whitebeard

Don't curse the darkness, light a candle.

New York, 31th may 1819 - 26th march 1892
For you o democracy. 
COME, I Will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of
America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over
the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's
necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

posted by: Whitebeard at 22:47 | link | comments |

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Nuke 'Em
Wielding the Nuclear Option
by Ira Chernus 
 May 17, 2005 
 
Trent Lott and George Lakoff live in very different worlds. But they both understand the power of a good metaphor.

 Lott, the canny politician, knows that the public likes complicated policies best when they are reduced to snappy soundbites. The more complex and controversial the policy, the more compelling the word picture has to be. So when the Republicans set out to foist a complex, controversial policy on the American people -- getting Senate confirmation for every federal judge George W. Bush nominates by denying the Democrats the right to filibuster -- Lott came up with snappiest, most vivid soundbite he could find: "the nuclear option."

 Cast a look

posted by: Whitebeard at 12:14 | link | comments |

Dear Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience Friends:

Some exciting new developments:

1)  MoveOn members have taken up the call to filibuster and are holding more than one hundred 24-hour Citizen Filibusters to Stop the Right-Wing Power Grab starting Tuesday, May 24th at 12 Noon. There's one near you. The Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience (NION SOC) urges you to be part of these Peoples' Filibusters. It is crucial that people join in these actions. <http://www.moveonpac.org/event/citizenfilibusters/?id=5557-1733345-VT7Nj97w1nLE9hcmvhVA7Q&t=1>http://www.moveonpac.org/event/citizenfilibusters/?id=5557-1733345-VT7Nj97w1nLE9hcmvhVA7Q&t=

   There needs to be both visible protest to this "nuclear option" as well as outreach to those who are not recognizing the severe far-reaching consequences of this power grab. The NION statement speaks to this urgent need.

   To do:
-- Distribute the NION SOC. http://www.nion.us/NSOC/download.htm
-- Take posters with the slogans: "Stop the Theocratic Power Grab!  No Nuclear Option!"
-- Read the NION statment at your Peoples' Filibuster http://www.nion.us/NSOC/NION2wsigninfo.htm
-- Read Tony Hileman's speech from NION SOC's 5/18 DC People's Filibuster (he's the Executive Director of the American Humanist Association). http://filibusteragainsttheocracy.blogspot.com/  
-- Let us know what you see, hear, and read about the filibuster and the protests at nion@cloud9.net.
 
   While the (NION SOC) does not endorse actions, we notify people of significant events that are relevant to the statement's contents.

2)  The NION SOC was published in the Columbia University Daily Spectator graduation issue on May 18th, 2005.

3)  Check out the new look of the Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience (NION SOC) web site  http://www.nion.us and add your comments about the Peoples' Filibuster to our new Filibuster blog spot http://filibusteragainsttheocracy.blogspot.com.
   New sections of the web site will be coming soon. Your ideas, suggestions and  participation on this web site are appreciated. Write us at nion@cloud9.net.

From the NION SOC Staff

posted by: Whitebeard at 08:51 | link | comments |

 

Impeachment Time: "Facts Were Fixed."   
  
  Here it is. The smoking gun.
The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over it.The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed...."
.........  by Greg Palast  May 05, 2005
 
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=48&ItemID=7799

posted by: Whitebeard at 21:28 | link | comments |

Peoples' Filibuster! Thurs., 5/19, in Washington, DC!

Join NOW (National Organization for Women), signers of Not In Our Name
Statement of Conscience, and others. Spread the word: email friends,
organizations, and media!

Stop the Theocratic Power Grab! No Nuclear Option!

12 pm to 6 pm, at the National Mall, Capitol Reflecting Pool

3rd St. SW and Maryland Ave. SW, Washington, DC

For more information call 212-941-8086 or write to nion@cloud9.net. For
ongoing info, go to http://filibusteragainsttheocracy.blogspot.com/

Day Two of a peoples' filibuster is on! This is urgent. Compromising
with a right-wing theocratic agenda and judges that could enforce it is
not in our interests. Day one of the people's filibuster (Wed 5/18)
shows the potential for people to come together quickly and reach the
media. And that we must do! Already ABC TV news, the San Francisco
Examiner, and the Christian Broadcasting Network came to the opening round.
Speaking out were:

Tony Hileman of American Humanists (http://www.americanhumanist.org),

Karen Bradley from http://www.democracycellproject.net,

Alliance for Justice (http://www.afj.org) representatives dressed as
"checks and balances,"

C. Clark Kissinger, a signer and initiator of Not in Our Name Statement
of Conscience (http://www.nion.us) and contributing writer to
Revolution newspaper (http://www.revcom.us).

This filibuster was inspired by Princeton University students
(www.filibusterfrist.com) who continue to mobilize campus filibusters across the
country, and was initiated by Joan Bokaer, Director of
www.theocracywatch.org and individual signers of Not In Our Name Statement of
Conscience.

A commentary by Robert S. Rivkin, Pacific News Service (PNS), May 18,
2005 speaks well to what some of the stakes are: "Once the religious
right's theocratic agenda has been fulfilled, it will not be reversible
or derailed during the lifetime of Bush's judges. Even if the religious
right's current agenda were to be overwhelmingly rejected by the voters
for the next 30 or 40 years, it would be locked in -- by 'activist
judges' of the radical right." PNS contributor Robert S. Rivkin is a San
Francisco lawyer who has trained foreign judges and prosecutors on human
rights and rule of law issues.

While the Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience (NION SOC) does not
endorse actions, we notify people of significant events that are
relevant to the statement's contents. If you are able to attend this event or
any other similar events, we encourage you to distribute the NION SOC.
Send us feedback at nion@cloud9.net.

From the NION SOC Staff
http://www.nion.us

posted by: Whitebeard at 06:40 | link | comments |

Anniversary

Freiburg 6th May 1856

 

 The high point in the relationship between Einstein and Freud came in the summer of 1932 when, under the auspices of the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Einstein initiated a public debate with Freud about the causes and cure of wars. Einstein's official letter is dated July 30, 1932.

Dear Mr. Freud:

The proposal of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation at Paris that I should invite a person, to be chosen by myself, to a frank exchange of views on any problem that I might select affords me a very welcome opportunity of conferring with you upon a question which, as things now are, seems the most insistent of all the problems civilization has to face. This is the problem: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?
...
Freud's reply, dated Vienna, September 1932
Dear Mr. Einstein:

When I learned of your intention to invite me to a mutual exchange of views upon a subject which not only interested you personally but seemed deserving, too, of public interest, I cordially assented.

...You begin with the relations between might and right, and this is assuredly the proper starting point for our inquiry. But, for the term might, I would substitute a tougher and more telling word: violence. In right and violence we have today an obvious antinomy. It is easy to prove that one has evolved from the other and, when we go back to origins and examine primitive conditions, the solution of the problem follows easily enough. I must crave your indulgence if in what follows I speak of well-known, admitted facts as though they were new data;the context necessitates this method.
...
Conflicts of interest between man and man are resolved, in principle, by the recourse to violence. It is the same in the animal kingdom, from which man cannot claim exclusion; nevertheless, men are also prone to conflicts of opinion, touching, on occasion, the loftiest peaks of abstract thought, which seem to call for settlement by quite another method.

...Thus we see that, even within the group itself, the exercise of violence cannot be avoided when conflicting interests are at stake. But the common needs and habits of men who live in fellowship under the same sky favor a speedy issue of such conflicts and, this being so, the possibilities of peaceful solutions make steady progress. Yet the most casual glance at world history will show an unending series of conflicts between one community and another or a group of others, between large and smaller units, between cities, countries, races, tribes and kingdoms, almost all of which were settled by the ordeal of war. Such war ends either in pillage or in conquest and its fruits, the downfall of the loser. No single all-embracing judgment can be passed on these wars of aggrandizement. Some, like the war between the Mongols and the Turks, have led to unmitigated misery; others, however, have furthered the transition from violence to law, since they brought larger units into being, within whose limits a recourse to violence was banned and a new regime determined all disputes. Thus the Roman conquest brought that boon, the pax Romana, to the Mediterranean lands. The French kings' lust for aggrandizement created a new France, flourishing in peace and unity. Paradoxical as its sounds, we must admit that warfare well might serve to pave the way to that unbroken peace we so desire, for it is war that brings vast empires into being, within whose frontiers all warfare is proscribed by a strong central power.

...You are amazed that it is so easy to infect men with the war fever, and you surmise that man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction, amenable to such stimulations. I entirely agree with you. I believe in the existence of this instinct and have been recently at pains to study its manifestations. In this connection may I set out a fragment of that knowledge of the instincts, which we psychoanalysts, after so many tentative essays and gropings in the dark, have compassed? We assume that human instincts are of two kinds: those that conserve and unify, which we call "erotic" (in the meaning Plato gives to Eros in his Symposium), or else "sexual" (explicitly extending the popular connotation of "sex"); and, secondly, the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggressive or destructive instincts. These are, as you perceive, the well known opposites, Love and Hate, transformed into theoretical entities; they are, perhaps, another aspect of those eternal polarities, attraction and repulsion, which fall within your province.

He evolved the notion of a "Compass-card of Motives" and wrote: "The efficient motives impelling man to act can be classified like the thirty-two winds and described in the same manner; e.g., Food-Food-Fame or Fame-Fame-Food." Thus, when a nation is summoned to engage in war, a whole gamut of human motives may respond to this appeal--high and low motives, some openly avowed, others slurred over. The lust for aggression and destruction is certainly included; the innumerable cruelties of history and man's daily life confirm its prevalence and strength. The stimulation of these destructive impulses by appeals to idealism and the erotic instinct naturally facilitate their release. Musing on the atrocities recorded on history's page, we feel that the ideal motive has often served as a camouflage for the dust of destruction; sometimes, as with the cruelties of the Inquisition, it seems that, while the ideal motives occupied the foreground of consciousness, they drew their strength from the destructive instincts submerged in the unconscious. Both interpretationsare feasible.

In your strictures on the abuse of authority I find another suggestion for an indirect attack on the war impulse. That men are divided into the leaders and the led is but another manifestation of their inborn and irremediable inequality. The second class constitutes the vast majority; they need a high command to make decisions for them, to which decisions they usually bow without demur. In this context we would point out that men should be at greater pains than heretofore to form a superior class of independent thinkers, unamenable to intimidation and fervent in the quest of truth, whose function it would be to guide the masses dependent on their lead. There is no need to point out how little the rule of politicians and the Church's ban on liberty of thought encourage such a new creation.

How long have we to wait before the rest of men turn pacifist? Impossible to say, and yet perhaps our hope that these two factors--man's cultural disposition and a well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take--may serve to put an end to war in the near future, is not chimerical. But by what ways or byways this will come about, we cannot guess. Meanwhile we may rest on the assurance that whatever makes for cultural development is working also against war.
[34]
With kindest regards and, should this expose prove a disappointment to you, my sincere regrets,

Yours, SIGMUND FREUD

complete charting 

posted by: Whitebeard at 08:42 | link | comments |

Public Opinion on

Torture, the Iraq War, and Civil Liberties

New findings from Retro Poll: May 6, 2005

Berkeley - In a series of polls by Retro Poll 72-89 percent of the American public consistently opposed the use of torture by the U.S. government. A recent poll by the Gallup organization confirmed these results.

In a new poll completed May 1st Retro Poll has found that 67.3 percent of those polled knew torture is against U.S. laws and a war crime. But many people remained unaware that their government is systematically employing torture. For example, only 32.7 percent had seen media reports that the U.S. was "rendering" captives, sending them to be tortured by outlaw governments, whose practices the U.S. supposedly abhors; and less than half (47.3 percent) knew that the International Red Cross issued a secret report to the government, later leaked to the press, that accused the U.S. of systematic use of torture at Guantanamo. Indeed 58 percent of those questioned believed that the torture so far exposed is the result of "a few bad apples".

In addition, based upon two sequential polls, about one in three Americans still believes that Saddam Hussein worked with the Al Qaeda terror network. This subgroup of Americans opposed withdrawal from Iraq (57.6 percent to 42.4 percent) although more than half of those polled by Retro Poll (52 percent), and 57 percent in a CNN poll released May 3rd, favored a full U.S. withdrawal. Presently neither the President nor the Democratic Party are calling for an U.S. timetable for withdrawal.

The same respondents who found terrorism a justification for the Iraq war also tended to have less critical views on torture. When asked whether they approve of the appointments of John Negroponte as National Intelligence Chief and Albert Gonzales as Attorney General in view of their support for the use of torture, 30 percent of those who believe Saddam worked with Al Qaeda approved the nominations. However, only 11 percent of those who knew that Saddam and Al Qaeda were enemies approved. This is a significant difference (p=. 009 by chi-squared test).

Fifty seven percent of the poll sample supported a moratorium on executions in the U.S. until systematic unfairness in the application of the death penalty has been addressed, (the same proportion as in a September, 2004 Retro poll). Opposition to specific intrusions authorized by the Patriot Act remained strong when detailed. However, opposition varied from as low as 54 percent against local businesses and professionals being required to turn over info to the government, to as high as 86 percent when federal officials are authorized to "enter your home and investigate you, recording and copying materials" without telling you. This 32-point gap suggests a failure to recognize that the Patriot Act is worded so that many provisions can be arbitrary applied to anyone without cause.

Opposition to lengthy detentions without trial remained strong (75 percent) as did support for international prosecution of war crimes (73 percent). .  The poll reached 205 people in 40 states and has a margin of error statistic of 5.6-7%.

Contact: Marc Sapir, MD, MPH
Executive Director, Retro Poll
Thurs/Fri 9 a.m.- 5 p.m.: (510) 266-1725
before 8 a.m. and after 7 p.m. (510) 848-3826
marcsapir@comcast.net
www.retropoll.org

 

posted by: Whitebeard at 20:37 | link | comments |

Anniversary

 

Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class home in Trier on the river Moselle in Germany on May 5, 1818

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

Continue

posted by: Whitebeard at 10:33 | link | comments |

Push bush

posted by: Whitebeard at 19:22 | link | comments |