...
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TPM Livewire: PCCC: Debt Ceiling Deal 'A Bizarre... →
TPM Livewire is the place for news on the rapidly evolving (or devolving) situation.
Unsurprisingly, the Progressive Change Change Campaign Committee has joined with other left-leaning groups like MoveOn in condemning the debt ceiling deal currently in the final stages of negotiations on Capitol Hill.
“Seeing a Democratic president take taxing the rich off the table and instead push a...
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“So, when a single left-leaning blog posted a single, dubious report about Rove,...”
– Eric Boehlert: “Fact-Checking the Blogs; Left vs. Right” HuffPost 5/23/06
A family member forwarded a completely bogus video from Powerline. Where was this concern with big gub’mint when Shrub was President? The truth is that the frat boy party is over, and we’re stuck with...
Jul. 31, 2011: The Writer's Almanac →
Sunday’s Poem: “You don’t believe” by William Blake. Sunday’s Literary Notes: On this date in 1703, English novelist, journalist, and pamphleteer Daniel Defoe was pilloried for sedition. He had…
Jul. 30, 2011: The Writer's Almanac →
Saturday’s Poem: “Early Morning: Cape Cod” by May Swenson, from Nature: Poems Old and New. Saturday’s Literary Notes: Emily Bronte was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, on this day in 1818. She…
Orion the Hunter: Ghost of the summer dawn →
If you’re up early, and have an unobstructed view to the east, be sure to look in that direction in the hour before dawn.
If you do, you’ll find a familiar figure, which is always in this…
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Constellation named for a Polish king →
With no moon in sight tonight, look for one of summer’s most beautiful celestial sights. Be sure you are looking in a dark country sky, far away from the the glare of citiy lights.
Looking…
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Norway’s Johan Galtung, Peace & Conflict Pioneer,...
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest right now in Spain is Johan Galtung. He’s a Norwegian sociologist, principal founder of peace and conflict studies, author of the book The Fall of the U.S. Empire—And Then What? We’re talking about this issue of how to avoid, stop these kind of attacks in the future. And then, following up on Juan’s question, your second answer, Johan Galtung?
JOHAN GALTUNG: His ideology, OK, we have to go into it. And it doesn’t help anything, as I said, to call him a "terrorist." We have to try to understand him. So I identify three features very quickly. Point one, a civil war in Europe between deep Christianity, which is his essentially as Catholic, and Islam. And a civil war has been going on and is going on. Point two, Islam is penetrating on a road greased by multiculturalism, tolerance, and key proponents of this tolerance are the builders of that road, which he finds in what he calls "cultural Marxism" and social democracy. And point three, debate is impossible. You cannot end the Norwegian democracy and have a debate about this, because people are deaf and dumb. The Islamists, as he calls and would refer to all Muslims, will not listen; they are just pursuing their cause. In other words, the only possible response, horrible as it is, is violence—terrible, but necessary. There you have three features.
And that makes me immediately ask the question, what does it remind me of? And I have one simple answer and one horrifying answer. I will take the simple answer first: it reminds me of Nazism. There’s a civil war in Europe between Jews and Aryans—also a very basic tenet of Hitlerism, Nazism. And the Jews are of two kind: the Bolshevik Jews in Moscow and the plutocratic money Jews in London. Point two, there is something greasing the way for them, and that is miscegenation, racial mixing, marriages between Jews and Aryans—the worst crime imaginable. And point three, these people have their minds set; there is no dialogue possible. The only thing one can do is to expel them. You might even reward them for expelling them. And if not, the alternative is to execute them. Now, that last point was picked up by Breivik. I don’t think he had it from Nazism, but his idea was that each Muslim family in Norway should be paid 25,000 euro to leave, back to their own country. And if they rejected that, the alternative was execution—exactly the same as the Nazis did under the famous Transfer Agreement during the 1930s, when 60,000 Zionist German Jews were given not only the permission, but encouraged to leave for Palestine. Well, I can call this ideology neo-fascism, and it’s an updating, where instead of being anti-Semitic, it’s anti-Islam, and instead of miscegenation being the fantasma, it’s multiculturalism. So Breivik talks cultures where the Nazis talked race. But otherwise, the similarity is almost point to point.
But you see, then, when again you ask the question, "What does it remind you of?" there is a horrifying answer, which will be very difficult for Norway to process. This is exactly the ideology of the Washington-led attack on Muslim countries. There’s a civil war in Europe. It’s called "clash of civilizations," the idea that came from the Princeton professor Bernard Lewis and was taken by Samuel Huntington’s publishers and put as title of his book, and I think wrongly attributed to Sam. But that doesn’t matter; that’s a small detail. The road is greased by failed states and by local groups taking command those failed states, so that in these failed states, the local groups, be they Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, these groups can launch decisive attacks on the Christian Western mainland, and particularly then U.S. And 9/11 is then interpreted in that context. And point three, makes no sense to have any dialogue. These people, you cannot talk with them. Terrible as it is, the only language they understand is violence. Well, my country, Norway, is a part of that: sharpshooters in Afghanistan killing Taliban.
I had talked to a number of Taliban. I feel very deeply touched by that. They are human beings. They are fighting for their country. Some are what we would call "extremists," most of them are not. I think their ideology has essentially three points. Point one, they stand up for Islam, but know they have made—know very well they have made mistakes, particularly with regard to women. Point two, they hate Kabul as the landing platform for foreign invaders. And they hate being invaded. I have no difficulty accepting those three points. I have great difficulties, or I cannot—I simply reject the Norwegian government signing up with the U.S. effort to try to quench what they see as a rebellion of people with whom they cannot talk.
And then you have Norway in Libya, F-16s, 535 sorties, throwing 501 bombs on what they call military targets. OK, Breivik could say, "My bomb killed very few, and it was on the target." The target was the center of decision making. The parallel is disgusting. And the point about it is that, suddenly, my little country Norway stands as victim. We are mourning today. There are beautiful ceremonies. And I must reach out to the Prime Minister, saying his words are extremely well chosen. He does it beautifully. And at the same time, Norway, under the leadership of Washington, is doing exactly the same thing, only on a much larger scale: perpetrator—victim and perpetrator.
Well, I hope my country will be able to process that. And I think the way to process it, there’s only one road, and that is to point to positive openings, both in Norway, in Europe, and in the world. So, as a mediator, I’m working on that and have a couple of small things to say.
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“I want you all to know that if I haven’t answered to all the expressions of...”
– Ida, granddaughter of Johan Galtung, the great Norwegian sociologist and scholar of peace and conflict, in a personal letter “Norway’s Johan Galtung, Peace & Conflict Pioneer, on How to Stop Extremism that Fueled Shooting” on DemocracyNow! 7/29/11
Ida was caught in the attack...
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Emergency Team Of 8th-Grade Civics Teachers... →
Cute.
JULY 27, 2011 | ISSUE 47•30
WASHINGTON—With lawmakers still at an impasse over increasing the debt ceiling, a special team of 40 eighth-grade civics teachers was air-dropped into Washington earlier today in a last-ditch effort to teach congressional leaders how the government’s legislative process works. “We started them off with the basics, like the difference between a senator and a...
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Norway Terrorist Anders Breivik Purchased... →
Another Breivik-Loughner link is the high-capacity gun clips they used. These were banned during the Clinton administration. Remind me again who’s soft on terror?
By Ben Armbruster on Jul 28, 2011 at 3:13 pm
Politico reports today that, according to the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, Anders Breivik, the right-wing “fundamentalist” charged with the terror attacks in Norway last week,...
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WatchSimple as we can make it for a Faux Noiz anchor (intellectually equivalent to Bill Nye’s target audience, actually, no wait, kids are smarter): “a cupcake cools faster than a big cake.”
thedailywhat:
Say What Now of the Day: Fox News anchor Jon Scott asks Bill Nye if volcanoes on the moon disprove human-influenced climate change.
Fox News: If you can’t beat ‘em, confuse the...
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How Shadowy Right-Wing Front Groups Engineered Our... →
Since the end of the Bush presidency, shadowy right-wing groups, many of them formed for this very purpose, have primed the public with a sophisticated public relations campaign to shift the national discourse to a focus on debt reduction. Many of these groups do not appear partisan, and have figured out ways around registering their activity with the Federal Elections Commission (so the true...
Best summer meteors of 2011 in late July, early... →
Every year, people look forward to the Perseid meteor shower. But, this year, the full moon is destined to interfere with the peak of the shower, which comes on August 12 or 13. That fact…
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“The military budget is not on the table. The military budget is at the table –...”
– Rep. Barney Frank, (D-MA), “It is eating everybody else’s lunch.” « Peace Action Blog
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Michele Bachmann vows to ban teleprompters from... →
motherjones:
Whoops!
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US Islamophobes Influenced Anders Behring Breivik
AMY GOODMAN: Kari Partapuoli, what about the influence of Americans on him, like Robert Spencer, who operates the anti-Muslim website Jihad Watch, which was quoted 64 times in his manifesto?
KARI HELENE PARTAPUOLI: He definitely—that’s definitely—he definitely needs these theoreticians, or if that’s the correct word, to support his ideas, because I don’t think he’s found what he was looking for, ideologically wise, in the Norwegian context. Although these things are developing in some right-wing groups, it just is not as developed as, for example, in what you mentioned, as Spencer here. So he would have to lean on a lot of other international thinkers, if we can call them that, to sort of develop his own theories. But it’s the whole mix, it seems. I mean, some of the researchers who now are studying his manifesto say that, you know, he mixes things together. So he puts things together from different thinkers, from his own mind, and also some of the sort of racial thinking.
And then also religion gets into it, maybe because of—you know, this is part of the Crusades still fighting the Muslims, like Europe has done, in his view, for so many years, and now he’s sort of continuing that, that struggle. So, religion comes into it, as well, and then some sort of version of Christianity. He, himself, criticizes the Norwegian Church for being too Social Democratic. It’s a Protestant state church in Norway, and he criticizes that for being too Democratic—priests marching in the streets alongside pro-Palestine demonstrations, for example. And he says that he doesn’t really prefer that any longer. He would rather have more of a Catholic Church. So, you know, there’s a whole mixture of ideas and thinkers and ideologies in this. Bloggers that he relies on heavily, there’s a Norwegian, still anonymous, blogger called Fjordman that he quotes extensively. And this Fjordman is now being very silent about that, but he—I mean, taking—not supporting at all Breivik’s actions. But so, you know, there’s a whole mixture of things that come together in his manifesto and in his thinking. He’s been developing this for years. This is a person who’s been developing his worldview. It doesn’t happen overnight. And it actually—as it looks now, it seems as if it started, you know, before these sort of major anti-Muslim sentiments actually became part of mainstream European politics.
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“Speculations abound concerning the deeper effects of screen technologies on a...”
– James Carroll (via azspot)
This is a thoughtful epitaph to the demise of Borders, which reverberates quietly through our shared intellectual life. I understand that to some, this will smack of digital dualism. Therefore, I think it is incumbent upon those who embrace both the public and the digital...
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“But what really is striking is that—I mean, even though this is a particularly...”
– Ali Esbati “Eyewitness to Norwegian Massacre: Survivor Recalls Attack at Island Youth Camp” DemocracyNow! 7/27/11
Contrast this with the frame circulated by Pam Gellers and others that this attacker was a “lone wolf.”
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“An unreleased military investigation shows U.S. taxpayer dollars are being...”
– Democracy Now! | Headlines for July 26, 2011
Let’s just be clear about this. Bradley Manning rots in jail in inhumane conditions, and we’re totally gunning for Julian Assange, even though the Pentagon itself admits that Wikileaks has not compromised the safety of any US servicepersons...
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Pat Buchanan: Norwegian Right-Wing Terrorist... →
Oh my, the hate speech is just coming out of the woodwork.
Today, in a World Net Daily op-ed, failed presidential candidate and conservative pundit Pat Buchanan offers an example of the ethnic bigotry and racial insensitivity that has come to define him.
Offering his take on the horrendous terrorist attacks in Norway, Buchanan joined the Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post in arguing...
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Geller Says Norway Attacks Made Her A Victim Of A... →
Pamela Geller drags out the anti-Semitic canard that so plagued Sara Palin six months ago. The scary thing is that Sarah Palin trotted this out in the wake of right-wing terrorism that took place here in the good ole’ USA. Dog whistles anyone?
In an appearance yesterday on Janet Mefferd’s radio show, Geller said that she is under attack because she is one of “the most effective voices,...
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Watch(via “Before Death, Acclaimed “Girl With Dragon Tattoo” Author Stieg Larsson Lamented Right-Wing Extremism”) DemocracyNow! 7/27/11
Okay, Stieg Larsson fans, take a moment to consider his life work, not the novels, but research on the extreme right wing in Scandinavia, and the impassioned and intelligent words of his life partner, Eva Gabrielsson.
In the aftermath of...
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Email from Norway - Atlas Shrugs →
Pamela Geller ran this e-mail from someone in Norway in 2007. If someone is “stockpiling guns,” shouldn’t you alert the Norwegian authorities? The right proposes that Europe is “soft on terrorism.” What is the appropriate choice here, to pass on as fact these rants, or to pass on information about the e-mail to the appropriate authorities? Who’s being soft on...
WatchJust favorited “New York Set to Close School for Troubled Teens After Simple Clerical Error In Budget Request” by Democracy Now on Mixcloud.com
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Forward: Walker Moves to Close 10 DMVs Now That... →
Neo-Jim Crow in Wisconsin. Thank you, Koch addicts. If you don’t like the game, change the rules, I guess.
Having disenfranchised tens of thousands of Wisconsin voters, Walker is now making it harder for many of these voters to obtain the ID they need to regain their right to participate in the next election.
Gov. Scott Walker’s administration is working on finalizing a plan to close as...
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Jul. 26, 2011: The Writer's Almanac →
Tuesday’s Poem: “July” by Louis Jenkins, from Words to that Effect. Tuesday’s Literary Notes: Today is the birthday of the man who said, “If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach…
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“This ersatz crisis began when the Republican zealots in Congress decided to use...”
– Robert Borosage ”Speaker Boehner’s Disgrace” | OurFuture.org July 26, 2011 - 7:57am ET
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“Most Americans, regardless of political party, don’t understand how we can ask a...”
– President Obama on the debt-limit compromise (via athivee)
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“This is a lone psychopath, evil.”
– Pam Geller, a blogger who was cited in Anders Breivik’s 1500-page manifesto.
Geller writes about the threat of Islam in America on her blog, Atlas Shrugs.
According to The Takeaway, Anders Breivik, the Norwegian charged with carrying out a mass killing last week in his home country, was heavily...
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15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent →
nevver:
1. Zhaghzhagh (Persian) The chattering of teeth from the cold or from rage. 2. Yuputka (Ulwa) A word made for walking in the woods at night, it’s the phantom sensation of something crawling on your skin. 3. Slampadato (Italian) Addicted to the infra-red glow of tanning salons? This word describes you. 4. Luftmensch (Yiddish) The Yiddish have scores of words to describe social...
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Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr: The Teen Suicide... →
As a social scientist, I must take with a grain of salt the estimations of advocacy organizations. However, whether or not there is an empirical connection between anti-LGBT activity, increased bullying and official tolerance for the latter, all of three of these behaviors are reprehensible and should be opposed. Moreover, the connection between bullying, particularly of the anti-LGBT variety,...
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Speaker Boehner's Disgrace | OurFuture.org →
Böhner should take up acting… or three card monte.
By Robert Borosage
July 26, 2011 - 7:57am ET
Seldom have we witnessed a more dishonest speech in prime time than that delivered by House Speaker John Boehner last night on the debt ceiling crisis. “The sad truth,” he declared, “ is that the president wanted a blank check six months ago, and he wants a blank check today. That is just not...
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Robert Reich: Vicious Cycles: Why Washington is... →
More wisdom from the former Secretary of Labor (under Bill Clinton, remember him?)
robertreich:
We now live in parallel universes.
One universe is the one in which most Americans live. In it, almost 15 million people are unemployed, wages are declining (adjusted for inflation), and home values are still falling. The unsurprising result is consumers aren’t buying — which is causing...
Mars by Bull’s horns in late July – plus hottest... →
Look eastward before morning dawn (on Tuesday, July 26) to see the waning crescent moon, and two ruddy points of light in the constellation Taurus the Bull. Mars is the red “star” shining…
