what non-human species?

it's the end of the world as we know it, but i don't feel so fine...

what the House did today constitutes an unconscienable act of aggression against the earth, when they passed the new bill to essentially end the Endangered Species Act. Of the several particulars of the bill that are beyond heinious, the two with which i have the most trouble are the ones that end science as a discipline and the placing of personal private property of one over the health and welfare of all.

To suggest that a political appointee, with virtually no experience in their department nor in any science other than the economy of political fundraising, will determine what is science and what is not science, is perhaps the most radical of faith based institutionization yet perpetrated on the US. I can see it now, the council of the cabal, meeting in their illuminati chairs hidden in the bowels of the secret pyramid beneath the capitol mall, reviewing the best political machinations for their empire building, deciding just what scientific truth they shall create this day. Waving wands in front of their cloaks they conjur a statement that becomes the law, not just politically and economically, but also for all objective constructs as well.

And the notion that one man's personal property is the absolute determinant of what is valuable about the planet and thus worth saving or not, creates the latest in Randian/Straussian horrors of oligarchic plutocratic fascist edictism. I am John Galt and i get to choose how the world lives or dies, and all in that world are subjects of my dominion. Aint' it grand. All i can say is that i am seriously rooting for the protists, monerans, and fungi to destroy the rest of the plant and animal kingdoms thus ridding the planet of humans for all time to come.

da problem with the trolls of unktehi

on a generally liberal blog i frequent the following comment was made, and from which a debate ensued, fed by conservative trolls who railed against public education essentially from their fundamental belief in racism, classism, and elitism(can we say Randianism). Here is the comment:

How come Bellevue schools are better than Seattle schools, even though Bellevue spends 20% less per student than Seattle?

I read all one hundred comments that followed, and was just as dismayed with the liberals to the extent that not a single poster thought to challenge the context of the initial question at all. The trolls on the other hand ranted and raved about how white upper class education was the hallmark of good citizenship and that it is simply too bad for anyone else, especially the poor and people of color but that is the way it is. The fact that not one person asked the most obvious of all questions is indicative of something in our society that i find hugely frustrating. People no matter who they are, and trolls in particular, would never think to engage in a discussion of particle physics, cosmological theory, molecular bio-chemistry, ethnopharmacology etc. They recognize that unless they are persons focussed in those fields, they should avoid commenting because they acknowledge their own ignorance. Not true with religion or education. Every single person feels absolutely qualified to discuss religion and education issues ad nauseum; they all are magically transformed into experts. Well the above case demonstrates why this is such a huge problem.

How can one school district be better than another school district? Wouldn't it be useful to ask what is meant by the word/term value laden construct symbol "better?" Just what is better about one district than the other? That not one person asked the question immediately presented the group with a shared agreement that this statement is "true" without any degree of ascertaining its veracity or declaring it to be so. A hundred comments all engaged in bitterness and tirades against one another, while never challenging the premise that started it all. All these education "experts" who must KNOW what they know sufficiently to comment and criticize and evaluate material texts based on their own glaringly uninformed opinions. As someone who is actually a professional educator (retired) w/ a Ph.D. in the philosophy of education i do feel comfortable talking about the question. I feel i have sufficient knowledge and experience w/ regard to all of the possible parameters of it. I know what it says and what it intends to mean and how infered within it is a bigotry and zealousness for a partisan political agenda that reeks of increasing ignorance not knowledge. What aggravates me most is that the liberals got sucked into the discussion in the way they did.

As for the question/comment. Better is certainly too loaded of a term to be addressed by any reasonable person but especially by the experts; who of course would never ask such a question in the first place. Do we compare sizeable schools, do we use standardized tests, do we accept that the formulas for compounding the thousands of variables into a set of misleading but manageable quanitifiable function factors---these are but three of the hundreds of questions that deserve to be asked. Should we compare economic factors since the question asked about economics?? Should we engage in disaggregation of the data streams to sort out the various means, medians, ranges for which some highly inaccurate but marginally acknowledgeable criteria may exist?? See isn't it too nuts..

turn turn turn again...

A school I visited three years ago in Columbus, Ohio, was littered with "Help Wanted" signs. Starting in kindergarten, children in the school were being asked to think about the jobs that they might choose when they grew up. In one classroom there was a poster that displayed the names of several retail stores: J. C. Penney, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Sears, and a few others. "It's like working in a store," a classroom aide explained. "The children are learning to pretend they're cashiers." At another school in the same district, children were encouraged to apply for jobs in their classrooms. Among the job positions open to the children in this school, there was an "Absence Manager" and a "Behavior Chart Manager," a "Form Collector Manager," a "Paper Passer Outer Manager," a "Paper Collecting Manager," a "Paper Returning Manager," an "Exit Ticket Manager," even a "Learning Manager," a "Reading Corner Manager," and a "Score Keeper Manager." I asked the principal if there was a special reason why those two words "management" and "manager" kept popping up throughout the school. "We want every child to be working as a manager while he or she is in this school," the principal explained. "We want to make them understand that, in this country, companies will give you opportunities to work, to prove yourself, no matter what you've done." I wasn't sure what she meant by "no matter what you've done," and asked her if she could explain it. "Even if you have a felony arrest," she said, "we want you to understand that you can be a manager someday."

Now do need to consider that if this is how we want all the children educated then all the children should be educated this way. But of course we only want other children, especially colored children to learn this, and keep the universities open only to the privileged white kids, boys for sure. Consider these two comments:

from Jonathon Kozol's essay in the September Harper's(as is the large quote above):

Admittedly, the economic needs of a society are hound to be reflected to some rational degree within the policies and purposes of public schools. But, even so, there must be something more to life as it is lived by six-year-olds or six-year-olds, or by teenagers, for that matter, than concerns about "successful global competition." Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.

Very few people who are not involved with inner-city schools have any real idea of the extremes to which the mercantile distortion of the purposes and character of education have been taken or how unabashedly proponents of these practices are willing to defend them. The head of a Chicago school, for instance, who was criticized by some for emphasizing rote instruction that, his critics said, was turning children into "robots," found no reason to dispute the charge. "Did you ever stop to think that these robots will never burglarize your home?" he asked, and "will never snatch your pocketbooks. . . . These robots are going to be producing taxes.^"

from my friend Terry Flanagan's email last night(he is retiring this year after 35 years of teaching in the innercity of LA):

I may wait until June. This will be the last year before our school is completely roboticized, thus ending the need for teachers as we know them.

What?! We are roboticizing our educational systems? Well only for the poor and underprivileged which is translated as black and hispanic. We are choosing, as a nation, to destroy our public education system, enslave the masses through their enforced ignorance, and then retain the best and brightest for the white males. The underlying racism and classism can no longer be ignored. As a nation, led by the corporate fascists, we are embarked on a path that promotes a white aristocracy ruling a multi-cultural slave class. No wonder the Federalist Society, encouraging the appointment of one of their own to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, demands that the only interpretation of the Constitution is a pure originalism based on the slave holding, indian killing, property owning, moneyed elites' opinions of self governance under which all else are slaves and powerless without rights.

Mní kte sni yelo

there are days when things don't work well and this is one of them... i had this post ready to, well, post. but it got deleted by some inadvertant power surge.. this so sucks. why why why??? oohohohoh... well i will try later then

damn it all

let's go driving in the car, car.

Let's go driving in an automobile
Let's take a ride in a car.
Listen to the sounds we all can hear
As we travel near and far
Vroom, vr-vroom, vr-vroom
Vroom, vroom, vroom
Beep, be-beep, be-beep, beep
Swish, sw-swish, sw-swish,
Swish, swish, swish
La, la, la, la, la.

So yesterday i go driving in the car; needing to go to Missoula for a meeting and such. Now I-90 between here and Missoula covers a bit more than 200 miles most of which transcects the Rocky Mountains through the panhandle of Idaho and the eerily strange Clark Fork River canyon(strange because as you tend to perceive yourself driving downhill to Missoula you are in fact driving up the river flow). Much of the road passes through a number of small mining towns surrounded by the usual assortments of tailings, rusted hulks of equipment, touristy little antique efforts, and the hideous ugliness of partially restored dessimated landscapes. What regrown forests there have been since the 1940's are either burned, being clear cut again, or are too young to be cut. Why i mention this is that we(esp liberal enviro types) all too often overlook the highway itself in our quest to go somewhere to enjoy beautiful vistas and access to natural playlands.

This summer i spent a great deal of time, as usual, driving up and down the pacific coast from one music festival to another, one concert to the next. Usually i had friends or my son along, and we would often comment on the various clearcuts, destruction of habitat, ruination of view sheds, expansive housing and industrial development and so forth. But yesterday i chose to pay particular attention to the road. The interstate and US highway system has consumed more forest and viewshed, destroyed more stream flows and species habitats, killed more species(check a windshield lately) than logging and mining combined. Thousands of squaremiles of north america lays beneath concrete and asphalt and more is being overburdened each day. Next time you drive through a national forest on a highway and remark about the clearcut on the sides, remind your self that were it not for the clear cutting, the bulldozing, the mashing smashing tearing up of the earth creating huge destruction of stream and river habitats, you wouldn't be driving along so happily being able to see the forest in the first place. We not only paved paradise to put up the parking lot, we paved it to get from parking lot to parking lot. We destroyed it to get to it, we ransacked it to walk in it.

an interesting weekend

we are certainly living in some ugly times in this country, and yet, there are such beautiful people out there who seem to be able to glorify and magnify their humanity in the face of such evil. hundreds of thousands of citizens, maybe millions, stood out on saturday against the war in iraq and for the support of human beings. such a protest laid the table for a simpler debate. Are we, as a nation, happily moving forward in the direction of fascism and global military engagement, or are we as a people willing to make the world understand that we know our leadership is the most evil incarnate upon this planet in more than two generations? I give but one small example. Late news friday(outside the ability of the MSM to catch the story) reports that the Bush administration has decided that the only countries guilty of trafficing in children are those with which the administration wishes to conquer--north korea, iran, cuba---- now among those that Bush chose to claim had made "significant improvement" in their efforts to not kidnap and enslave children are Saudi Arabia, China and... wait for this..... Sudan! How could Sudan have improved its record--well there is that genocidal war going on there. Killing them all certainly qualifies as a means to not enslave and force work on kids or adults. It is sheer audacity and vugarity that this administration holds their own personal economic interests ahead of not only this nation, but the whole of the planet as well---what do the eleven countries that were let off the sanctions for this most evil behavior have in common---can you spell oil and holding US T-bills.

media predicts our future, well it used to:

Just as Margaret Atwood's HANDMAID'S TALE predicted the nightmare that is the creeping theo-fascism that is endemic to the elites of this nation, so clearly seen in the NOLA situation, and even further evidenced in the "camps" that are being set up across this nation to house the colored and impoverished---Paddy Chayefsky wrote the novel/screenplay for the film NETWORK at the height of the Nixon ugliness. Mark Drolette today reminds us all of that one amazing scene that i have found to be so clearly portending this that has come. Combined with the scenes in the original ROLLERBALL, when the corporations that own the various aspects of the earth's infrastructure compete using physical gladitorial slaves, this scene is the identifier of all that is clearly wrong with the US today:

"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal -- that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!

"You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T and T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale!"

Re vera, potas bene

MTV has removed itself even further from the mainstream, dedicating two shows this season to the scions of ostentacious wealth.

Laguna Beach, the real OC is nothing more than a platform for encouraging the masses to act like the super rich spoiled little brats on this show. This snottly beasts with their expensive daily habits think nothing of violating all sorts of CA penal codes recognizing that they have not one shred of risk from being charged with any of the crimes they commit. They further uglify the culture by flashing their complete lack of thrift by travelling excessively from one mansion to another, from one ski resort to another surf resort, from one luxury restaurant to another Ritz hotel. The editors have made sure that not one bit of compassion or concern is shown by any of the players, whilst they jive and groove to the day's potentials, whether they be denigrating friends or cheating on ex's(how this is possible is the only craft that editors and directors seem to employ).

But even worse than LB is Sweet Sixteen. Tracking the short brief history of incredibly spoiled bitches receiving the keys to luxury cars and five star hotel suites from parents with way too much money to spend on utter lunacy, this show attacks the core of adolescent development. In essence the message is that if you aren't one of the wealthiest bitches you are so unworthy in this life that you will not ever be able to enjoy your own rite of passage. It is ironic that they find only those families whose daughters are some of the ugliest freakiest not so sweet sixteens to film anecdotally. I can only assume that this is because the other RB's families know that their kids will violate even more laws than those kids on LB. I can see the shows next year, the parents begging MTV to come film their expenditures of money on parties, amounts that could buy most people new homes, shed on four or eight hours of partying and celebration. "Look at me, look at how much my parents love me, by spending all this money on me!"

It concerns me that the message that these shows provide to the masses is one of how it is just too bad you aren't like this, and whatever you do, do not challenge or question or inquire; just shut up and know your place in the schema of things in the US. As if Katrina never happened we are reminded that only the rich white families will ever be able to sustain their own lifestyles, at the expense of the poor. And where is the middle class in any of these shows. You don't see the doormen, the waiters, the gas station attendents, the maids, the slaves of the gentrified money classes. They are carefully and faithfully excised from these kids lives, while we all know full well, that none of these kids could survive without them.

welfare mentality?? all in the eye of the racists

two different stories today: both highly indicative of the inherent systemic racism of those in the US who perceive people of color inferior to the euro-americans. When so many shout that the problems of african american criminal behavior is part and parcel the result of a socially just welfare system, then they also need to shout that it is that same "welfare" that creates the criminal behaviors of these others. Of course they will never ever do that, because in essence, it is this very sort of behavior that is the bedrock of their own elitist claims to dominance and hierarchical prestige: capitalism at its best!!
From TomPaine.com comes this piece from an essay by Rumpler and Fidis:

Sound public policy dictates that industries should be liable for the toxic contamination they create in the pursuit of profit. And it is hard to believe that the multibillion-dollar oil and chemical companies residing in Cancer Alley, along with their insurers, did not contemplate the risks their facilities and products would pose in a severe hurricane.

However, it is unlikely that American taxpayers will receive one dime of reimbursement from these powerful polluters. When Superfund became law in 1986, the oil and chemical industries persuaded Congress to include two liability loopholes. First, petroleum is exempted from the definition of hazardous waste. Second, “acts of God” constitute an affirmative defense for toxic spills. In exchange, the industry agreed to the imposition of “polluter pays” fees to provide a steady and reliable source of money to pay for toxic cleanups—especially in cases where liability could not be imposed.

Up front, this Faustian bargain with the likes of DuPont and Shell might appear as a reasonable and pragmatic calculation. In hindsight, the public was shortchanged by legislative sleight of hand: While the loopholes were drafted as permanent, the polluter pays provision required reauthorization by Congress.

And that’s where the chemical companies went to work—launching a multi-year PR campaign to smear Superfund and undercut support for polluter pays. In 1995, their efforts paid off; Congress failed to reauthorize the fees. As a result, the Superfund is now officially bankrupt. The Oil Spill Liability fund is expected to be bankrupt by 2009, although costs to clean Katrina oil spills may advance this date. And in case you hadn’t heard, Exxon/Mobil just reported record-breaking profits on the order of $8 billion earnings last quarter.

<>But the injustice does not end there. A combination of wars and tax cuts has left the federal treasury ill-equipped to finance the grand “Marshall Plan for New Orleans” that has been heralded in recent days. With limited resources, the pressure to cut corners will be great. Will cleanup standards be compromised to ensure adequate funding for jobs, food and housing? With no polluter money on the table, the risks of such unconscionable choices become graver by the day.

Hey this isn't looting from the US citizens, it is merely increasing profits and offsetting expenditures to do so. Afterall the ability to bribe congress and be free from criminal sanctions is equal to the amount of dollars expended in such activities versus the perception that a PR campaign can wage on others to cover it up. Look over there, black people looting; do not look at the man behind the curtain. So thousands of children over the next several generations, mostly those of color, but certainly a significant degree of relatively wealthy white ones too, will suffer immeasureable and uncontrollable cancers and infections created by the toxic stews of this horrible mess, without any recourse to funds to help defray the costs of treatment or cleanup. No not looting, just blatant horrendous grand theft evil. But as if that isn't enough, the other story today out of the Independent online edition by Patrick Cockburn, itemizes another great military/industrial corporate engineered theft of billions.

One billion dollars has been plundered from Iraq's defence ministry in one of the largest thefts in history, The Independent can reveal, leaving the country's army to fight a savage insurgency with museum-piece weapons.

The money, intended to train and equip an Iraqi army capable of bringing security to a country shattered by the US-led invasion and prolonged rebellion, was instead siphoned abroad in cash and has disappeared.

"It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history," Ali Allawi, Iraq's Finance Minister, told The Independent.

"Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal."

The carefully planned theft has so weakened the army that it cannot hold Baghdad against insurgent attack without American military support, Iraqi officials say, making it difficult for the US to withdraw its 135,000- strong army from Iraq, as Washington says it wishes to do.

Most of the money was supposedly spent buying arms from Poland and Pakistan. The contracts were peculiar in four ways. According to Mr Allawi, they were awarded without bidding, and were signed with a Baghdad-based company, and not directly with the foreign supplier. The money was paid up front, and, surprisingly for Iraq, it was paid at great speed out of the ministry's account with the Central Bank. Military equipment purchased in Poland included 28-year-old Soviet-made helicopters. The manufacturers said they should have been scrapped after 25 years of service. Armoured cars purchased by Iraq turned out to be so poorly made that even a bullet from an elderly AK-47 machine-gun could penetrate their armour. A shipment of the latest MP5 American machine-guns, at a cost of $3,500 (£1,900) each, consisted in reality of Egyptian copies worth only $200 a gun. Other armoured cars leaked so much oil that they had to be abandoned. A deal was struck to buy 7.62mm machine-gun bullets for 16 cents each, although they should have cost between 4 and 6 cents.

Many Iraqi soldiers and police have died because they were not properly equipped. In Baghdad they often ride in civilian pick-up trucks vulnerable to gunfire, rocket- propelled grenades or roadside bombs. For months even men defusing bombs had no protection against blast because they worked without bullet-proof vests. These were often promised but never turned up.The Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit says in a report to the Iraqi government that US-appointed Iraqi officials in the defence ministry allegedly presided over these dubious transactions.

<>Senior Iraqi officials now say they cannot understand how, if this is so, the disappearance of almost all the military procurement budget could have passed unnoticed by the US military in Baghdad and civilian advisers working in the defence ministry.<> Mr Allawi says a further $500m to $600m has allegedly disappeared from the electricity, transport, interior and other ministries.
The sum missing over an eight-month period in 2004 and 2005 is the equivalent of the $1.8bn that Saddam allegedly received in kick- backs under the UN's oil-for-food programme between 1997 and 2003. The UN was pilloried for not stopping this corruption. The US military is likely to be criticised over the latest scandal because it was far better placed than the UN to monitor corruption.

See, those damn Iraqi Arab colored types, and again the africans(kofi annan), are just despicable criminals bred from all of the social justice programs perpetrated by liberals. Just don't look at the paper and dig too deep into the files or mention how the US based military/industrial complex(think Halliburton/Fluor/Olin/et al) is so apt at removing billions of dollars from systems for which no audits can account. So far the affirmed missing billions just from Iraq alone, under the watchful care of a certain Paul Bremer(now in charge of NOLA cleanup and rebuilding) is $12 billion and climbing. But hey, those Swiss really need the investments in Euros into their accounts as does the Chinese and Russian agencies that are co-sponsoring the syphoning of petroleum supplies and other superior technologies. Stolen billions can provide a great deal of access as do record profits generated from avoiding paying cleanup fees and long term healthcare for those that they choose to destroy.

we are volunteers in the revolution????

so what the hell is Tommy Hilfigger doing selling cheap China made red white and blue clothes using the Jefferson Airplane anthem Volunteers???? If there was one album of the late 60's that focussed the rage and disappointment in the US among those who had imbibed too much Kool-Aid it was Volunteers. Song after song agonizing about the dangers of the destruction of human dignity and planetary health by the government--Dem or Republican, has now been reduced to selling crappily designed clothes on TV. Just for referent:

LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENING OUT IN THE STREETS
GOT A REVOLUTION, GOT TO REVOLUTION
HEY I'M DANCING DOWN THE STREETS
GOT A REVOLUTION, GOT TO REVOLUTION
AIN'T IT AMAZING ALL THE PEOPLE I MEET
GOT A REVOLUTION, GOT TO REVOLUTION

ONE GENERATION GOT OLD
ONE GENERATION GOT SOUL
THIS GENERATION GOT NO DESTINATION TO HOLD
PICK UP THE CRY

HEY NOW IT'S TIME FOR YOU AND ME
GOT A REVOLUTION, GOT TO REVOLUTION
COME ON NOW WE'RE MARCHING TO THE SEA
GOT A REVOLUTION, GOT TO REVOLUTION

WHO WILL TAKE IT FROM YOU
WE WILL AND WHO ARE WE

WE ARE VOLUNTEERS OF AMERIKA

We are talking about revolutionary action against the status quo, against the government, against the corporatists dedicated to destroying the planet and engaged in empire building. And now TH has purchased--using his corporate power in the most imperious of ways--a revolutionary anthem to cheapen the message and suggest that his current line of underwear and excessively overpriced jeans are something other than the piece of crap they are. There is a great and horrible sadness in this.

How deep in debt are we willing to get?

The federal insurer of pensions could find itself responsible for another $11 billion in obligations to workers at Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines, now that the two carriers have filed for bankruptcy. Although neither carrier has said it plans to terminate pensions and turn them over to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., both have indicated they will no longer contribute to their plans - a tactic United Airlines used successfully in July 2004. The future, however, looks grim. The agency may face a shortfall of $86.7 billion during the next 10 years, according to a Congressional Budget Office report released yesterday. This figure estimates the agency will assume $63.4 billion in additional obligations from terminations that will occur over the next decade. The PBGC declined to comment on the report.

So someone should start doing the math on these sorts of public pronouncements. In just the last two weeks alone the fiscal news hasn't been particularly positive. I suspect the MSM is quite content in not making a point of aligning the dollar numbers needed in a spreadsheet that would show just how out of balance our thinking and our economy has become. The CPA in Iraq suspended all reconstruction in that country because they had exhausted the more than $22 billion set aside for 2005. The vast majority of that money went to... private security contractors(who just happen to be lining up in the Gulf region for more of the handouts).. as well as being lost and/or unaccountable in the audits. We are spending around a billion a day on Iraq just to maintain our military presence(again most of that goes to private corporations). Then the nation decides it needs to spend an additional $200 billion on the Gulf Coast this year, and several billions more in the next five years. Now the various financial mismanagements of major corporations are forcing the PBGC to seek nearly a $100 billion to cover the bankrupt insured pensions of a surprisingly large number of citizens who, without this insurance, would further bankrupt the banks and financial institutions. All the while we are in the process, as a nation, of cutting the taxes for the wealthiest financiers (those raking in the dough from the government contracts and from mismanaging funds to their benefits); these tax cuts alone will amount to more than $260 billion a year for at least the next decade and possibly more as the wealth is consolidated between fewer and fewer individuals who take these assets out of the country for safer keeping.

If we think the poor african americans were a bit pissy and testy as they were deprived of access to basic human needs, start envisioning millions upon millions of citizens in the US discovering that they are being marginalized into destitution and impoverishment for the benefit of so few. What these Norquist freaks fail to realize is that the US is populated by the largest private ownership of weapons of any population in the world. We don't have sufficient troops, law enforcement personnel, nor private security forces to stop the eruption of overt violence that will precipitate from the collapse of basic needs support for the mass of the population. The world has seen nothing yet in comparison, and that includes the famines in Africa and subcontinental Asia.

Kikta yo kids...

More than half of American teens ages 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex, increasing to nearly 70% for those who are 18 and 19, according to the largest federal study of the nation's sexual practices.

The study also found that 11% of women ages 18 to 44 reported having at least one homosexual experience in their lifetime, up from 4% in a similar survey conducted in 1992.

Taken together, the two findings suggest a shift in sexual practices, in which females are using oral and lesbian sex "as a safer alternative than [vaginal] sex with men," said epidemiologist William D. Mosher of the National Center for Health Statistics, the study's lead author.

"If it is seen as a safer alternative, it is an interesting response to the campaigns to reduce teen pregnancy and to reduce sexually transmitted diseases and HIV," he said.

However, only 9% of the teens reported using condoms during oral sex. Studies have shown that gonorrhea, syphilis, genital herpes and human papillomavirus can be transmitted in this manner.

"They have not been given a strong enough message about the health risks of oral sex," said Dr. Claire Brindis of UC San Francisco.

hell's bells, what do these kids think they are doing??? "it isn't like we hooked up??" "we didn't have sex" "we just, well, you know, played around." Now anecdotally i can support the findings from my research over the last fifteen years of my own student's progress and development. In the last three years alone, numerous female high school students have stepped forward publicly to avow their bi-sexuality and overt lesbianism, when just five years ago that was a socially stigmatizing taboo. Before this study was released i had asked some former students from a decade ago, if they were aware of that much homosexual experience among their peers. They said there were not, and did not believe that they were socially able to engage in those behaviors as a response to the problems in the world around them because of the red neck christian ethical climate which surrounded them. In that some of that same christian ethic is promotional of chastity and thus encourages virginity while accepting irresponsible non-intercourse sexual behaviors, it should come as no surprise that more and more females are engaging in bi-sexuality while male homosexuality is declining in the same settings.

What strikes me as particularly dysfunctional is the excessive overt "advertising" of these traits, especially on websites such as yahoo personals and myspace.com. When you have a public forum encouraging young adults(and the all too many teens who lie about their ages to use the systems) to literally advertise their sexual preferences as a "cool" card, you are are society that has begun to turn away from the idiot moralizing and socially destructive fundamentalist ethic at the same moment that that group is insisting upon forcing that on people. This overt expression of sexual non-preferences is a revolutionary act in the face of the mounting campaign by evangelicals and fundamentalists to hold power over the personal cognitive views of the population. The only reservations i have are in the choices to not be safe about it, otherwise this trend is wonderfully radical.

Raptus regaliter:

When my bleakest long term predictions start being realized i am becoming more aware that there will not be much left of the US constitutional democratic republic for any of my grandchildren to grow up in. This pretty much sums up one aspect of something i said a long time ago.

President Bush proposed the creation of a "Gulf Opportunity Zone" to encompass "the region of the disaster in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama." You won't find specifics in Bush's speech, but you can find them on the Heritage Foundation's website, since it proposed the idea in its "manifesto on post-Katrina policy" last week. According to Heritage's plan, the "opportunity" in the zones is actually for the wealthy few and for special interests seeking to strip away government protections and regulations. Heritage calls for a panel of government and private sector officials to target "regulations at all levels" to be "eliminated or simplified," for capital gains taxes and the estate tax for the ultra-weathy to be repealed, and for waivers on environmental rules.

The US will build, is building as i type this, security camps(razor wire hung to keep people in) in the southern great plains full of trailers and manufactured boxes and reconfigured storage containers in which thousands of the impoverished descendents of slaves will live, work, shop, play, and maybe have some rudimentary education for their children. Meanwhile billions and billions of dollars will be spent on refurbishing the Gulf Coast to accomodate the latest and greatest billionaire homeland also in security camps, this time with the razor wire facing out and protected by the most expensive government financed private security forces that could have ever been trained in Iraq. It almost appears that Iraq was merely a testing ground for the type of development and services the US intends to provide for its citizens. The rich will get the luxury estates of their dreams built to their specifications while the rest of the population will live hand to mouth until they too find their way into the camps working for room and board in government sponsored company towns cleaning up hazardous waste and making toxic materials and products to be sold to China and India. Are you getting the idea, yet???? It is already fucking happening.

John Stossel the libertarian idiot

Finally one of the truly idiotic egos in the US makes my case for me:

You continue on your quest, and finally find that dreaded monster, the price gouger. He offers a bottle of water that cost $1 last week at an "outrageous" price -- say $20. You pay it to survive the disaster.

You resent the price gouger. But if he hadn't demanded $20, he'd have been out of water. It was the price gouger's "exploitation" that saved your child.

It saved her because people look out for their own interests. Before you got to the water seller, other people did. At $1 a bottle, they stocked up. At $20 a bottle, they bought more cautiously. By charging $20, the price gouger makes sure his water goes to those who really need it.

The people the softheaded politicians think are cruelest are doing the most to help. Assuming the demand for bottled water was going to go up, they bought a lot of it, planning to resell it at a steep profit. If they hadn't done that, that water would not have been available for the people who need it the most.

[...]

It's the price "gougers" who bring the water, ship the gasoline, fix the roof, and rebuild the cities. The price "gougers" save lives.

Now you have to really appreciate the philosophical principle behind this sort of syllogism. Let us get the picture of this altruistic water seller, standing on a corner with an ice chest out of which he pulls some bottled water and offers it for a completely unrealistic price. The water is something you need, for yourself and your child. The seller seems to have no needs except money(why this is the case in the middle of a huge disaster of course is not addressed) and is solely interested in generating private wealth from the property he controls. Withholding the property from those that need it intentionally inflicts suffering and possible fatal consequences on others. Stossel for some bizarre idiotic reason thinks a person is going to pay for the water because: they have the extra dollars floating around, they are wealthy but incapable of caring for themselves, that human beings will of course behave coldly rational in this situation, the water is available from a number of similar vendors, etc. When needs are not met, and when one is using desperation to increase one's personal wealthy the only rational logical action is to shoot the fucker and take the water and distribute it to others who need it for free. How could there be any other response.

it is all our fault of course... the blame game

James McWorther, that child of the Vernon Jordans, Robert Johnsons, Uncle Toms, wrote for the Manhattan Institute this ditty of apolofuckingetics for who is to blame for creating the visions on TV from NOLA.

This is the hell that most of the people in the Superdome either lived in or knew at close hand, and none of them could help being stamped by it. Welfare reform was only nine years ago. The women now past the five-year cap are mostly struggling in dead-end jobs. This is better than living on the dole. But these women are weighed down by too many kids created under the old regime to have the time or energy to get the education to get beyond where they are. Poor black neighbourhoods are not what they were at the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, but they are still a crying shame.

The poor black America that welfare expansion created in 1966 is still with us. Poor young blacks have never known anything else. People as old as 50 have only vague memories of life before it. For 30 years this was a world within a world, as is made clear from how often the Katrina refugees mention it is the first time they have ever left New Orleans.

What Katrina stripped bare, then, was not white supremacy, but that culture matters — even if what created the culture was misguided white benevolence. Social scientists neglect that before the 1960s poor blacks knew plenty of economic downturns and plenty more racism.

But before the 1960s the kinds of behaviour so common among the blacks stranded in the Superdome, possibly including multiple rapes, was a fringe phenomenon. Only after the 1960s did it become a community norm.

Well obviously the most important thing we can do is to return all of that welfare $$ and make sure that we reinstitute slavery as quickly as possible for all african americans--no wait--just for the poor ones, and the middle class ones, and well maybe the rich gangsta ones. This argument of his, other than being purely silly and inane without any citational support or documented data and research, does represent the thinking of those same white racists who bring us closer to an apartheid society not unlike that of most military dictatorships around the world. This "fringe phenomenon" certainly ignores the history of places like Detroit, East St. Louis, Washington D.C., and other locales around the US who experienced black on black violence and hostility from the earliest days. To desire a return to that period, as it seems poor ol' James would have us believe is best, further ignores the influence of african american athletic and celebrity success, most of which is garnered from the white people wishing to be like the blacks in the ghetto. But of course he makes no mention of that; why? Well he is already pushing his lack of expertise in sociology and to engage in discourse regarding role modelling and TV's influence and the success of advertising and media saturation of luxury lifestyles, would disprove his thesis. I wonder what he would say if, no when, this sort of crisis chaos occurs in upscale communities of good white folk. Then all that looting and ugly human behavior will have to be played out as something about liberal permissive child rearing i suppose.

UPDATE: well i didn't have to work to hard to find an example. Here is a story from Belfast today:
You could be forgiven for thinking that Northern Ireland had left its days of organized violence behind. The last few years have been relatively quiet, even encouraging: the peace process seemed to be making strides. Cranes hovering over Belfast's skyline were evidence that reconstruction money was flowing to the area. What's more, the Catholic Irish-nationalist movement's political wing, Sinn Fein, had recently gotten a decisive leg-up on the movement's military division, by convincing the IRA to agree to a ceasefire. But the IRA still hasn't given up its weapons and this week's eruption of violence underscores tensions caused by the fact that many of Northern Ireland's Protestants feel the IRA and Catholics have disproportionately gained from the peace process.

The mayhem that broke out in Belfast has left behind a disturbing amount of destruction, a surfeit of unsettling images, 60 injured policemen and massive social unease. Few deny that Loyalist Protestants were responsible for the weekend's violence: the rioting erupted on Saturday when Northern Ireland's main legal Protestant fraternity, the Orange Order, called for Protestants to mount sit-down protests on roads all over Belfast in response to British authorities' refusal to allow an Orange parade from passing along a main road on the Catholic side of town. Before long, the ostensibly peaceful protest had transformed into a hailstorm of automatic gunfire and Molotov cocktails.

The tenor is that of people rioting looting raping, burning and killing, just like NOLA? So what is McWorther's causal discourse here. Oh yeah, it must have been British socialized medicine and possibly the use of welfare funds to provide only for the poor catholics??? Obviously for Jimmy history over centuries is irrelevant.

unkiciktepi

The NRC granted a license to an impoverished indigenous tribe in Utah to make their money by storing 44,000 tones of nuclear waste on their land. They will call this a temporary repository until the final approval and completion of the national repository in Nevada makes that site available. What does this mean for all of us???

Well for starters, let us consider the term "temporary?" If you move and store spent fuel rods and other medium level radioactive waste in a spot, you tend to create a place that become radioactive. Hence all of the various places around the US that are horribly toxic from it in the first place. By storing the waste temporarily, we increase the amount we need to store later, in that the storage facility becomes waste as well. So we move more and more nuclear contaminants around the country on trains, particularly along farming and ranching corridors, thus increasing the risk of contamination of food supplies and whatnot. In other words, we begin to exponentially increase the problem without effecting any sort of remediation.

The other alternative is to turn temporary into permanent. Sounds okay right? In that you go to all the trouble to build a temp site to secure the materials, and then you can conveniently forget about a few hundreds years from now(Pu halflife is 24,000 years) and continue to use the site for a few generations. In this particular case however, the site is a lovely 25 miles upwind of Salt Lake City. Upwind!!! There can be no oops factor as SLC suffers from a terrible inversion layer problem, expecially in the winter. Should there be a leak or "dustup" of the site's material, especially in the winter, all of those aerosols would be concentrated in the inversion and held down in the SLC region for a considerable period of time before they are washed into the rivers and water systems. Not so good.

But none of this matters, right? Because well we have to store it and deal with it and anyway it is only Utah.