My Bad Date

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WHY WE FIGHT

U.S. Troops Die For Rapists

 

by Ted Rall

American soldiers serving in Vietnam wondered what they were fighting for. U.S. troops in Afghanistan don't have that problem. They know exactly what they're fighting for: rapists.

After President Obama's coming "Afghan surge" there will be 72,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. Their primary mission is to prevent Afghans from overthrowing the unpopular regime of Hamid Karzai, the former oil consultant installed by George W. Bush when the U.S. occupation began nearly eight years ago.

America's media repeatedly claimed that Afghan women would be better off under the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance puppet government headed by Karzai than under the Taliban. But when I went to Afghanistan and asked women what they thought, they had a different story. The defeat of the Taliban brought about the collapse of law and order, making life even more dangerous, especially for women. "Under the Taliban," a woman told me, "I watched rapists being executed. Now I see them in the government."

The Afghan women's rights group RAWA has repeatedly told anyone willing to listen that there hasn't been much improvement for women and girls since the U.S. occupation began in 2001. But no one--least of all left-of-center Americans eager to embrace the Afghan war--has wanted to hear what they had to say. "Most women still wear the all-encompassing burqa through fear of attack and social pressure, a third of women in Kabul do not leave the house, forbidden from doing so by the male members of the family, and it is still almost impossible for women to get a divorce," reported The Sunday Herald in 2005.

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/?uc_full_date=20090507

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Bob Dylan: why he's back at number one

Middle-aged consumers are keeping the album alive

By Neil McCormick

Forty-eight-year-old Susan Boyle is stirring up the nation on Britain's Got Talent. Bob Dylan, 67, is at number one in the album charts. And making them both look like spring chickens, 90-year-old Pete Seeger celebrated his birthday this week with a concert at Madison Square Garden, where he was joined for renditions of classic hits including If I Had a Hammer and Where Have All the Flowers Gone by Bruce Springsteen (59) and John Mellencamp (58). Isn't it about time these oldies stopped hogging the limelight? Young people can sing too, you know.

Joking aside, Seeger is to be commended for a lifetime committed to folk music and political activism, which, as Springsteen put it, made him "a stealth dagger through the heart of our country's illusions about itself".

The thing about Seeger is that he already seemed old in the pop boom of the Sixties. He famously threatened to take an axe to the sound cables during Bob Dylan's performance at the 1965 Newport Folk convention, when Dylan horrified the purists by performing with an electric band. How quaint the controversy seems now, when both artists are considered venerable statesmen of antiquated music, rock and roll being almost as crusty as folk. Yet still, apparently, capable of topping the charts.

Dylan's first number-one album in 40 years received much comment in the news. And certainly we should celebrate the continued creative vitality of the greatest lyrical singer-songwriter of our times, but let's not get too carried away.

As CD sales collapse and musical activity migrates towards the internet, it is middle-aged consumers romantically attached to the notion of the long playing record as a cohesive work of art who are keeping the album alive. Bob Dylan fans, in other words.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/neilmccormick/5292161/Bob-Dylan-why-hes-back-at-number-one.html

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Prison Awaiting Hostile Bloggers

By David Kravets

Proposed congressional legislation would demand up to two years in prison for those whose electronic speech is meant to "coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person."

Instead of prison, perhaps we should say gulag.

The proposal by Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Los Angeles, would never pass First Amendment muster, unless the U.S. Constitution was altered without us knowing. So Sanchez, and the 14 other lawmakers who signed on to the proposal, are grandstanding to show the public they care about children and are opposed to cyberbullying.

The meaasure, H.R. 1966, is labeled the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act. It's designed to target the behavior that led to last year's suicide of the 13-year-old Meier.

In response to Meier's suicide, prosecutors turned to an anti-hacking statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and prosecuted Lori Drew. She was accused of violating MySpace's terms of service agreement in what prosecutors said was a complex conspiracy to harass Meier via a fake MySpace online profile.

The judge presiding over the case is weighing a motion to nullify the jury's verdict on allegations the authorities failed to prove Drew knew the MySpace terms of service existed — allegations that would be mooted had Drew been prosecuted under Sanchez's proposal. Drew's case was the nation's first cyberbullying prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Sanchez's bill goes way beyond cyberbullying and comes close to making it a federal offense to log onto the internet or use the telephone. The methods of communication where hostile speech is banned include e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones and text messages.

We can't say what we think of Sanchez's proposal. Doing so would clearly get us two years in solitary confinement.

The bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/prison-awaiting-hostile-bloggers/

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Zogby Poll: Majority support legalization

Today a new Zogby poll has been released that for the first time found a majority of Americans (from now on referred to as 'Maricans') want to see pot legalized.

Salem News has the story:

Voters were asked: "Scarce law enforcement and prison resources, a desire to neutralize drug cartels and the need for new sources of revenue have resurrected the topic of legalizing marijuana. Proponents say it makes sense to tax and regulate the drug while opponents say that legalization would lead marijuana users to use other illegal drugs. Would you favor or oppose the government's effort to legalize marijuana?"

The results showed a decisive majority of 52 percent in favor with 37 percent opposed and 11 percent not sure -- slightly higher than the 46 percent support reported in an ABC News/Washington Post poll released at the end of April.

We recently pointed to an ABC/Washington Post poll which determined 46 percent of Americans to be in favor of pot legalization. Could the pendelum have swung over the tipping point this fast? Was it the way the question was worded? Are polls an accurate reflection of public sentiment? Who knows.. A more reliable picture of the situation can probably be obtained by acknowledging that these numbers oscillate within a certain range and that it may be prudent to average over the last 3 polls or so. Anyway, lots of good news these days!

http://www.dosenation.com/listing.php?smlid=6232

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MPAA to teachers: don't rip DVDs, just record your television with a camcorder

Posted by Cory Doctorow

MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set from timothy vollmer on Vimeo.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann sez, "Hearings for the DMCA triennial rulemaking are going on this week in DC, where the educational community is asking for an exemption to rip DVDs to take clips for classroom use. The MPAA responded with a video showing how to camcord (!) movies from a flat screen monitor, arguing that educators and students should do this instead of ripping DVDs. In the words of media literacy researcher Martine Courant Rife, that's like typing up a quote from a book, taking it outside, chiseling the words in a rock, photographing the rock, scanning the photo, and running OCR on it. And for what?"

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/07/mpaa-to-teachers-don.html

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US missile data found on eBay hard drive

By Gareth Llewellyn

The launch procedures for a US military missile air defence system were found on a second-hand hard drive bought on eBay, researchers revealed today.

More than 300 hard disks were studied and researchers uncovered other sensitive information including bank account details, medical records, confidential business plans, financial company data, personal id numbers, and job descriptions.

The drives were bought from the UK, America, Germany, France and Australia through computer auctions, computer fairs and eBay.

The exercise was carried out by BT's Security Research Centre in collaboration with the University of Glamorgan in Wales, Edith Cowan University in Australia and Longwood University in the US.

A spokesman for BT said they found 34% of the hard disks scrutinised contained "information of either personal data that could be identified to an individual or commercial data identifying a company or organisation."

The researchers concluded that a "surprisingly large range and quantity of information that could have a potentially commercially damaging impact or pose a threat to the identity and privacy of the individuals involved was recovered as a result of the survey."

Perhaps most surprising was the discovery of a disk bought on eBay that revealed details of test launch procedures for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) ground to air missile defence system, used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq.

The disk also contained security policies, blueprints of facilities and personal information on employees including social security numbers, belonging to technology company Lockheed Martin - who designed and built the system.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-missile-data-found-on-ebay-hard-drive-1680529.html

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Mexico: "They Kill Our Trees So We'll Grow Their Drugs."

by Yemeli Ortega

The village of Creel was the site of narco-killings in broad daylight that shocked Mexico's conscience last year, but the Tarahumara Indians' subjugation to the cartels extends to even the most remote corners of their rugged lands, reports Yemeli Ortega. (Photo: ThierryB / Flickr)

    Violence linked to drug-trafficking does not spare the most isolated indigenous communities. A report from Barrancas del Cobre among the Tarahumara Indians.

    The region with the richest biodiversity in North America is located in Mexico's far north, at 1420 meters of elevation, in the heart of the Western Sierra Madre. These lands, rugged and inhospitable, have been inhabited by Tarahumara, "the light-footed people," for close to 2,000 years. Today, these peaceful people are threatened by narco-trafficking which threatens the very essence of their culture and the equilibrium of their environment.

    "Narco-trafficking violence is a thousand-headed snake. When you cut one head off, a hundred grow in its place," explains a Tarahumara Indian, who intends to stay alive, and, consequently, to remain anonymous. "Don't think my word is worthless," he defends himself, "but what I'm going to relate to you could cost me my skin."

    After a silence as pregnant as his gaze, the Indian ends up talking:

    "They come; they kill the trees and afterwards we have to choose: either we leave our lands or we stay to grow their drugs."

    The Tarahumara people pay a heavy price to defend their forests, which hold the ancestral secrets of their culture, their cosmology and their very lives. "People don't commercialize their family. No one can sell what belongs to Mother Earth and Father God," says the outraged Indian, who draws most of his food and medicinal plants from the forest.

    "The forest is the soul of the fire," he continues as he watches wood burn in the hearth. It's also the soul of music: without wood, there would be no more flutes, violins, or drums, indispensable elements for traditional rites and dances.

http://www.truthout.org/050709F?n

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Harlan Ellison -- Pay the Writer

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Why suicide bombers are back in Iraq

By Steve Niva

Suicide bombings are back in Iraq, signaling that the war is far from over. After a significant downturn, with only six suicide attacks between December 2008 and March 2009, there have been 25 suicide bombings in Iraq in the last two months, contributing to the worst spate of violence in Iraq in nearly a year. The bombers have revealed a new audacity and sophistication, striking in all parts of the country and against many seemingly highly secured targets.

The new wave of suicide bombings culminated in a coordinated series of four bomb blasts across Iraq on March 23, three of them suicide bombings. The bombings spiked in April, with attacks on Iraqi army bases and police stations in Shi'ite enclaves and holy sites. Attacks also targeted US-backed Sunni militia leaders and US forces, including a massive suicide truck bomb in Mosul that killed five US soldiers, the deadliest strike on American troops in a year. The nearly 20 suicide bombings in April have made it the deadliest month in 2009 for Iraqi civilians, with nearly 300 dead according to Iraqi Interior Ministry officials, compared with only 51 killed in February and 70 in January.

With the seemingly forgotten war in Iraq now back in the media spotlight, US officials have downplayed the bloody surge in suicide bombings as a desperate response to the fact that the United States is successfully ending the war and withdrawing troops, as announced by President Barack Obama in a February 27 policy speech on Iraq. In a particularly embarrassing episode, the usually careful Defense Secretary Robert Gates echoed former Vice President Dick Cheney's infamous 2005 claim that Iraq's insurgency was "in the last throes" by claiming that the mayhem in Iraq was simply a "last gasp" by al-Qaeda to "reverse the progress that's been made". During her unannounced visit to Iraq in late April, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quick to interpret the violence as a "signal that the rejectionists fear Iraq is going in the right direction".

The reality, however, is that the latest surge in violence isn't because the United States is leaving, but because the timeframe and terms of withdrawal are unclear. The real story behind the new wave of suicide bombings is that Iraqi insurgents are in conflict with the American backed Iraqi state and the US effort to perpetuate an order favorable to continued American influence and interests in Iraq even while American forces draw down, a policy long known in the region as neo-colonialism.

 

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KE07Ak01.html

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Don't write off the Republicans

Obama may be making two mistakes from over-confidence: not trying to reach out to Republicans in Congress, and leaving the crafting of major legislation to the Democratic barons. Look for a modest revival of the GOP in the next election.

By Ted Van Dyk

If you take seriously the talking heads on the cable-news networks, you might believe that, less than four months into the Obama Presidency, the Obama agenda is rolling toward enactment and the Republican Party is in danger of dissolution. History would argue otherwise.

President Obama is enjoying public approval at about the level that previous Presidents have enjoyed at this early stage. Democrats have solid Senate and House majorities (with their Senate majority growing as Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter has changed parties and Al Franken is on the verge of certification as a Minnesota Senator). So soon after last fall's election, there is no single Republican leader who can serve as that party's rallying point. But it is far too soon to declare Obama and his program winners by technical knockout.

First, the matter of political mandate: Obama's victory in the 2008 Democratic nominating race was razor thin. His general-election victory over Sen. John McCain was solid but not as large as expected. The financial/economic crisis — hard economic times always favor Democrats — buried a McCain campaign that was still competitive at the time the recession struck. (A comparable foreign policy/national security crisis might well have elected McCain). Democrats had a huge financial advantage over Republicans and, down the stretch, were outspending Republicans 3 and 4-to-1 in major electoral states. The outgoing Bush administration was hugely unpopular. Yet Obama won the popular vote by only a bit more than 6 percentage points.

Obama's 2008 victory was nowhere near as large as those of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 or Lyndon Johnson in 1964, those to which it is most often compared. Democrats' Congressional majorities, likewise, are nowhere near as one-sided as those coming out of the 1932 and 1964 elections. In baseball terms, Obama's victory was 6-4 over the Republicans whereas the FDR and LBJ victories could be characterized as 10-1.

Why does this matter? Presidents with huge popular and strong Congressional majorities can operate with freer hands than those who must pay greater attention to minority opinion in the Congress and country. (Yet, in 1965, Johnson took extraordinary steps to generate Republican and business support for his Great Society programs). Obama's nominating and general-election campaigns stressed bipartisan cooperation and his desire to end polarizing gridlock in the capital, but as President Obama has talked bipartisanship but has governed in a one-party manner.

http://crosscut.com/2009/05/08/politics-government/18995/

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More fun than sex

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Zombie swine flu hoax story: Does Twitter have panic-creating potential?

by Tanner Stransky

 

This hilarious but totally bogus story -- about a mutant zombie strain of the swine flu and designed to look like a legit BBC News story -- is making quite the splash on Twitter. The link to the story has been retweeted (in other words, shared on user's Twitter feeds), at last check, 720 times, according to Tweetmeme, a website designed to aggregate which links are getting the most play on Twitter at any given moment. Even more interesting is that the story -- which is undoubtedly a complete fake as it makes claims like a Netherlands boy dying and then rising from the dead and lunging at his mother, among other crazy things -- is listed on Tweetmeme's homepage with this very misleading and official-looking moniker: BBC NEWS | Europe | EU quarantines London in swine flu panic. And it's right alongside actually legit BBC News stories, like this: BBC News | Health | What scientists know about swine flu, which is also being retweeted but not nearly as much. Shouldn't someone at Tweetmeme catch the potential panic such a legit-but-bogus link could incite?

If you look at what the Twitter community is saying when posting the fake link, it's a mixed bag. Everything from tongue-in-cheek takes -- "OMG! Swine flu virus has mutation...and it's now creating zombies!" says user redrisker -- to the dismissive: "Great example about trust and checking sources," Tweeted user MeManders.

Another interesting dimension to this story is the URL that's used for the hoax. Just look at it: http://bouncewith.me.uk/europe/8027043.htm. Clearly, you're not being directed to the BBC News website. But it's important to remember that, on Twitter at least, a good portion of the URLs posted are turned into "short links," which save space. So users rarely look at what they're clicking on anymore -- until they get to the destination. Checking the URL, and whether it redirected to a legit website, may or may not happen.

In this case, thankfully, most users seem to get the fact that the story is a joke, but we do seem to have the ideal forum for a potential War of the Worlds-like event.

http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2009/05/zombie-swine-fl.html

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Young Americans Losing Their Religion

New Research Finds Number Who Claim No Church Has Risen Sharply

 

By DAN HARRIS

New research shows young Americans are dramatically less likely to go to church -- or to participate in any form of organized religion -- than their parents and grandparents.

"It's a huge change," says Harvard University professor Robert Putnam, who conducted the research.

Historically, the percentage of Americans who said they had no religious affiliation (pollsters refer to this group as the "nones") has been very small -- hovering between 5 percent and 10 percent. However, Putnam says the percentage of "nones" has now skyrocketed to between 30 percent and 40 percent among younger Americans.

Putnam calls this a "stunning development." He gave reporters a first glimpse of his data Tuesday at a conference on religion organized by the Pew Forum on Faith in Public Life.

The research will be included in a forthcoming book, called "American Grace."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=7513343&page=1

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Magical anti-gay people boobs

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