November 24, 2006

News -- November 24, 2006

"As Long As You're Not Doing Anything Wrong, You Have Nothing To Worry About" - "Since when were long established civil liberties and the citizen's right to privacy replaced with this "new freedom", this "freedom lite" shall we call it, this guilty until proven innocent mantra? The problem lies with what is considered to be "something to hide". I don't want to be filmed 24 hours a day, everywhere I go, does that mean I've got something to hide? I don't much like the idea of being fingerprinted if i want to go into a bar, does that mean I have got something to hide? Yes, if I am an enemy of the gestapo in the 1930s, but no if I am a free citizen in 21st century Britain or America."

The Snooping Goes Beyond Phone Calls - "The Departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security spend millions annually to buy commercial databases that track Americans' finances, phone numbers, and biographical information, according to a report last month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Often, the agencies and their contractors don't ensure the data's accuracy, the GAO found. Buying commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules. The Privacy Act of 1974 restricts how federal agencies may use such information and requires disclosure of what the government is doing with it. But the law applies only when the government is doing the data collecting."

'Big Brother' cameras listen for fights - "In U.K. public places, smarter closed-circuit TV cameras have been given the ability to listen for disturbances and also keep an eye on citizens. The system has already been put into use in the Netherlands to listen for people speaking in aggressive tones, to try to counter violent attacks in Dutch streets, prisons and railways."

Chertoff’s “Chilling Vision” - "Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who runs the giant agency that keeps track of threats to the United States, has shared what he calls his “chilling vision” of the future—a time when U.S. government actions might be constrained by international law."

Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs' - "But recent developments suggest that the Bush administration may already be contemplating what to do with Americans who are deemed insufficiently loyal or who disseminate information that may be considered helpful to the enemy." -- Just what is being planned?

Iraq war was good for Israel: Olmert - "Thank God for the power and the determination and leadership manifested by President Bush."

The 'Real' McCain - "If Ms. Huffington is baffled as to why McCain and Feingold are giving radically different assessments of what is going on in Iraq, then one has to wonder if it's her, and not McCain, who has gone off the rails. What world is she living in? Feingold is the only Democrat of any national stature calling for the U.S. to get out of Iraq. McCain, on the other hand, is – and always has been – one of the biggest warmongers in the U.S. Senate, and no more fervent supporter of the war exists outside the offices of the Weekly Standard. Why do you think Bill Kristol, the little Lenin of the neocons, supported his candidacy during the 2000 GOP primary?"

Two U.S. men charged with broadcasting Hezbollah TV - "U.S. authorities brought terrorism charges against two men for providing satellite broadcasts of Hezbollah television channel al-Manar to U.S. customers, according to an indictment unsealed on Monday."

LBJ Night Before JFK Assassination: "Those SOB's Will Never Embarrass Me Again" - "The night before the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Baines Johnson met with Dallas tycoons, FBI moguls and organized crime kingpins - emerging from the conference to tell his mistress Madeleine Duncan Brown that "those SOB's" would never embarrass him again. It's a jaw-dropping deposition and it's the biggest JFK smoking gun there is - despite the fact that it has received little media attention."

CIA role claim in Kennedy killing - "New video and photographic evidence that puts three senior CIA operatives at the scene of Robert Kennedy's assassination has been brought to light. ... It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968. The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles."

No Thanks to Thanksgiving - "One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting. ... But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin -- the genocide of indigenous people -- is of special importance today. It's now routine -- even among conservative commentators -- to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful."

Teaching Thanksgiving from a different perspective - "Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings. He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers. Morgan said he still wants his pupils at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco to celebrate Thanksgiving. But "what I am trying to portray is a different point of view." Others see Morgan and teachers like him as too extreme. "I think that is very sad," said Janice Shaw Crouse, a former college dean and public high school teacher and now a spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, a conservative organization. "He is teaching his students to hate their country. That is a very distorted view of history, a distorted view of Thanksgiving.""

Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history - "Whatever the motives for atheist bloodthirstiness, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades."

The religious divide - "BEHIND THE political divide in America, there is also a religious divide. The split is not just between people who believe and people who do not; it is between those who see religious faith as society's foundation and those who see it as society's bane. ... A religion, like any other set of beliefs, can be used for good or bad. In America, some people used the Bible to justify slavery, but Christians were also in the forefront of the battle to abolish it. Any passionately held belief, whether or not it includes God, can make some people intolerant, closed-minded, unwilling to look at facts that contradict their dogma, and hateful toward those who disagree."

First, Re-Open the Libraries - "It never got down to actual book-burning, but the Republican choke-hold on government would clearly have taken us there. In August, under the guise of fiscal responsibility, the Bush Environmental Protection Agency began closing most of its research libraries, both to the public and to its own staff. ... Closing the EPA libraries is the perfect symbol to characterize the methods of the Bush administration. Since 2000, the Republicans have cemented their reputation as ushers of a new dark age. They have sought to shroud the light of science by closing libraries and by suppressing scientific reports. They have gagged their own scientists and persecuted whistleblowers. They have cloaked government in secrecy, a prime example being Dick Cheney's secret meetings with oil companies to draft an industry-friendly national energy policy. But that era is now winding down."

How Multinational Corporations Avoid Paying Their Taxes - "Drug companies and other multinational companies based in the U.S. systematically avoid paying tax in the U.S. on their profits. The companies elect to realize profits in low-tax countries and because of this the rest of us have to pay billions of unnecessary taxes to make up for the shortfall, writes Peter Rost, an ex-pharmaceutical executive."

Genetic breakthrough that reveals the differences between humans - "The findings mean that instead of humanity being 99.9 per cent identical, as previously believed, we are at least 10 times more different between one another than once thought - which could explain why some people are prone to serious diseases."

Lifelike robots: Cool or creepy? - "Their heads are so lifelike, their skin so textured and realistic, that Candy Sidner, a competing roboticist, called his Albert Einstein robot "spookily cool ... a giant step forward." ... "If you make it perfectly realistic, you trigger this body-snatcher fear in some people," he said. "Making realistic robots is going to polarize the market, if you will. You will have some people who love it and some people who will really be disturbed.""

Hubble telescope's top ten greatest space photographs - "Hubble's Top Ten are shown here, and they illustrate that our universe is not only deeply strange, but also almost impossibly beautiful." -- Very nice pics.




Quote of the Day
"Reading is too intimate. It will put you too close to the feelings and the ideas of others. It will disturb and confuse you."
~ Mary Lou Borne, Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

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