O rly?
February 29th, 2008
“In my judgment, the impacts of global climate change in California, compared to the rest of the nation as a whole, are not sufficiently different to be considered ‘compelling and extraordinary conditions’ that merit separate state GHG (greenhouse gas) standards for new motor vehicles,” says the document signed by EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson.
Via Wiki: California ranks among the ten largest economies in the world, and were it a separate country, it would be 34th amongst the most populous countries, just behind Poland, as well as the world’s sixth-largest economy.
Then I guess European nations are too small to be making their own decisions about global warming, huh? I’m sick of this sold country.
You say ‘asked nicely,’ I say ‘beat the shit out of’
February 29th, 2008
It is believed that at least 200 political prisoners are currently being held in Cuba.
Via Wiki: Since the beginning of the War in Afghanistan, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo, approximately 420 of which have been released. As of August 9, 2007, approximately 355 detainees remain.
Detainees, political prisoners, what exactly is the difference? I guess you could say we’ve tortured and released more innocent men than Cuba has imprisoned, but it’s okay since we labelled them ‘maybe terrorists’ instead of ‘politically advantageous show-captives.’
Well, fuck Cuba too!
February 29th, 2008
Via BBC: Cuba has signed two legally binding human rights agreements at the UN in New York, just days after Raul Castro was sworn in as the new president.
*whistles nonchalantly* In any case, Raul Castro looks kinda like my grandpa did before shaved his ’stache, so he’s an alright guy in my book blog.
Yes, that’s right, we must kill Afghani farmers
February 29th, 2008
Record illegal drug production in Afghanistan supplies the Taliban insurgency with money and arms and the U.S.-backed government must take direct, prompt action against poppy growers, a State Department report said Friday.
So sorry we ruined your country and didn’t fix it. Can you please kill your peasant farmers for us and ruin pretty much your entire country’s GDP?
Hey, surprise, just like in Iraq, we actually fucked shit up worse in Afghanistan than when it was under the brutal, repressive Taliban dictatorship.
Via Wiki [emphasis mine]: In 2000, the Taliban had issued a ban on opium production, which led to reductions in Pashtun Mafia opium production by as much as 90%.[68] Soon after the 2001 US led invasion of Afghanistan, however, opium production increased markedly.[69] By 2005, Afghanistan had regained its position as the world’s #1 opium producer and was producing 90% of the world’s opium, most of which is processed into heroin and sold in Europe and Russia.[70] While US and allied efforts to combat the drug trade have been stepped up, the effort is hampered by the fact that many suspected drug traffickers are now top officials in the Karzai government.[71] In fact, recent estimates by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimate that 52% of the nation’s GDP, amounting to $2.7 billion annually, is generated by the drug trade.[72] The rise in production has been linked to the deteriorating security situation, as production is markedly lower in areas with stable security.[73]. The poppy eradication policy propagated by the international community and in particular the United States, as part of their War on Drugs, has been a failure, exacerbated by the lack of alternative development projects to replace livelihoods lost as a result of poppy eradication. Rather than stemming poppy cultivation, poppy eradication has succeeded only in adding to the extreme poverty in rural areas and general discontent, especially in the south of Afghanistan. Several alternatives to poppy eradication have been proposed, including controlled opium licensing for poppy for medicine projects.
So lets just kill or maim the farmers. After all, if they’re physically incapable of growing poppy, they can’t grow poppy!!
The White House responded…
February 29th, 2008
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked the Justice Department on Thursday to open a grand jury investigation into whether President Bush’s chief of staff and former counsel should be prosecuted for contempt of Congress.
At the White House, spokesman Tony Fratto said House Democrats “have been trying to redefine the notion of contempt and they succeeded.”
Both Fratto and House GOP leader John Boehner said the House should focus on passing legislation allowing the government to more easily eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mails of suspected terrorists.
I honestly can’t tell if Fratto is calling the Democrats contemptible, or if he is saying that refusing to appear for a subpoena isn’t currently contemptible and their asking to have this matter investigated is redefining contempt to mean refusing to appear for a subpoena. Anyway, it’s a petty argument. You must obey the law. The king enforced the law but didn’t follow it. That’s why we kicked England’s ass and wrote the constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States does it say the President is allowed to not follow the law.
Anyway, instead of caring about us obeying the law, you should allow us to spy on people in the US. Just like it ought to be.
Lies, fear, spying, and making it all legal.
February 28th, 2008
US says sends warship off coast of Lebanon
Are you fucking kidding me? The greatest country in the world you say?
Hey, Rome was the greatest empire in the world. Hm. Look at them now, in a museum.
Payday jones
February 27th, 2008
It occurs to me that in all these shady-lending things going on in the media, and people calling for reforms in fucked-up markets, that no one mentions the practice of payday loansharking. If any industry needs some regulation hardcore, it’s that one. They don’t break your knees, they just ruin your credit and make you more in ‘need’ of their sketchy services.
Economy’s in the shitter, Bernanke’s looking bitter
February 27th, 2008
Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, signaled his readiness on Wednesday to further reduce interest rates even though inflation has picked up speed, and he called again for more effective rules to deter questionable lending practices.
and the decline in household wealth as a result of falling home prices.
“Decline in household wealth as a result of falling home prices.” I’d like to point out that that is actually Not True. Households are not losing wealth, they are losing the opportunity to go deeper into debt based on inflated valuations of their homes. This is actually increasing debt-safety by stopping home-based lines of credit and forcing people to just repay them, instead of making payments and getting deeper in debt to equity-based credit on homes they don’t own yet. Sure, it’s bad for the rich people that these homedebters were getting in hock to, because their companies now wont be able to be irrationally valued on the stock markets and all their hedge funds that were paid for by junk will tank, which of course will hurt the investors and retirees they’ve suckered, but that would have happened anyway, eventually.
Things will work out, everything is a balance, and like any good pendulum when it swings too far to one side it will come crashing back, then swing again. The ‘wealth’ of a home shouldn’t be spendable, you’re risking your domain for some fast cash. Some of those who have done so will be alright, because they are skilled and will keep their jobs. Some will not. These could even be people that at one point owned their homes, now getting them taken away for some cheap bling from the rich man. From slavery for pyramids to slavery by debt, willingly walked into.
I remember…
February 25th, 2008
Mocking of the early visionaries is part of the topping process. Group think sets in and is reinforced over the years. Risk premiums drop as the long term trend reaches the peak. That takes time. Memories fade. Does anyone fear another great depression? Heck, does anyone even remember it, let alone fear it?
I was raised by someone who was about 10 when the Great Depression hit. I remember the stories, the lifetime scars it left on the hearts and souls and bodies of those hardest hit by the depression, the poor immigrant families of the day. I myself am very young, but was always raised with the attitude of be lucky for what you have because one day you might not have it. And I see examples of this every day in the homeless whose lives have been destroyed by either mental illness or drug abuse (another form of mental illness). They were once like me, but they lost what they had. Well, as a nation we had that problem in the 30s. And it can happen again, because mobs rule and when the biggest mob is poor and not spending any money…
Gaining grounds
February 25th, 2008
More than 16 percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country’s fourth largest “religious group.”
I myself like the Buddha’s teachings of the middle path (i.e. moderation). However, I like the original intent of the Buddha’s message, wherein he does not claim to be a god and says that he should not be worshiped, that following him should not be made into a religion. Of course, no one listens to that, they just want a new ‘god’ to worship and rituals to follow. But I am not part of any organized faith. I have never and will never ‘go to church.’ I applaud those who have woken up to the many ills that organized religion have forced upon us throughout the ages. When I was younger, I felt alone, now I can say that one in seven people actually admit to thinking like I do about this.
I bet that will drive conservative nuts nuts and they will deny it as the liberal bias of the NYT. I wonder what the anti-immigration conservative movement would say when they find out that the only reason we still have the same amount of Catholics in this country is due to (illegal?) immigration from Mexico and other parts south. “They bring us drugs, disease, poverty, and more Catholics than we can raise ourselves! How dare they!”
We can fight as extremists, or get along as moderates. I’ll respect your religion as long as you respect my lack thereof. What you call God I call Nature. What you call miracles I call hallucinations written about unverifiably by long-dead men who loved to write in allegory. I tend to believe in concrete things I can touch and derive from my own experiences.
The Hindu beliefs of Brahma and atman, samsara and moksha, those all sound like metaphors for the world that quantum mechanics and nanotechnology are introducing us to. For instance: the technical scientific limitation to the possible orbits of the outermost electron of an individual atom are defined as infinite. The fact that we exchange electrons, which make up the physical properties of the world we see around us, is evidence of the interconnectedness of being that Hindu and Buddhist faiths propose. However, they make the mistake of saying the world is an illusion that is not important. That I take issue with, I believe the outer world is just as important as the inner, precisely because of the interconnectedness of being. When you trash Nature, you trash yourself. When you trash yourself, you trash your spirit. Science has told us that we are made out of the remnants of long-dead stars. If that’s not interconnectedness, knowing that we were born out of processes born out of the very beginning of our observable universe, I don’t know what is.
Religion can have some useful metaphors and morals. But you must remember that it is metaphor, anything to do with spirituality must be metaphor and thusly have different but similar meanings to anyone that experiences it. Take the good, leave the bad, and progress forward with life, yo.