Reuters reports that Jeremiah Wright preached "anti-American" sermons

The statement comes in its report on Obama's break with Trinity church. Reuters writes, "[Obama], who would be the first black U.S. president, cut ties last month with Trinity's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who angered many with anti-American and racially charged sermons."

The fact that this bullshit opinion is regarded as fact by an international news organization is appalling. According to Reuters, Wright has committed the following crimes: "blamed the U.S. government for the spread of the AIDS virus, declared 'God damn America' and blasted the country's history of racism." But Reuters has conveniently forgotten to include Wright's crime of deriding U.S. imperialism and war-mongering while espousing peace.

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bush's NAFTA redux

i don't know much about this proposed trade agreement, but it looks it will be something on the horizon worth keeping your ears and internets open for.

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freedom isn't free -- as we have all read, there is sometimes a hefty fuckin' fee

this article about economic alternatives to the iraq war reminded me of a previous post here on TIA. (note that the costs described in the article are only relevant to the iraq war, and do not include the other war in afghanistan, though there might be some shared expenses which aren't detailed.)

an excerpt from the article:

NASA have plans for a manned Mars expedition based on the Ares spacecraft they're developing as a replacement for the Space Shuttle. Price estimates vary from $20Bn (presumably for a single round-trip) to $450Bn (presumably for a single round trip plus all the externalities, like developing the spacecraft and equipment and conducting a thorough prior reconnaissance using unmanned landers).

Either way, the direct costs of the Iraq war exceed the maximum cost estimate for a manned Mars expedition, infrastructure and all, by 20%. If we take $20Bn as the cost per mission and $450Bn as the cost to develop the technology to go there, the direct cost of the Iraq war would be sufficient to develop a gold-plated Mars expeditionary capability and send six crews of astronauts to Mars (and bring them back afterwards).

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Another look at nuclear power.

SUNY Journalism professor Karl Grossman writes in "Money Is the Real Green Power" that clean nuclear energy is a nuclear-industry fabrication. The full article can be accessed by the above link. The first few paragraphs read:

Nuclear advocates in government and the nuclear industry are engaged in a massive, heavily financed drive to revive atomic power in the United States—with most of the mainstream media either not questioning or actually assisting in the promotion.

“With a very few notable exceptions, such as the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. media have turned the same sort of blind, uncritical eye on the nuclear industry’s claims that led an earlier generation of Americans to believe atomic energy would be too cheap to meter,” comments Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “The nuclear industry’s public relations effort has improved over the past 50 years, while the natural skepticism of reporters toward corporate claims seems to have disappeared.”

The New York Times continues to be, as it was a half-century ago when nuclear technology was first advanced, a media leader in pushing the technology, which collapsed in the U.S. with the 1979 Three Mile Island and 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accidents. The Times has showered readers with a variety of pieces advocating a nuclear revival, all marbled with omissions and untruths. A lead editorial headlined “The Greening of Nuclear Power” (5/13/06) opened:

Not so many years ago, nuclear energy was a hobgoblin to environmentalists, who feared the potential for catastrophic accidents and long-term radiation contamination. . . . But this is a new era, dominated by fears of tight energy supplies and global warming. Suddenly nuclear power is looking better.

Nukes add to greenhouse

Parroting a central atomic industry theme these days, the Times editors declared, “Nuclear energy can replace fossil-fuel power plants for generating electricity, reducing the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute heavily to global warming.” As a TV commercial frequently aired by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the nuclear industry trade group, states: “Nuclear power plants don’t emit greenhouses gases, so they protect our environment.”

What is left unmentioned by the NEI, the Times and other mainstream media making this claim is that the overall “nuclear cycle”—which includes uranium mining and milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication and disposal of radioactive waste—has significant greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

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Purity Ball

I saw this in the Times this morning, and found it a little disturbing. Am i alone in thinking that this is weird? maybe i need a different perspective...

related story

excerpt:
'But after dessert, the 63 men stood and read aloud a covenant “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.”'

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Your Assignment II

Your continuing mission: create a caption (or captions) for these pictures, like we did in February.
Thanks to Jamon for emailing them to me. (See my captions below the pics.)


Am I a propagandizing scumbag or does NBC have my balls in a vice? Hahahaha.


Fuck, let's try this again. Hahahaha

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Support the troops, those sadists.

More Winter Soldier--Now on Capitol Hill. You can listen to a segment of the hearings here, via Free Speech Radio News. Part of me is angry at the government, but mostly I'm angry at the soldiers for allowing themselves to be cowed. It seems to me that their moral enlightenment is too late.

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Grande Olde Partye

Per the Newsweek story, McCain's GOP convention chair (now resigned) represented the Burmese military junta in 2002. Also has lobbied for ExxonMobile and GM.

Will the media give McCain shit about this or ignore it?

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o'reilly spaz

on collegehumor.com, there are recommended videos listed below this video of o'reilly spazzing out, but, at first glance, i thought they were comments for the o'reilly video.

one of the recommended videos' headlines was "this dude plays one intense game of tag," which i feel would be a fitting comment for the o'reilly video above, too.

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'she needs to be euthanized'

Great mini debate about hilary and the kentucky derby metaphor on bloggingheads.

also check out the segment on john mc cain's association with Rod Parsley an evangelical pastor who believes that Islam needs to be eradicated.

from his book 'silent no more'

"do[es] not believe that our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed.”

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pre + health

(foot village sounds like lightning bolt wannabees)

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lawrence kaplan on the iraq war

In 2003, Lawrence Kaplan, a leading neoconservative, helped deliver arguments that justified the invasion of Iraq. Afterwards, he traveled repeatedly to the war zone over the course of two years. It changed his view: "You can't help but be much more cautious with the ideas you put on the table," he tells SPIEGEL ONLINE in an interview.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Was the increase in US troops at the start of 2007 also partially responsible for the progress you describe?

Kaplan: This is the subject of fierce debate in the US -- because to ascribe progress to the "surge" means to say that George W. Bush did something right. I think it is impossible to disentangle the progress that comes from the tribes switching sides, from the new American strategy, from the fact that Shiite radical Muqtada al-Sadr has stood down and the surge. My sense is that the influx of 30,000 new American troops holds the least explanatory power. Most important were the tribes. And their switching sides predates the surge.

read the rest of the interview >> here

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post-war suicides may outstrip combat deaths

from Bloomberg Science >>

Insel echoed a Rand Corporation study published last month that found about 20 percent of returning U.S. soldiers have post- traumatic stress disorder or depression, and only half of them receive treatment. About 1.6 million U.S. troops have fought in the two wars since October 2001, the report said. About 4,560 soldiers had died in the conflicts as of today, the Defense Department reported on its Web site.

Based on those figures and established suicide rates for similar patients who commonly develop substance abuse and other complications of post-traumatic stress disorder, ``it's quite possible that the suicides and psychiatric mortality of this war could trump the combat deaths,'' Insel said.

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global warming winners and losers

from The Atlantic, a host of potential social, economic, and environmental scenarios resulting from increased global warming >>

It may sound odd to ask of global warming, What’s in it for me? But the question is neither crass nor tongue-in-cheek. The ways in which climate change could skew the world’s distribution of wealth should help us appreciate just how profoundly an artificial greenhouse effect might shake our lives. Moreover, some of the lasting effects of climate change are likely to come not so much from the warming itself but from how we react to it: If the world warms appreciably, men and women will not sit by idly, eating bonbons and reading weather reports; there will be instead what economists call “adaptive response,” most likely a great deal of it. Some aspects of this response may inflame tensions between those who are winning and those who are losing. How people, the global economy, and the international power structure adapt to climate change may influence how we live for generations. If the world warms, who will win? Who will lose? And what’s in it for you?

...

Environmentalists don’t like talk of adaptation, as it implies making our peace with a warmer world. That peace, though, must be made—and the sooner businesses, investors, and entrepreneurs get to work, the better.

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