Maybe you should Invest in Booms

All we can do is lower the boom (More pictures at the National Geographic Site)

I’m not really certain who to blame right now because–just as it as with Hurricane Katrina and the 2007 financial meltdown–there’s plenty of it to go around. Big messes usually have the finger prints of big corporations,big government agencies and pols, and big investors all over them. These are people that make a lot of money taking chances with every one’s livelihoods, savings, and resources. Some how they always escape the lowering of the boom.

All of these folks are very short-sighted.

Big Corporations only see the next quarterly earnings reports and bonuses. Big Government only sees the next election. Big investors only look at the return on assets over the next earnings window. All of this combined has made my life very complex over the last five years and I’ve just about had enough of it. The problem is that it’s systemic so there’s not much I can do but blog, pull my hair out, and wonder if I my credentials can cause me to land in a better place with a better job.

All this short-sightedness. Where will it lead us?

I have to say, despite everything, I love the city where I live but I’m not sure how much more I can take of local corruption, corporate piracy, and government incompetence. I sit in my little piece of land high and dry with chaos around me. My house did not flood or lose its roof, or suffer much damage during Hurricane Katrina. My house will not be damaged by the oil spill. You have no idea what it’s like, however, being in the middle of a chaos vortex.

I teach, so the only thing that threatens my livelihood is our governor who appears to believe we graduate way too many 4 year college students here. He argued he wanted the technical colleges to have more funds to train folks for life on those oil rigs out there in the Gulf. As I said, I am surrounded by short sightedness and that creates chaos for the lot of us. Chaos the power brokers can avoid as long as we keep re-electing the politicians that do this to us. For certain, most investors only look at their ROA and not what the companies they invest in do to the world around them. Every one puts social responsibility at the bottom of their list.

Local officials have now decided to try their own plan which basically means their going to try to fight with containment. Yup, (with apologies to Winston Churchill)

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight on Breton Sound
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender

So what does that mean? St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro called for all vendors of hard and soft boom to sell him 300,000 more feet of boom. Boom, boom, and more boom. It’s really evident the response to this is pretty much one big hail mary. The containment dome (cement condom used after the spew) has proven to be one big piss in the wind. Ice crystals evidently clogged the top of the thing and it wouldn’t stay put on the ocean floor.

Meanwhile, the response ranks right up there with the Keystone cop response to Hurricane Katrina headed up by heckuva-job-Brownie. Remember “no one could know the levees wouldn’t hold?” Via a link from BB, it looks like we also have “no one could know the spill could be this big.” The battles are fought by the little people and their boats. Meanwhile, every one else yucked it up at a big ol’ dinner inside the beltway.

Plans by BP to sink a 4-story containment dome over the oil gushing from a gaping chasm one kilometer below the surface of the Gulf, where the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and killed 11 workers on April 20, and reports that one of the leaks has been contained is pure public relations disinformation designed to avoid panic and demands for greater action by the Obama administration, according to FEMA and Corps of Engineers sources. Sources within these agencies say the White House has been resisting releasing any “damaging information” about the oil disaster. They add that if the ocean oil geyser is not stopped within 90 days, there will be irreversible damage to the marine eco-systems of the Gulf of Mexico, north Atlantic Ocean, and beyond. At best, some Corps of Engineers experts say it could take two years to cement the chasm on the floor of the Gulf.

Only after the magnitude of the disaster became evident did Obama order Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to declare the oil disaster a “national security issue.” Although the Coast Guard and FEMA are part of her department, Napolitano’s actual reasoning for invoking national security was to block media coverage of the immensity of the disaster that is unfolding for the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean and their coastlines.

From the Corps of Engineers, FEMA, the Environmental Protection Agency, Coast Guard, and Gulf state environmental protection agencies, the message is the same: “we’ve never dealt with anything like this before.”

The Obama administration also conspired with BP to fudge the extent of the oil leak, according to our federal and state sources. After the oil rig exploded and sank, the government stated that 42,000 gallons per day was gushing from the seabed chasm. Five days later, the federal government upped the leakage to 210,000 gallons a day.

I’m getting tired of having my neck of the woods victimized by these failures of engineering wedded to an ‘everything done on the cheap’ attitude of tax haters and profit lovers. This crap never seems to happen in their back yard and always in mine. We pay with for it with our livelihoods and heritage.

So here’s a link to something in TNR called The Crisis Comes Ashore: Why the oil spill could change everything. I’m looking at the headline and thinking, wow, I heard that the response to Hurricane Katrina was going to change everything, and that electing Barack Obama president was going to change everything, and getting rid of Dubya was going to change everything. WHY should I believe this? (BTW, it uses the gulf oil spill to talk about global warming, and calls for stopping the use of fossil fuels which is all very much against the short run interests of big corporations,big government, and big investors.)

It is understandable that the administration will be focused on the immediate crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. But this is a consciousness-shifting event. It is one of those clarifying moments that brings a rare opportunity to take the longer view. Unless we change our present course soon, the future of human civilization will be in dire jeopardy. Just as we feel a sense of urgency in demanding that this ongoing oil spill be stopped, we should feel an even greater sense of urgency in demanding that the much larger and more dangerous ongoing emissions of global warming pollution must also be stopped to make the world safe from the climate crisis that is building all around us.

Okay, so let me pull the punch line on this for you. This article is penned by Al Gore; the coulda been president.

I have only one central question. What ever hope do we have of getting folks to actually think in long run terms in this country when the people in power are rewarded with bonuses in the short run, votes in the short run, and accolades in the short run? Will the bodies of dead dolphins and oily birds, the tears of life long shrimpers who will lose their homes and livelihoods, and the desperate ramblings of an old bitter knitter that keeps getting sideswiped by all this shit really change the incentive structures?

Ritual Mutilation of Women

“…It is degrading. And it is a violation of the physical integrity of a woman’s body, leaving a lifetime of physical and emotional scars.” – Hillary Clinton, in China, Sept 1995.

According to the World Health Organization:

Female genital mutilation (FGM) includes procedures that intentionally alter or injure female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

The procedure has no health benefits for girls and women.

Procedures can cause severe bleeding and problems urinating, and later, potential childbirth complications and newborn deaths.

An estimated 100 to 140 million girls and women worldwide are currently living with the consequences of FGM.

It is mostly carried out on young girls sometime between infancy and age 15 years.

In Africa an estimated 92 million girls from 10 years of age and above have undergone FGM.

FGM is internationally recognized as a violation of the human rights of girls and women.

It is very difficult for meet to look at that drawing, read the accompanying information, then think about how the American Academy of Pediatrics has trivialized this horrible form of torture to an acronym: FGC (Female Genital Cutting). I might add the drawing came from their site and there’s more information and as well as more gruesome drawings. There is a long list of all the accompanying health and emotional problems that this act of violence causes its victims.

The AAP’s stated position for GPC (such a almost harmless sounding name) is:

Immigrants in the United States from areas in which FGC is common may have daughters who have undergone a ritual genital procedure or may request that such a procedure be performed by a physician. The American Academy of Pediatrics believes that pediatricians and pediatric surgical specialists should be aware that this practice has life-threatening health risks for children and women. The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes all types of female genital cutting that pose risks of physical or psychological harm, counsels its members not to perform such procedures, recommends that its members actively seek to dissuade families from carrying out harmful forms of FGC, and urges its members to provide patients and their parents with compassionate education about the harms of FGC while remaining sensitive to the cultural and religious reasons that motivate parents to seek this procedure for their daughters.

How about just calling the police and having the girl removed from the people who want to torture her? Don’t they have a legal obligation to report child abuse?

National Day of Hypocrisy

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. (6)But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. (7)And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. (8)Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. – Matthew 6.5-8 NASB

I have a huge problem with evangelical christians who deny history, constitutional law, and if you believe that jesus existed and said the above per the new testament, deny the words of the dude with whom they have a close personal relationship.

This is what two of our greatest presidents thought of a National Day of Prayer. First, from Thomas Jefferson.

“I have duly received your favor of the 18th and am thankful to you for having written it, because it is more agreeable to prevent than to refuse what I do not think myself authorized to comply with. I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the
Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises….

Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government…. But it is only proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe a day of fasting & prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to the U. S. an authority over religious exercises which the Constitution has directly precluded them from. It must be meant too that this recommendation is to carry some authority, and to be sanctioned by some penalty on those who disregard it; not indeed of fine and imprisonment, but of some degree of proscription perhaps in public opinion. And does the change in the nature of the penalty make the recommendation the less a law of conduct for those to whom it is directed?

I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies that the general government should be invested with the power of affecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. Fasting & prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.

This is from James Madison. You can read a list of his reasons at the link, but here’s his general argument. (It’s interesting that the folks that are challenging this National Day of Prayer’s constitutionality come from Madison, Wisconsin.)

“Religious proclamations by the Executive recommending thanksgivings & fasts are shoots from the same root with the legislative acts reviewed.
“Although recommendations only, they imply a religious agency, making no part of the trust delegated to political rulers.

So, what about our current President, the constitutional law lecturer?

President Obama issued a proclamation last Friday as his Justice Department appeals a federal judge’s ruling last month that the day of prayer is unconstitutional.

“Prayer has been a sustaining way for many Americans of diverse faiths to express their most cherished beliefs, and thus we have long deemed it fitting and proper to publicly recognize the importance of prayer on this day across the Nation,” Obama said in the proclamation.

The folks that are in charge of this even include Mrs. James (beat your children into submission) Dobson as well as Franklin (muslims are evil) Graham. You can find a history of the controversial event here. There is an on going bible reading in Washington, DC and other events to protest the judge’s decision.

Meanwhile, Obama had this to say in his proclamation.

“I call upon the citizens of our nation to pray, or otherwise give thanks, in accordance with their own faiths and consciences, for our many freedoms and blessings, and I invite all people of faith to join me in asking for God’s continued guidance, grace, and protection as we meet the challenges before us,” Obama said in his official proclamation.

I have to admit to being one person that feels extremely uncomfortable when some one stands up in a crowd and suggests we offer up a prayer to his/her deity (whatever it is.) Being surrounded by people obediently reciting things gives me the same kind of creepy, uneasy feeling I get when watching “1984” or those ‘we love fearless leader ceremonies’ they do in North Korea. I feel surrounded by aliens that might turn on me or shriek and point like those pod people did to Donald Sutherland.

I now defiantly stay seated. I do not bow my head to something I believe does not exist. I no longer add that extra ‘under God’ remnant from the cold war in the pledge. I refuse to sing “God bless America” although I have been known to sing Dogs Bless America. I’m really tired of having to endure people’s need to prove themselves sanctified. I do not want to participate in a show of forced holiness.

Isn’t it time to put these folks back in their churches where the constitution protects them and me? I don’t need the President telling me what to do with any religious conviction I might have. That’s above his pay grade.

Constitutional Rights don’t Discriminate

I was horrified this morning to read this headline and the accompanying article in the Hill: McCain: ‘Serious mistake’ if car bombing suspect was Mirandized’.

It would have been a serious mistake to have read the suspect in the attempted Times Square car bombing his Miranda rights, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Tuesday.

McCain, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a longtime leading Republican on national security issues, said he expected the suspect in the case could face charges that might warrant a death sentence if convicted.

“Obviously that would be a serious mistake…at least until we find out as much information we have,” McCain said during an appearance on “Imus in the Morning” when asked whether the suspect, 30-year-old Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen from Pakistan.

“Don’t give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it’s all about,” McCain added.

From everything I’m reading about the suspect that was arrested this morning for the failed incendiary device left in a car in Saturday’s fail attack on Time’s Square, says he is a U.S. citizen. He may be a horrible one, and traitorous one and a potentially murderous one, but he’s still a U.S. citizen. There was a time in our country when that meant something.

Investigators believe Faisal Shahzad, a recently naturalized U.S. citizen living in Shelton, Conn., paid cash for a Nissan Pathfinder that was found packed with explosives Saturday night on a tourist-crowded block in Midtown Manhattan. The vehicle was set on fire, but a homemade bomb inside failed to detonate.

Investigators located Shahzad after a two-day investigation that yielded what senior White House officials described as a flood of international and domestic clues. It was not immediately clear whether there was any link between Shahzad and videotapes that police circulated widely on Monday, showing men near the site of the attempted bombing who may have been acting suspiciously.

The Constitution grants specific rights because the colonial governments who ruled this part of the world did things to their colonies and their own citizens that were capricious. Many things done to colonists, the colonized natives, and indeed to people not within the power structure or threatening the power structure didn’t even recognize their basic humanity. Our constitution is there to protect every one from the abuses and excesses of a powerful central government. Even the ones we do not like. This is because when government is allowed to run rampantly over one set of citizens, it eventually means it can run over any and all of us. If you’ve ever been hauled of to jail having done absolutely nothing or been shot and killed for standing on your campus during the lunch hour–as was done 40 years ago with Kent State May 4 student killings by the Ohio National Guard–you are fully aware of the capriciousness of a state that has police power.

This just seems to be yet another attack on the rights of individuals to the justice and liberty we’ve established in our constitution and with our rule of law. We’ve just recently seen complete overstep by the Arizona government to deal with crime problems coming from Mexico. If you haven’t read former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s take on the new Arizona round ’em up and document ’em law, please do.

In her first public comments on an issue that has embroiled her state in controversy, Justice O’Connor said she understood why Arizona passed the bill last month allowing local police to question a person’s legal residency. Like California, she said, Arizona is a border state that suffers from smuggling of drugs and people from Mexico.

But she expressed doubt on whether the state had the authority to enact such a law. “It is essentially the job of the federal national government to secure our borders,” Justice O’Connor said Monday at a luncheon here hosted by St. Ignatius College Preparatory, the high school alma mater of her late husband, John. Arizona “may have gone a little too far in its authority,” she said.

The retired justice suggested that one potential issue with the new law, signed by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer on April 23, could be racial profiling by police. Immigration-rights groups have raised concerns the law could result in the targeting of people who look Hispanic.

The question courts may have to decide, she said, is whether the law “does too much to allow officers to arrest people because they look Hispanic. It might not read that way, but it might work that way.”

The justice predicted the law would be the subject of legal challenges, and added: “We will be locked up in court for a long time” over it.

We supposedly have a movement afoot that is mad over the powers wielded by the Federal Government. But what laws are they supporting? This year we’ve had states pass laws that stick the government’s nose squarely in the uterus of pregnant women, laws that allow the police to ask you for papers just because, and now a senator suggesting you don’t read a U.S. citizen his Miranda Rights. What’s next, asking every one with an accent or a slightly foreign look for a portfolio of documents? Perhaps we should just suggest we all get permission slips from the government before we go for plastic surgery now or take an ESL course so they can determine if we might be up to something that goes against certain religions or political mindsets. Maybe they should just barcode us all so the police can figure out which level of constitutional rights we get? Teaparty on dudes!

WTF is going on here?

The War of Religious Fanaticism Wages on against Women

No matter what the source of religious extremism, the war against modernity and science continues to place women on the front lines. Europe is fighting to free women from the islamofascists that force women into burqas.

Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a member of Germany’s pro-business Free Democrats and a vice-president of the European Parliament, has called for a complete ban on the Islamic full-body covering in an interview with the German Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

In her editorial, Koch-Mehrin said that the full veil “openly supports values that we do not share in Europe.”

Koch-Mehrin said personal and religious freedom should be defended, but should not “go so far as to take away a person’s face in public.”

“The burqa is a massive attack on the rights of women. It is a mobile prison,” she wrote.

Meanwhile,American women are losing the war against christofascists that continue to push through laws that put our rights to our bodies lower than the “right to life’ of non-sentient clump of cells. One of the worst states to live as a woman–and I ought to know because I was raised there–is Nebraska. Without absolutely any medical or scientific evidence, the Governor signed into law law that bans most abortions after 20 weeks (a new threshold) because it’s been hypothesized by religious fanatics that a fetus feels pain at that point in gestation. Theses bill are meant to go to the Supreme Court to challenge two seminal laws defining when the government can begin to weigh the life of the women and fetal viability(now 25 weeks). Those would be Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey. Since the swing vote now appears to be Justice Anthony Kennedy, this bill appears to be one of many coming out of states to test the waters.

At the same time, Nebraska has ended Prenatal care for Illegal Immigrants. So evidently, the pain of some clumps of cells are more important than others. Does this mean undocumented women in Nebraska will die with pregnancy complications too? (My doctor daughters says the University Med Center is now eating the costs of prenatal care for pregnant and undocumented women. Maybe the right to life movement should consider holding bake sales for future american citizens living in “illegal” wombs?) I guess I’d call this the let the Latinas die bill.

Less than 48 hours after a top state lawmaker told Nebraska Watchdog he was confident Governor Dave Heineman (NE-R) would back a controversial move to provide pre-natal care to the unborn children of illegal immigrants, the Governor has issued a statement clearly indicating he won’t.

The Nebraska I feel-your-fetal-pain bill is essentially begging the court to rethink the current standard. Rather than viability, it uses the possibility that the fetus could feel pain as a new dividing line at which abortions could be banned. Again, scientific evidence appears to be irrelevant to this current law. There’s another agenda at work.

Will the courts turn on almost 40 years of precedent, and trade in the viability standard for one that considers the possibility of fetal pain a more “compelling” point? It’s doubtful: the court has, on numerous occasions, reaffirmed its commitment to the viability standard. Moreover, I think it’s important to note here that research suggests fetuses cannot feel pain at 20 weeks, undermining this particular bill’s scientific credibility.

As pointed out by Charles M. Blow today in a NY Times’ Op-Ed, Florida joined the ranks looking to push challenges to current abortion law on Friday. There are other challenges that have been passed in Mississippi and Oklahoma that are meant to annoy women enough to give up on their right to choose to be a state forced incubator or a person with the right to self determination and ability to protect their health and individual sanctity. Would these kinds of things happen if we had more women in elected positions?

On Wednesday, Mississippi’s Legislature sent a bill to the governor that forbids public financing of abortions. The prohibition stands even in cases of severe birth defects.

Tuesday, the Oklahoma Legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto to pass two abortion laws. One requires women, even those seeking to end a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, to have an ultrasound and have the fetus described to them. The other prevents mothers from suing doctors who withhold information about fetal birth defects.

And on Friday, the Florida Legislature passed a bill also requiring all women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound. Even if the women don’t want to see the image, the doctor must still describe it to them.

We now have so many special interest wars on deck that I suppose these folks believe that no one will notice that we continue to pass one set of laws for men and potential men and another set for women. I imagine that they’re now full speed ahead on this because the fight over the health care bill showed how quickly the White House and the Democratic leadership will throw over women and their right to physical self determination for corporate interests.

More disturbing are signs that civil rights activists are having to fight on so many fronts, that we may be losing the message in the culture wars fought by determined religionists with an endless source of funds and fanaticism. There are so many moves against modernity that it’s hard to chose battles.

Proponents hope that some of these measures will force the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade. Unfortunately, public opinion is inching in their direction. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Friday found that the percentage of people who think that the Supreme Court is too liberal is at its highest since they began asking the question, as is the percentage of people who say that if Roe v. Wade were to come before the court again, the next justice should vote to overturn it. They’re not the majority, but it’s still not good.

It might be tempting to think of this as a temporary blip — a conservative swing during tough times, but that would be shortsighted. There is a long-range trend of public opposition coming from unexpected quarters.

Unexpected quarters indeed. We can no longer rely on the Democratic party to protect our rights and yet they try to convince us we have no place else to go. Nearly every other developed nation has fought off the established efforts by churches and others to push women’s health issues back to the 1950s. Prior to the 1980, the Republican Party supported both the ERA and a woman’s right to choose. It now endorses neither and actively supports candidates that can at best be described as troglodytes on issues impacting women and children. But what do we call the likes of Bart Stupak who was the clear winner of the Great Congressional Health Care battle? We also see these same group of people continuing to rewrite textbooks and history to shape public opinion so that ignorance rules the day. It is obvious that after 30 years of fighting, christofascists will continue the battle. Will we?

It is time we enjoin them again. We must fight people who seek to replace evidence with opinion and facts with myth. It is time to beat our hard drives into swords so that we fight the good fight for truth and freedom. We cannot rely on Democratic elected officials to block their efforts any more.

No more Jane Crow! No more Stupakistan!!! No more laws enacting religious persecution of women!!!!