Thursday, April 27, 2006
This is one of the most interesting articles ever.
The study presented in it proves how the myth of America as a land of opportunity is, exactly, only a myth and how, compared to other countries, the poor is more likely to remain poor and the rich to remain rich.
In the light of this, taxt cuts for rich people and lack of public access to education and health insurance appear a formidable vehicle to perpetuate the inherent classism and social injustice of American society.
Of course the myth of the "land of the plenty" and the "land of opportunities" is fuctional to a relative social stability and to blithe consumerism.
The nearly-desperate individual might even vote Republican so, in case he becomes rich, he might have tax cuts! He might have grown into a lottery-minded, betting, TV-driven, gadgety and dreamy illusion of a heaven on earth.
But truth is that this very illusion makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer. And abysmal social differences remain and become, if possible, greater.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
In a recent statement George W. Bush said:
"I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true," he said. "One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free.
"I believe liberty is universal. I believe people want to be free. And I know that democracies do not war with each other."
Not just the commander-in-chief, beyond any principle of law and accountability, let alone reasonability. Also the God-representative-in-chief on earth who has the responsibility to make sure "God's plans" (at least how he interprets them) are carried out!
I thought that one was a president because of elections, not by virtue of a divine mandate.
In a country that has formulated the doctrine of the "Manifest Destiny" of the God-blessed America, the above is not altogether surprising.
Alarming, rather.
Bush's approval ratings slide to new low
Poll: Only one-third say he's handling his job well
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush's approval ratings have sunk to a personal low, with only a third of Americans saying they approve of the way he is handling his job, a national poll released Monday said.
In the telephone poll of 1,012 adult Americans carried out Friday through Sunday by Opinion Research Corporation for CNN, 32 percent of respondents said they approve of Bush's performance, 60 percent said they disapprove and 8 percent said they do not know. [...]
(read the whole article here)
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Abstinence education short-sighted
by Mike Skelly
[...] The liability of any abstinence program is that its effectiveness relies solely on its ability to indoctrinate its students into believing its central dogmas. This is an especially hard task to accomplish, given the sexual inclinations of teenagers and societal pressures about sex and sexuality.
As a program that relies on an emphasis of a singular, uncompromising belief, it must necessarily exclude or detract from the gamut of ostensibly contradicting information that is both relevant and educational.
This often leads to abstinence proponents employing fallacious correlations in their reasoning. Many in favor of abstinence often argue that creating access to contraceptives would increase the likelihood of promiscuity. A similar line of logic could draw the conclusion that access to members of the opposite sex increases the risk as well.
Furthermore, the obvious religious undertones create the potential for religious indoctrination to permeate the public classroom.
The strategy employed by abstinence programs should appear suspect to anyone who favors supplying students with all the available information, a goal that public schools should adopt in every field. The aim of these programs should be to address all aspects relating to sexual education in a responsible, appropriate manner. By creating access to information on not just abstinence, comprehensive sexual education includes relevant information for everyone. This would help to empower those who wish to abstain while allowing others to learn the associated risks of sexual activity and the preventative measures necessary to protect themselves. [...]
[Read the all article here]
COMMENT:
As I have often remarked, people - including young ones - do not need indoctrination, patronising, scare tactics, threats of ostracisation and/or religious agendas creeping in education.
They need intellectually honest, comprehensive notions allowing them to make informed choices.
Society needs real answers and proper, complete education, not ignorance and priestly homi-lies.
Friday, April 21, 2006
If Past Is Prologue, George Bush Is Becoming An Increasingly Dangerous President
By JOHN W. DEAN
----
President George W. Bush's presidency is a disaster - one that's still unfolding. In a mid-2004 column, I argued that, at that point, Bush had already demonstrated that he possessed the least attractive and most troubling traits among those that political scientist James Dave Barber has cataloged in his study of Presidents' personality types.
Now, in early 2006, Bush has continued to sink lower in his public approval ratings, as the result of a series of events that have sapped the public of confidence in its President, and for which he is directly responsible. This Administration goes through scandals like a compulsive eater does candy bars; the wrapper is barely off one before we've moved on to another. [...]
[Read the whole article here]
Thursday, April 20, 2006
In a recent interview, the authorative Catholic Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini stated: "In some circumstances, it [the condom] can be the "lesser evil". When a spouse is infected by AIDS, he is obliged to protect the other partner, and the latter too should be able to be protected".
Finally something somewhat reasonable from the Catholic Church.
The recent opinion expressed by Cardinal Martini makes sense of course. It has always been absurd to criminalise the use of condom as, if used, it can provide a high degree of protection.
But how long did it take for the Catholic Church to come out with a glimmer of reasonability on this issue? Too deplorably long.
From now on, however, priests - the pavid notaries of Catholic "ethics" - will be able to force less their intellectual honesty and come out with something reasonable too, when speaking to the "flock of faithful" about condoms. From now on they will not have to be equilibrists of nonsense to defend orthodoxy on this issue.
Suddenly they are authorised to express a different opinion!
Sad how these mentally passive individuals, with vaguely educational responsibilities, have to wait for the opinion of higher hierarchies in order to say something reasonable.
Non-Catholics have the advantage of being able to start being reasonable decades, if not centuries, earlier.
Monday, April 17, 2006
From Think Progress I learn that the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced new guidelines for organizations applying for funds to carry out abstinence-only education programs.
In such guidelins a new articulation of the concept of abstinence:
That is, abstinence curricula are expected to teach young people, at the peak of their sexuality, that not only making love, but any type of stimulation (therefore touching, kissing) shall be postponed to the moment in which society (and churches) authorise them - through marriage - to express their very nature.
How alienating and psychotic is that?
One wonders what type of psychologists or medical experts might endorse the above approach. No serious expert would.
But one can surely imagine dozens of Evangelical pastors or Catholic priests - who, I am afraid, are far from being reliable experts on human psychology and sexuality - will rub their hands with pleasedness.
These type of oppressive and humanly humiliating teachings, in which even human affection and love is subject to forms of social stigma, convey a dangerous vision of dissociation.
Not to mention the fact that proper crucial information on contraception and safe sex is not given with abstinence-only programmes, even if one "voluntarily choose not to be abstinent". A quite absurd and irresponsible social policy.
Of course Evangelical or Catholic people, and people from any religion or sect, are entitled to believe what they want. Some even whip themselves and wear cilices. Some people are so wacko that they think self-punishment and pain is better than pleasure!
But what is unacceptable is that the current American administration applies am anachronistic, scientifically wrong, fanatic, sexophobic and dissociated approach for the WHOLE society. An approach that is patronising and humiliating for teenagers and adults alike. Not to mention dangerous, as it does not provide crucial health information on contraception and safe-sex.
I still don’t understand how come all people in school in the States do not go on strike and protest against these policies of misinformation and non-education which humiliate people intelligenge and self-determination, while creating a dangerous dissociated approach towards the body and sexuality.
I cannot help thinking that through sexual repression and humiliation of people's private sphere, the Bush administration is really carrying out an attempt of religious and political shaping of people's mind.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Source: Human Rights Watch
(New York, April 14, 2006) – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could be criminally liable for the torture of a detainee at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002 and early 2003, Human Rights Watch said today. A December 20, 2005 Army Inspector General's report, obtained by Salon.com this week, contains a sworn statement by Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt that implicates Secretary Rumsfeld in the abuse of detainee Mohammad al-Qahtani. Based on an investigation that he carried out in early 2005, which included two interviews with Rumsfeld, Gen. Schmidt describes the defense secretary as being "personally involved" in al-Qahtani's interrogation.Human Rights Watch urges the United States to name a special prosecutor to investigate the culpability of Rumsfeld and others in the al-Qahtani case."The question at this point is not whether Secretary Rumsfeld should resign, it's whether he should be indicted," said Joanne Mariner, Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program director at Human Rights Watch. "General Schmidt's sworn statement suggests that Rumsfeld may have been perfectly aware of the abuses inflicted on al-Qahtani."
Gen. Schmidt said that Secretary Rumsfeld was "talking weekly" with Gen. Miller about the al-Qahtani interrogation, and that the secretary of defense was "personally involved in the interrogation of [this] one person." Schmidt's statement indicates that Rumsfeld maintained a high level of knowledge of and supervision over al-Qahtani's treatment. Although Schmidt said that he believed that Rumsfeld did not specifically order the more abusive methods used in the al-Qahtani interrogation, he concluded that Rumsfeld's policies facilitated the abuse.
The Pentagon has acknowledged that al-Qahtani's mistreatment was not unplanned. "Al-Kahtani's interrogation was guided by a very detailed plan, conducted by trained professionals in a controlled environment, and with active supervision and oversight," wrote Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, in an email to Salon.com. "Nothing was done randomly."
Human Rights Watch has obtained an unredacted copy of al-Qahtani's interrogation log, and believes that the techniques used during al-Qahtani's interrogation were so abusive that they amounted to torture.
The interrogation log reveals that al-Qahtani was subjected to a regime of physical and mental mistreatment from mid-November 2002 to early January 2003. For six weeks, he was intentionally deprived of sleep, forced into painful physical positions (known as stress positions) and subjected to forced exercises, forced standing, and sexual and other physical humiliation. [...]
[Read the whole article here]
Read also:
Torture: the human-rights answer
by Geoffrey Robertson
"The unequivocal lesson of history and current politics is that torture corrodes the bonds of law and humanity that underpin any society with a claim to be civilised, says Geoffrey Robertson."
COMMENT: If justice and accountability means something. If morality and human rights are not empty words behind which blind loyalty, abuse and torture hide. If the U.S.A. truly wants to have a glimmer of credibility when it claims to be a lighthouse of civilisation and freedom, all American citizens should demand Rumsfeld's being put on trial. And they should consider the inane support given to Rumsfeld by George Bush as complicity.
Friday, April 14, 2006
In some countries with a Catholic majority, penance rituals for the Holy Week include scourgings and crucifictions (sometimes with with real nails).
A repertoire of sado-masochistic activities which all Catholics are quite familiar with, pictorially, psychologically and/or in real life (Opus Dei docet).
The kid in the photograph (found here), exposed to some penitents in the Philippines, looks quite perplexed.
By now, he might have been brainwashed with pictoresque fabrications such as Original Sins, Virgin Marys, Angels and Archangels, or ideas about "intrinsically and gravely disordered" sexual behaviours (basically all sex not sanctified before a man in drag with Catholic symbols), and teachings which foster passivity and acquiescence.
Sad to consider how growing up often entails accepting common psychosis and mental disturbances.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Yet, the current American administration wants to export its ideology-driven abstincence-only (non)education approach in other countries too, an approach which has not proved effective on a society scale. Spreading ignorance is criminal.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Norway Aims to Reduce Microsoft Dependence
The Associated Press
Friday, April 7, 2006; 10:46 AM
OSLO, Norway -- The Norwegian government said Friday it will increase its use of freely shared, open-source software to reduce its dependency on large computer companies like Microsoft Corp.
"It should no longer be necessary to use software from the major, international computer companies to gain access to electronic information in the public sector," the government said in a statement. "Now that dependency will be broken."
The Ministry of Government Administration and Reform said measures to increase use of open-source programs include a specialist panel to set standards for public information.
The government statement said the project will also set standards to allow various operating systems to communicate with one another.
Several countries, including Brazil, China, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea, have been actively moving toward open-source alternatives.
Proponents say open source results in quicker development of software because vast numbers of people can study, update and adapt programs without having to pay licensing fees.
The Linux operating system and the Mozilla Web browsers, led by Firefox, are examples of free open-source technology that users can copy, modify and redistribute. Microsoft's Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer browser are proprietary, meaning the blueprints behind them are closely guarded, though IE is distributed without charge.
COMMENT: That's an excellent idea. I don't see why governments should spend money for Microsoft software when great, safer open source software is available for free. It is better to save that money and use it in better ways.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Moving echo of Vietnam's tragic doctor
A young woman's rediscovered war diaries are a publishing sensation 36 years after her death
Doctor-soldier Dang Thuy Tram (left, photo found from vietnamnet.vn)
John Aglionby in Hanoi
Sunday April 9, 2006
The Observer
For three years until she was killed in a skirmish in 1970, Dang Thuy Tram struggled to cure the wounds of North Vietnamese soldiers injured fighting the Americans.Today she is healing wartime scars on both sides of the Pacific through her no-holds-barred diaries from the front line of the Vietnam war that have become a massive bestseller in her own country after languishing for decades in an American veteran's filing cabinet.
'It's the struggle in her mind,' said Thuy Tram's 82-year-old mother, Dang Ngoc Tram. 'For my daughter, and now for others, it was the honest reality of what she did and saw on the battlefield.'
The opening entry, dated 8 April 1968, is typical of the way she not only exposes what the authorities sought to suppress for years but also her inner turmoil: 'I had to do an appendix operation without enough medicine. Only a few tubes of Novocaine, but the wounded young soldier never cried out or yelled. He continued to smile to encourage me. Looking at the forced smile on his dry lips, knowing his fatigue, I felt so sorry for him. Very bad because his stomach is infected, but not from a burst appendix. I searched for an hour but couldn't find the cause ... I lightly stroked his hair. I would like to say to him, "Patients like you who I cannot cure cause me the most sorrow, and their memory will not fade".'
Vuong Tri Nhan, the diaries' publisher and a friend of Thuy Tram, agrees, but says it is much more than this contradiction of official propaganda that has resulted in Thuy Tram on Tuesday being awarded the Hero of the People's Army medal, an honour conferred on only a few thousand of the millions who fought.
'Her writing is so genuine because she was writing for herself, not for other people,' he said. 'It's a personal dialogue, a place to shelter her soul and her spirit.' [...]
The raw emotion is manifest in the diary, which served myriad purposes for Thuy Tram, just like a journal did for Anne Frank, to whom Thuy Tram is now regularly compared even though she was 27 when she died. At times it acts as an outlet for her anger against the Americans, particularly when friends are killed. 'I have already promised my comrades that even if it kills us we will try hard until we break the warlike head of this poisonous snake,' she wrote. 'How hateful it is! We are all humans, but some are so cruel as to want the blood of others to water their gold tree ... there is never enough to satisfy the avarice and crazy ambitions of those bloodthirsty demons.' [...]
(Read the whole article here)
Sunday, April 09, 2006
48 hours that could condemn Berlusconi - and David Mills
He has passed laws to protect himself and his business, and blurred his interests with the nation's. But that could change. By Peter Popham in Rome
Published: 09 April 2006
Excerpt:
"[...] One of the reasons he [Italian prime minister Berlusconi] has done so little to enact meaningful reform in Italy over the past five years is that he has devoted most of his political energy to getting laws passed to protect himself: to allow trials to be transferred to more indulgent judiciaries; to give himself immunity from prosecution, to protect his media empire from assault on the grounds of its being a monopoly, and to forestall "conflict of interest" attacks on his position as media tycoon and Prime Minister.
He has passed these ad personam laws without betraying any sense that he was making indecent use of parliament: for Silvio Berlusconi, l'état, c'est moi.
As his violent rhetoric of recent days makes clear, he is no longer capable of seeing any difference between his own interests and those of the nation. Anyone (like Milan's prosecutors) who is against him is a subversive against Italy. "Berlusconi," wrote one former editor, "seems devoted to the task of making the entire nation part of his clan." He still makes foreigners laugh, but these are some of the reasons why nowadays he makes many Italians gag with fright. [...]"
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
The Fading Future Of Italy's Young
Reverence for the past is stifling the present. it's time for the old guard to give the under-40 generation a chance
By JEFF ISRAELY
[Read the whole article here.]
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Do you see any coherence in being a Republican who supports an illegal war based on lies, causing tens of thousands of deaths, polluting Iraq for millions of years with depleted uranium (thus causing abortions and/or genetic mutations of newborns in the future), a war which costs trillions, WHILE being at the same time a pious pro-life supporter?
South Dakota recently passed a legislation that bans abortion in nearly all cases. But, according to Karen Miller, co-chair of Democracy in Action’s Women’s Autonomy Group (quoted in this press-release by a group of South Dalota grandmothers) "12% of our families don’t have health insurance, our public schools are under-funded, and folks are struggling to get by on rock-bottom wages,” and, Miller asks, “What is the agenda of the politicians who claim to care about fetuses while refusing to provide for the health, welfare, and education of our children?".
Karen Miller has more than one point. America is run by an administration which has done nothing to increase support for families, and pregnant women, or to spread sexual and contraceptive education, rather quite the opposite. In short an administration which fosters the very conditions that cause abortion, while at the same time claiming to be 'pro-life'. And while spending trillions to cause death and destruction with illegal wars.
The current American administration might have in mind a model of woman-martyr who will not have an abortion even if alone, desperate and ostracised by her environment, even if risking to lose a job (or jobless) or to be kicked out of a school, and even if without money and social insurance. Or even if raped. Unless, perhaps, as South Dakota state senator Bill Napoli twistedly puts it, she is a "religious virgin" who "planned on saving her virginity until she was married" and was "brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated".
But it would be about time that the current American administration did something for the people, instead of spending money for wars or to help its cronies and corporate friends, while expecting common people to be martyrs.
Read also: "My dinner with Napoli" by Nancy Goldstein, an interesting post which inspired me to express my take on this matter.
