Tuesday, March 17, 2009

America's Sweetheart

What if a newspaper folded and nobody cared?

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's print edition dies, and while it's a shock to Seattle's sense of specialness, a new study shows that most people don't really care whether their local daily lives or dies. The real buzz is about what's next.

By Knute Berger

No one likes to see the underdog get beaten, but the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, long the David against the Seattle Times newspaper Goliath, just got clobbered. The Blethens are the last men standing in this long-time grudge match, but they're staggering too.

Seattle likes to regard itself as an exceptional place, and staying a two-newspaper town fed our sense that we're something special, a literate, world-class city that could buck the trend that saw most major cities become one-daily burgs. We buy more books, we have more education, we're paragons of the creative class. Members of Committee for a Two Newspaper Town often made it sound as if having two daily newspapers was somehow the Platonic ideal of civic enlightenment.

Seattle never likes having its exceptionalism questioned. We don't like to be reminded that we're not so special, or that national trends can reach across the Cascades or Pacific and slap us upside the head. No matter our deeds and intentions, daily newspapers are dying like Ebola victims, bleeding from every orifice: circulation, advertising, public confidence.

To put the folding of the print edition of the P-I into a little context, check the grim statistics this week from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual "State of the News Media" report. It finds that newspapers are dying across the country, thriving only in small markets where Craigslist has yet to penetrate or where isolation, monopoly and intimate connections with readers have not yet been lost. Small dailies and community weeklies still connect with micro-communities and offer the kinds of things Facebook does: The paper you read is about your friends and family. It has recipes, obits, weddings, and school sports. These aren't newspaper assets, they're the embodiment of the community itself: What's vital belongs to the readers, not the writers and editors.

http://crosscut.com/2009/03/16/mossback/18911/

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Americans are losing their religion

The sheer absurdity, fundamentalist cruelty and ungodly hypocrisy that have characterized so much "religion" in the past 30 years have driven people away, writes Leonard Pitts Jr., citing a new study. It should serve as a wake-up call to organized religion, he writes.

By Leonard Pitts Jr

We are losing our religion.

That, with apologies to R.E.M., is the startling conclusion of a new study, the American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by researchers at Trinity College of Hartford, Conn. The poll of more than 54,000 American adults found a sharp erosion in the number of people claiming religious affiliation.

A few highlights: The number of people who call themselves Christian is 76 percent, down 10 percentage points since 1990.

Thirty percent of married couples did not have a religious ceremony.

Better than one in four Americans do not expect a religious funeral.

It is important to reiterate that we are talking about overall percentages. In raw numbers, there are actually about 22 million "more" Christians now than in 1990. Still, the trend is clear, particularly as illustrated in one telling statistic: In 1990, 8.2 percent (about 14 million) of us said "none" when asked to specify their religion. Last year, 15 percent (34 million) did.

Some have suggested our loss of faith is due to increased diversity, mobility and immigration. I'm sure there's something to that, but I tend to think the most important cause is simpler: religion has become an ugly thing.

People of faith usually respond to that ugliness — by which I mean a seemingly-endless cycle of scandal, controversy, hypocrisy, violence and TV preachers saying idiot things — in one of two ways. Either they defend it (making them part of the problem) or they regard it as a series of isolated, albeit unfortunate, episodes. But irreligious people do neither.

And people of faith should ask themselves:

What is the cumulative effect upon outside observers of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker living like lords on the largesse of the poor, multiplied by Jimmy Swaggart's pornography addiction, plus Eric Rudolph bombing Olympians and gays in the name of God, plus Muslims hijacking airplanes in the name of God, multiplied by the church that kicked out some members because they voted Democrat, divided by people caterwauling on courthouse steps as a rock bearing the Ten Commandments was removed, multiplied by the square root of Catholic priests preying on little boys while the church looked on and did nothing, multiplied by Muslims rioting over cartoons, plus the ongoing demonization of gay men and lesbians, divided by all those "traditional values" coalitions and "family values" councils that try to bully public schools into becoming worship houses, with morning prayers and science lessons from the book of Genesis? Then subtract selflessness, service, sacrifice, holiness and hope.

Do the math, and I bet you'll draw the same conclusion the researchers did.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008855719_opina15pitts.html

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Rich Jerk Watch

By Knute Berger

Everyone is pretty much up in arms for AIG execs getting $165 million in bonuses after a $170 billion public bailout. The money is ostensibly to retain talent at the troubled company, but isn't this some of the same talent that put the insurance giant in a multi-trillion-dollar hole? Maybe they need a few cheaper second-stringers to pull them out. Last week also saw confessed thief Bernard Madoff marched off to jail in handcuffs to cheers, but legal larceny is still the biggest game in town.

The AIG bonuses are particularly galling to me since I've been wrangling with an AIG subsidiary to help my mother get access to her annuity for assisted-living expenses. Multiple calls, forms sent and resent, long waits on the telephone, lost documents. The process has dragged on for months. So AIG execs get huge bonuses for not jumping ship in the Great Recession after crashing their company onto the rocks, but my 93-year-old mother gets the runaround trying to extract her own money to pay for things like medication so she won't go completely blind.

You think these people don't know they are screwing us over? They've looted money from the suckers who invested in their IRAs, 401Ks and pension funds, then they soaked us again as we taxpayers enabled their bad behavior by giving them more cash to spend. Check out this New York Times story about hard partying Wall Streeters who will pay thousands of dollars for Bacchanalian brunches at places like Bagatelle and Merkato 55 where a jeroboam of champagne to shower the guests is a mere $2,500. These people are literally pissing our money away with glee. Some acknowledged that these excesses would look bad. Others said that back during the stock market collapse in the fall, such partying would have been curtailed, but there's no need now:

A 29-year-old man who works for a large investment management firm and was at Bagatelle's brunch one recent Saturday and at Merkato 55's the next, put it another way: "If you'd asked me in October, I'd say it'd be a different situation, and I don't think I'd be here. Then the government gave us $10 billion."

So we're not simply bailing out huge banks and insurance companies, we're bailing out the warped values of their overpaid employees who are eager to spend the money they're stealing from us in VIP clubs.

http://crosscut.com/blog/crosscut/18869/

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Project Life: World Orphan Rehabilitation Program

by Janet Zimmerman

The horrendous crimes that were perpetrated by Israel have left hundreds of families destitute. Many are faced with no other option but to live in one of the many tent camps scattered throughout the rubbles of Gaza. These tents offer only limited protection from the elements, and those who live in them are given nothing but blankets and an inadequate food supply. The children that live here suffer from malnutrition and trauma. Their childlike dreams have turned into nightmares, and their nights are flooded by involuntary urination as they wake themselves by their own petrified screams. Many have witnessed the death of a parent, and their innocence is lost.

Project Life: World Orphan Rehabilitation Program has aided child victims of natural disaster and war since 1997. It is an intensive, volunteer-based program that works to restore the lost childhood of innocent victims of disaster. My presence in Palestine has led to the birth of a new chapter based in the Gaza Strip due to the immense sufferings brought on by the Israeli massacre.

Ten children, ages 9-12, will be welcomed into the homes of local families in the peaceful countryside of Western New York where they will benefit from a therapeutic program of education and recreational activities. They will get a chance to just be kids again, free from the anxieties of war. By the end of the program, the children return home to their families with a dramatic transformation. They carry a new sense of hope and happiness that was not present prior to their summer abroad.

Project Life is a non-profit organization, and therefore we need your help. Your contribution will help cover the children's expenses, so please donate today and help restore these children's lost lives. Your generous donation is a step towards aiding the children of Gaza whose childhoods were stolen for a reason they never committed. They were the only losers out of this fierce and deadly war, and our humanity urges us to intervene and bring them out of this mayhem. This is your opportunity to contribute in the efforts to help save the Palestinian children. It cannot be done without you.

http://www.worldlifeinstitute.org/projlife.htm

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The most popular video in China

According to the New York Times, "The Grass-Mud Horse" is a mythical creature whose name in Chinese sounds like "fuck your mother". These horses face a problem: invading river crabs that are devouring their grassland. In spoken Chinese, river crab sounds very much like harmony, which in Chinas cyberspace has become a synonym for censorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts have been harmonized — a term directly derived from President Hu Jintaos regular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a harmonious society.

While grass-mud horse sounds like a nasty curse in Chinese, its written Chinese characters are completely different, and its meaning —taken literally — is benign. Thus, the beast has dodged the Chinese governments efforts to censor information over the Internet that is seditious or inflammatory.

Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the grass-mud horse is an icon of resistance to censorship.

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Bin Laden: Arab leaders 'complicit' with Israel

DUBAI (AFP) — Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden accused some Arab leaders of being "complicit" with Israel and the West against Muslims and urged holy war to liberate the Palestinian territories, in an audio tape broadcast by Al-Jazeera television on Saturday.

"It has become clear that some Arab leaders were complicit with the Crusader Zionist alliance against our people. These are the leaders that America calls moderate," said bin Laden, without singling out any leaders.

"The countries of the Muslim world from Indonesia to Mauritania are divided into two: Some of them are crooked, while others are even more crooked," he added, in excerpts of the tape aired by the Doha-based channel.

In the tape, whose authenticity could not be confirmed, bin Laden labelled the devastating offensive by Israel against Gaza at the new year as a Holocaust.

"The Holocaust of Gaza amid a long siege is an important historical event that confirms the importance of distinguishing between Muslims and hypocrites," said the Al-Qaeda leader, who carries a 25-million-dollar US bounty on his head.

He called on jihadists to "liberate" Iraq from the US army and then launch attacks on Israel from Jordan.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hjizAtJirBg4cZvDY1xyZwUz9geQ

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Blackwater's New Frontier: Their Own Private Africa

Will military contractors blur the line between aid workers and hired guns?

By Bruce Falconer and Daniel Schulman

"You give me money, I don't care who you are." It was late October, and Zimbabwe's defense attaché, a soft-spoken, thick-shouldered lieutenant colonel, was explaining his country's freewheeling approach to business in the banquet room of the Liaison hotel on Capitol Hill. Mingling around him were representatives from some of the world's best-known private security and military contracting firms, gathered to explore their prospects in the industry's next frontier: Africa. None betrayed any eagerness to do business with Robert Mugabe, notwithstanding assurances from the beaming attaché that Zimbabwe—"the second-largest economy in southern Africa"—remains strong despite 231 million percent annual inflation. But there were plenty of other avenues to explore, including a recent shake-up in the US military's command structure that seemed to promise new demand for firms like Blackwater (which recently changed its name to Xe), Triple Canopy, and DynCorp.

The guests, dressed in business attire and the odd military uniform, were gathered for the annual summit of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA), a trade group. Industry reps had traveled from as far as Dubai and Malta to discuss this year's topic—the Pentagon's newly established US Africa Command, or AFRICOM—and to browse booths hawking everything from armored vehicles to high-risk insurance. Arrayed on a table in the back were piles of corporate literature, complete with pictures of Third World children and Western contractors delivering aid, a popular industry meme. Among the big-ticket attractions was a keynote address from William E. "Kip" Ward, the four-star general in charge of AFRICOM.

The event drew record attendance, and industry veterans were not surprised. "Everybody's always been interested in Africa," Chris Taylor, a former Blackwater executive and now a vice president at Ohio-based Mission Essential Personnel, explained over drinks in the hotel bar. "It represents a huge opportunity for business."

Africa is no stranger to armed security contractors; the industry in its modern incarnation was born when mercenary firms like Executive Outcomes and Sandline International fought for embattled African governments during the 1990s, allegedly in exchange for diamond and oil concessions. Since then, security contractors have gained broader acceptance. But serious concerns remain about the role they might play in their old stomping grounds.

"There is a crying, desperate need for some of the services that these people provide," said Alex Yearsley, the head of special projects at Global Witness, a London-based human rights group. "There's no question they can do it. It's a question of when you're going to have a questionable regime hiring these people to kick out indigenous communities or [gain access to] mining areas. That's when it gets problematic."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/blackwaters-new-frontier-their-own-private-africa

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Ron Paul debates Stephen Baldwin on marijuana

It's a big, weird world when a Republican congressman and a Hollywood actor square off over drug policy, and it's the politician who endorses legalization, while the actor favors prohibition. The debate makes more sense, however, when you realize that the live-and-let-live legislator is libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, and his authoritarian opponent is Stephen Baldwin, who is an idiot. Even more so than most actors, that is.

In his comments, Rep. Paul said:

Drugs are very dangerous, but there's a lot of things that are very dangerous. The question is who should regulate danger? Should we assume responsibility for ourselves, or should the government take care of us? And I don't believe in the nanny state.

If you do have regulations and laws, they should be at the state level, not at the federal level. We didn't even have a federal law up until 1937. And here we are, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars in a very unsuccessful attempt to regulate drugs.

Later, he said that he was optimistic that the laws will change in exactly the way Prohibition came to an end.

So the sooner we come to this realization someday--actually I'm optimistic on this. I think this country is going to wake up like they did in the 30s and say prohibition didn't work.

Alcohol is a horror. It's made things worse. It has caused a lot of crime and violence. It's about time we just do this, get rid of the prohibition. Let the regulation go back to the state. Regulate it like alcohol.

And would the real regulation come from the individual and also from the family and the parents and the community. That's what prevents drug use, not some federal thug coming in with guns and arresting some kid, and throwing him for prison for life. That makes no sense whatsoever.

The March 13 face-off on CNN, with Joy Behar standing in for Larry King, is below.

If you don't have the patience to watch the video, a full transcript is here.

http://www.examiner.com/x-536-Civil-Liberties-Examiner~y2009m3d14-Ron-Paul-debates-Stephen-Baldwin-on-marijuana

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Ponzi

by Jaron Summers

Let us begin with a small Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff put one together – we all know he bilked sophisticated investors out of fifty billion dollars. He is going to jail for forever and day.

Everyone knows how a Ponzi scheme works. Essentially you persuade people to let you invest their money and then you put it in your pocket. You pay the people who invested a nice return –

These early investors with nice returns tell their friends. Their friends give you all their money and as long as more and more people give you money you can make everyone happy.

Of course there comes a day when the investors want their money back. In Bernie's case he had spent most of the money – either on himself or to pay the interest to a very long line of suckers.

The bigger the Ponzi scheme, the bigger the swindle. I said Bernie's was a small Ponzi scheme.

Want to know the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world?

US Social Security.

It's the Federal Reserve in cahoots with The Government of The United States. The government takes your social security money and promises to invest it wisely and then when you get old, pays you back.

Surprise – the government has spent all the money and more in the Social Security money chest. There is no money left in the government.

So who will pay old people social security money? The Federal Reserve, under orders from the government, will print more money. Or create it out of thin air. This money will not be worth anything – that's why a twenty five cent ice cream cone now costs $3.00. Soon it will cost $20.00. Then $50.00.

I thought I was pretty smart when I came up with the theory that Social Security is a ponzi scheme. I googled the two.

There were 290,000 hits.

Which proves I'm not nearly as original as I thought I was and that my wife and I will end up as greeters at Walmart.

http://www.jaronbs.com/ss.htm

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Remember Ophira?

by Uri Avnery

Nobody from Gaza was there. As in the heyday of European imperialism, 150 years ago, the fate of the natives was decided without the natives themselves being present. Who needs them? After all, they are primitives. Better without them

If you stop any ten random passers-by in a Tel Aviv street and ask them what they think about the chances of peace, nine of them will shrug their shoulders and answer: It won't happen. No chance. The conflict will just go on forever.

They will not say: We don't want peace, the price of peace is too high. On the contrary, many will declare that for peace they are ready to give back the occupied territories, even East Jerusalem, and let the Palestinians have a state of their own. Sure. Why not? But, they will add: No chance. There will be no peace.

Some will say: The Arabs don't want it. Others will say: Our leaders can't do it. But the conclusion is the same: It just won't happen.

A similar poll of Palestinians would probably yield the same results: We want peace. Peace would be wonderful. But there's no chance. It won't happen.

This mood has produced the same political situation on both sides. In the Palestinian elections, Hamas won, not because of its ideology but because it expresses the despair of peace with Israel. In the Israeli elections, there was a general move to the Right: Leftists voted for Kadima, Kadima people voted for Likud, Likud people voted for the fascist factions.

Without hope there is no Left. The Left is by nature optimistic, it believes in a better future, in the chance of changing everything for the better. The Right is by nature pessimistic. It does not believe in the possibility of changing human nature and society for the better, it is convinced that war is a law of nature.

But among the despairing there are still those who hope that an intervention by foreigners — Americans, Europeans, even Arabs — will impose peace on us.

This week, that hope was severely shaken.

On TV we were shown a uniquely impressive conference, a huge assembly of world leaders, who all came to Sharm-el-Sheikh. (Remember that during the Israeli occupation of Sinai, it was called Ophira? Remember Moshe Dayan saying that he preferred Sharm-el-Sheikh without peace to peace without Sharm-el-Sheikh?) And for what? For little, poor Gaza. It has to be rebuilt.

It was a celebration of sanctimonious hypocrisy, in the very best tradition of international diplomacy.

First of all, nobody from Gaza was there. As in the heyday of European imperialism, 150 years ago, the fate of the natives was decided without the natives themselves being present. Who needs them? After all, they are primitives. Better without them.

Not only Hamas was absent, a delegation of Gaza businessmen and civil society activists could not come either. Hosni Mubarak just did not allow them to pass the Rafah crossing. The gate of the prison called Gaza was barred by the Egyptian jailers.

The absence of delegates from Gaza, and especially from Hamas, turned the conference into a farce. Hamas rules Gaza. It won the elections there, as in all the Palestinian territories, and continues to govern it even after one of the mightiest armies in the world spent 22 days trying to dislodge it. Nothing will happen in the Gaza Strip without the consent of Hamas. The world-wide decision to rebuild Gaza without the participation of Hamas is sheer foolishness.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\03\10\story_10-3-2009_pg3_4

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Free Spirit Spheres. The Coolest Treehouses in the World!

Hanging mysteriously in the trees these treehouses can be found in the old growth forests of Vancouver Island, Canada. They are crafted by Free Spirit Spheres and are available for nightly rental or purchase.

Their shape is such that they blend almost invisibly with the natural surroundings.

Inside they feature all the comforts of home including bathroom facilities.

Imagine resting in bed, seeing the moon and stars through the large round windows as the wind rocks you gently to sleep.

http://www.robotnine.com/2009/02/free-spirit-spheres-coolest-treehouses.html

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What are U.S. goals in Afghanistan?

By HELEN THOMAS

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is making a big mistake in escalating U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan where he already has acknowledged he doesn't believe victory is possible.

We should ask: What are we doing there seven years after the 9/11 attacks by the al-Qaida network? Historically, the country has lacked a strong central government and has been governed by locally strong tribal leaders and warlords.

Al-Qaida was able to take advantage of this loose structure and turn Afghanistan into the plotting ground for the terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York.

But what are our goals there in 2009?

While the U.S. is supposed to wind down its presence in Iraq in 19 months (rather than the 16 months promised by Obama on the campaign trail), the president has ordered a military buildup in Afghanistan to more than 50,000 troops, both from the U.S. and other NATO members.

He would leave 50,000 Americans in Iraq to cope with the resistance there. Such was the folly of President George W. Bush, who invaded Iraq after his hawkish neoconservative advisers told him we would triumph in a few weeks.

To this day none of Bush's reasons for attacking Iraq have held up to examination. There were no weapons of mass destruction, no Iraqi ties to al-Qaida and no threat to the United States.

There have been no apologies from Bush or his cohorts.

When Obama visited Afghanistan last summer as a presidential candidate, he joined several other senators in a get-tough statement that said: "We need a great sense of urgency because the threat from the Taliban and al-Qaida is growing and we must act. We need determination because it will take time to prevail. But with the right strategy and the resources to back it up, we will get the job done."

What exactly is the job that he says needs to get done? What is the U.S. exit strategy? Does anyone in power remember the lessons we were supposed to have learned from Vietnam?

Afghanistan is known as the "graveyard of empires" because of the repeated failure of invaders over the centuries to achieve their goals in that rugged country.

U.S. prowling around in Afghanistan hasn't aroused anti-war protests as did the March 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. I am puzzled about this. It seems to me we are leaping out of the frying pan into the fire!

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/403461_thomas13.html

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FBI terrorist watch list hits 1 million entries

By Patrick Martin

The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center acknowledged this week that there are more than 1 million names on its official terrorist watch list, a number that suggests the vast scale of the police-state measures undertaken by the US government on the pretext of waging a "war on terror."

It would be preposterous to suggest that these 1 million people are actually terrorists—in that event, Al Qaeda would have more troops than the US Army. Moreover, since an estimated 50,000 of those named are US residents, most of them citizens, this would mean hundreds of potential car bombers or airplane hijackers live in every major American city.

There is no legal restriction on who can be placed on the watch list, nor is there presently any legal right to have your name removed from the list once it appears. According to a 2007 report by the Government Accountability Office, an individual may be nominated to the list if they are subject to an ongoing counterterrorism investigation, or if the individual is the subject of a preliminary investigation "to determine if they have links to terrorism." The second category potentially includes the entire population of world.

The result has been daily acts of harassment and injustice, as individuals whose names supposedly match those who are alleged terror suspects suffer dire consequences: they can be stopped from boarding an airplane, denied entry into the US at a border, or denied a visa or other government permit.

Among the well-publicized cases, Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, is on the watch list, as well as Evo Morales, currently president of Bolivia, and the late Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, while he was being held in a US prison in Iraq. Thousands of Americans who share common names with supposed terrorists—Robert Johnson, Gary Smith, John Williams, David Nelson, Jim Robinson—have been stopped from boarding planes or otherwise targeted.

The list includes at least one US senator, Edward Kennedy, and three members of Congress, John Lewis, Loretta Sanchez and Don Young, as well as a former US Attorney and an army sergeant flying home from deployment in Iraq. Particularly sinister are cases like those of James Moore, author of a critical biography of Karl Rove, entitled Bush's Brain, and CNN reporter Drew Griffin, placed on the list in May 2008, shortly after he did a series of investigative reports critical of the Transportation Security Administration.

According to a report Wednesday by USA Today, the FBI claims that 33,000 entries were removed last year in an effort to purge outdated information and remove people cleared in investigations. The agency also argued that the 1 million entries represent "only" 400,000 unique individuals, with the balance consisting of duplications due to misspellings, variant spellings and conflicting demographic information.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/watc-m12.shtml

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