Who needs books anyway?

 

Link to story here.

Changing or misquoting history damns you to repeat it

 

Something something about ignoring history damns one to repeat it

 

Why America Is at War Over the History of Slavery

"As half of the country earnestly searches for a new understanding of our racial history, the other half violently denies it. Half of our neighbors are demagoguing critical race theory, while the other half are busy reading it. Smith has bravely stepped into that fray, asking a large swath of the country to soberly consider how their communities, and even their own families, contributed to our nation's original sin. “You have millions of people who are recalibrating their understandings of what America was and what America has been and what America is today,” Smith told me. “And as a result, you have this incredible amount of pushback from people for whom asking questions of American history is an existential threat to them because then they have to ask questions of themselves.”

Would Mark Twain recognize the US today? I think he would....

Said almost one hundred and fifty years ago but still applicable: Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite -- but they all worship money.    Mark Twain

Larry Wilmore Had the Best 2 Minutes on the Confederate Flag You'll See  And some people can't understand what the word slavery actually means.

Is fracking killing babies in Vernal, Utah?

Amazon tribe creates 500-page traditional medicine encyclopedia

Anti-intellectualism is killing the US.

Alaska is going up in smoke.

Why rape victims often don't fight or scream.

Delayed drowning involving children.  This can happen after the child seems ok after choking in the pool and pulled to safety.

*Gasp* A woman scientist who agrees with Tim Hunt....

A little late but a nicely drawn comic explaining the TPP and  how trade works.

Librarians to Gamergate

Sing the praises of librarians.

Paul Krugman sings the praises of Obama.  Really.

Mars and a comet.

Get ready to breathe more methane.

Myths about slavery.  Lots I didn't know.

Explaining white privilege.  And then some.  (Scroll down to read the letter.)

Gamergate.  And wow!  then some more!

Returning to their roots....

Alabama brings back slavery for Latinos: Here's how: pass a draconian immigration law, lock up 'illegals' in private prisons, then get the new inmates to work in the fields

Blog sprinkles

How badly fucked up the Gulf actually might be.... And people share their ideas on how to fix it. And BP tells you not to spill.

The secret about Obama and BP!!1!

Obviously there are giant secretive worms that live in the earth's core...

Chris Hedges: The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger

Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of social deviants, beginning with homosexuals, and moving on to immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they dismiss as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace their perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Those who defy the mass movement are condemned as posing a threat to the health and hygiene of the country and the family. All will be purged.

Uh oh.. Gamers Have Bodies Of '60-Year-Old Chain Smokers' (STUDY)

A photo of slave children around the Civil War.

I should be more concerned about this because it means other species are going as well.... but ... they're SNAKES.

The snake decline reported this week across Europe and Africa could well be happening in America as well, say biologists.

“If you get your average herpetologists together, you’d probably arrive at a consensus that a lot of scientists feel that even across their own lifetimes there are negative changes in terms of population,” says Rafe Brown, chief curator of herpetology at the University of Kansas. “It’s clear that overall the trends are not good and we’re looking at pretty serious declines.”

“The bottom line,” Dr. Brown adds in a telephone interview Thursday, "is that few of these species can survive when 99 percent of their habitat has been turned into subdivisions."

Sign the petitions:

Tell the oil companies: Stop polluting California and clean up the Gulf!

"Congress must not block the Clean Air Act's limits on global warming pollution."

"Please sign on to the Leahy - DeFazio "Dear Colleague" letter asking U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Vilsack to maintain the ban on Monsanto's genetically modified alfalfa."

Just forget that slavery stuff for Confederacy Month

Eugene Robinson for Truthdig:

It amounts to much more than “diddly” that so many Americans try hard to avoid coming to terms with the reality of slavery. It wasn’t just “a bad thing.” Littering is a bad thing. Slavery was this nation’s Original Sin, and yet many people will not look at it except through a gauze of Spanish moss.

The Atlantic slave trade was one of the last millennium’s greatest horrors. An estimated 17 million Africans, most of them teenagers, were snatched from their families, stuffed into the holds of ships and brought to the New World. As many as 7 million of them died en route, either on the high seas or at “seasoning” camps in the Caribbean where they were “broken” to the will of their masters.

[snip]

What “doesn’t amount to diddly” is the revisionist notion—which Confederate History Month celebrations perpetuate—that the Civil War was about something other than slavery. The “lost cause” die-hards insist that the treasonous rebellion was a fight over freedom or the Constitution or states’ rights. But the “right” that was being fought over was the ability to own human beings, compel their labor, buy and sell them as if they were livestock, exploit them sexually and torture or kill them if they tried to escape.

McDonnell’s apology, at least, recognized that slavery was nothing to be proud of. It should be noted, however, that Virginia’s previous two governors—both Democrats—did not feel the need to proclaim Confederate History Month. McDonnell’s original proclamation, before he amended it, seemed designed to appeal to a fringe group for whom the Civil War is still an open question.

This is a free country—for black people, too, thanks to the defeat of the Confederacy—and so if some white Southerners want to celebrate the “heritage” of slavery, they are welcome to do so. But while they’re entitled to their own set of opinions, they’re not entitled to their own set of facts. I’d say that Haley Barbour’s studied ignorance was “a bad thing,” but that would be a gross understatement.

Damn right. I'll quote Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic again:

What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn't. The Lost Cause is necromancy--it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn't about "honoring" the past--it's about an inability to cope with the present.

So when did the illegal alien influx slow down?

That we have workers from India treated like this?:

More than 100 Indians who moved to the US for jobs have marched hundreds of miles to Washington DC in protest at being forced to work "like slaves".

The men plan to take their protest to the Indian ambassador.

The men say recruiters tricked them into paying up to $20,000 each for a new life in the US, where they then had to work in exploitative conditions.

The Mississippi firm that employed them, Signal International, has denied they were mistreated.

It says the men were paid wages above the local average and given good accommodation.

It accuses the recruitment firm of deceiving the Indians and has now ended its contract.

It is also demanding the recruiters return the fees the men paid them.

Apparently businesses are missing their yearly dose of cheap exploitable labor...

We have undocumented workers, recent 'illegal aliens' and those who have lived in this country for decades in 'detention centers' being run by private companies where the people in these prisons have no legal recourse, no voice, no ability to see their American-born children. What is happening there?

Why am I getting continual hits on my 'Slavery is good' posts?

WTF?

Oh, look! More incompetence.

At least the Bush administration is consistent.

WASHINGTON — The fire-fighting system in the mammoth new $740 million U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is defective, according to documents obtained by McClatchy and U.S. officials, who said that their concerns were ignored or overruled in a rush to declare the complex completed.

"As far as I know, nothing's been fixed," said one State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation for speaking to the news media. "The lives of the people who are working in that building are going to be at stake" if the complex doesn't meet building codes, he said.

The 104-acre embassy complex, which has been hit at least once by mortar fire, will house more than 1,000 U.S. diplomats, coalition military officials and associated personnel. U.S. diplomats in Iraq are still headquartered in a former palace of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Green Zone and haven't moved into the new embassy complex.

Well.. what can you say when you work with slave labor and under such dangerous conditions? And by the way.... who are you going to get to come work at this monument to the Neocon PNAC and the Bush administration?

Remember that honkin' big ass embassy we are building in Iraq?

The one that shows we intend to stay for a thousand years? It's being built with slave labor and shitty materials:

WASHINGTON — The latest problem with the trouble-plagued new U.S. embassy complex in Iraq is that the sprinkler systems meant to contain a fire do not work, according to officials in Congress and the State Department.

The previously undisclosed problem in the $592 million project was discovered several weeks ago when the fire-safety systems were tested and pipe joints burst, State Department representatives recently informed Congress.

The embassy complex, being built by First Kuwaiti General Trade and Contracting Co., has been marred by repeated problems. In May, when kitchen facilities at a guard camp that is part of the embassy complex were tested, the electrical system malfunctioned and wires melted. A subsequent inquiry showed that First Kuwaiti had used counterfeit electrical wiring that did not meet specifications, according to testimony at a congressional hearing in July.

Former top investigators for State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard have charged that Krongard refused to aggressively investigate allegations of misconduct by First Kuwaiti and deficiencies in the Baghdad Embassy.

Krongard has disputed his former aides' version of events, and is expected to testify before Congress later this month.

The one-time aides to Krongard, including former Assistant Inspector General for Investigations John DeDona, have told Congress that the inspector general did not pursue allegations that First Kuwaiti failed to construct blast-resistant walls to protect the embassy, as required by its contract.

Krongard also took the unusual step of personally investigating allegations that First Kuwaiti abused foreign workers and illegally brought some workers to Iraq against their will, the aides have told Congress.

The embassy is eventually supposed to hold almost 1,000 U.S. diplomats and embassy staff, who are now crowded into a former palace in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

It remains unclear when the embassy, intended to be the largest U.S. diplomatic post in the world, will open for business. An embassy spokesman in Baghdad had no comment Saturday on the latest problems with the new complex.

In a letter Thursday to Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, complained that he had been assured repeatedly that the building would meet its scheduled opening date last month.

"Our new embassy compound in Iraq is apparently facing significant contractor deficiencies that will delay its opening for weeks or even months past its promised delivery date," Lantos wrote.

Slavery is good

Here Michael Medved blithers about the African slaves and how we did them a favor by bringing them to America. One point stood out:

5. WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.

Which brought me to this book review: Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy:

In this eye-opening look at the contemporary American scourge of labor abuse and outright slavery, journalist and author Bowe (Gig: Americans Talk About their Jobs) visits locations in Florida, Oklahoma and the U.S.-owned Pacific island of Saipan, where slavery cases have been brought to light as recently as 2006. There, he talks to affected workers, providing many moving and appalling first-hand accounts. In Immokalee, Florida, migrant Latino tomato and orange pickers are barely paid, kept in decrepit conditions and intimidated, violently, to keep quiet about it.

A welding factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma imported workers from India who were forced to pay exorbitant "recruiting fees" and live in squalid barracks with tightly controlled access to the outside world. Considering the tiny island capital of Saipan, Bowe explores how its culture, isolation and American ties made it so favorable an environment for exploitative garment manufacturers and corrupt politicos; alongside the factories sprouted karaoke bars, strip joints and hotels where politicians were entertained by now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The detailed chapter gives readers a lasting image of the island, touted a "miracle of economic development," as a vulnerable, truly suffering community, where poverty rates have climbed as high as 35 percent.

Bowe's deeply researched, well-written treatise on the very real problem of modern American slavery deserves the attention of anyone living, working and consuming in America.

The United States still has slavery?

And this about Bush, Abramoff and the Northern Mariana Islands, John Aravosis of Americablog in 10/16/06:

Remember how just two years ago George Bush claimed he wanted to put a stop to human trafficking - i.e., women being forced into sexual slavery?

Then why was the Bush administration's premiere advocate for stopping such sexual slavery forced out of his job a while back?

According to the Sunday Los Angeles Times, he was fired because convicted criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff was representing one of the countries that most profits from sexual slavery and human trafficking, the Northern Mariana Islands. Abramoff wanted this Bush administration official fired because the official's anti-human-trafficking agenda - now George Bush's agenda - posed a direct threat to Abramoff's pro-sex-slave client.

But Jack Abramoff doesn't have the power to fire a Bush administration official - all he can do is ask. Someone inside the Bush administration had to do Abramoff's dirty work and fire the official on behalf of Abramoff and his client. According to the Los Angeles Times, that someone was former senior Bush White House official, and now head of the Republican party, Ken Mehlman.

And then my post about the collection of illegal immigrants and others being held in concentration camps in the United States with no oversight.

I've been getting consistent hits on this last year's post about a parody site about slavery being good for the economy. It boggles my mind.

What the hell is going on?

Republicans: a party that runs on hate and fear

And has nothing to offer for the future but eternal war and ruin.

Fear of being overwhelmed by the 'other'. (Read the hilarious comments!) It's the master slave syndrome, where the master is always afraid that the positions of power would suddenly be shifted and what he has done to others would be done to him. It's all about domination. There is no recognition of the humanity of the 'other', they are just a looming threat.

The desire to be slaves themselves under an all-knowing, all wise grand white father who smells 'safe'. (Notice in the first link how off-handedly the 'other' is to be slaughtered.)

Ignore the fact that Republicans are NOT better at running the economy.

Ignore the fact that Republicans are NOT better at running the military.

Ignore the fact that Republicans are NOT better at family values.

Hate and fear.

That's all they have.

Update: eatbees at TPM Cafe lines up the quotes.

Soldiers reject Bush's war

As they begin to see that nothing said has been proved true: (my bold)

Last weekend, shortly before his return to the States, John let DER SPIEGEL in on his plan over cocoa and ham sandwiches in a Berlin cafe. He is one of a growing number of American service members now going AWOL (absent without leave) from units stationed overseas. Though the US Department of Defense does not keep figures on such cases, a strong indication of their frequency is the number who receive "Chapter 11" discharges through Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Fort Knox, Kentucky, the main processing centers for those who go missing overseas and turn themselves in, or are arrested, back home. Between October 2002 and September 2005, the two made an annual average of 1,546 such discharges. Last year the number grew to 1,988, or more than five per day.

John didn't start out a quitter. When he joined the military, he loved the idea of seeing the world. Family members were thrilled by his choice. His stepfather works for an oil company, his uncle for a weapons manufacturer.

In training, though, he had serious qualms. From inside, the Army struck John as brutal, controlling, "like a slavery contract." Iraq, his first war zone, did nothing to quiet his doubts. The communications specialist was sent to a base near Baghdad to repair a phone and Internet hookup that allowed communication between US facilities. John found himself holding a faulty fiberoptic cable labeled "Abu Ghraib." "I really felt like part of something bad at that point," he says. "I didn't directly have blood on my hands, but I was part of it."

Scan these links if you have any doubts as to the indifference the Bush administration has towards our soldiers.

Pandagon gets an email from a soldier

Which mentions a word I've been using to describe the stop-loss program: Slavery.

I am a soldier serving at Fort Hood. I signed up in 2003 for a 5 year contract (I should ETS on 1/15/08). I joined at 32 years old to serve my country. I have been to Iraq twice already and was looking forward to start terminal leave in Dec of 2007.

Now after my unit returned we were told our company was being moved and that all the soldiers had to go to another company. This new company has not deployed in over a year so on paper it looks like we have been home longer.

I asked not to be sent here since I knew I would be stop lossed. Basically the answer was no and too bad.

You see they no longer care about soldiers serving honorably and doing right by us. What they are doing is finding a loophole to extend soldiers in their contracts for a year or more. This in turn makes it look like the army is not short of soldiers.

Let me give you the truth. The army is scrambling to find soldiers ad morale is getting worse. Not as much due to the deployments (that’s part of it) but also to the knowledge that when our time comes the army can keep us as long as they want.

When I joined the stop loss was not explained to me. Had it been I would never have signed. What they are doing is a form of slavery that we the soldiers can do nothing about. If they needed to stay so badly they could ask me to extend and as a patriot I probably would have but to be forced to with threat of jail and the loss of my freedom then I have no choice.

Finally, I should note that I have never had any discipline problems and even volunteered for my second deployment becuase the company I went with needed soldiers. While in Iraq I served honorably and have seen combat on several occasions. I even volunteered to go in January so I would not be stop lossed but was denied.

The command cares little for the soldiers here and has a policy in place that is wrong in a supposedly volunteer army.

Update: Reminds me to bring up this journal which was written by a soldier while in Afghanistan and then at home.