Join us at www.videothevote.org — Our goal is to protect the vote by being the eyes and ears where ballots are cast and counted on Election Day. We will document and report any irregularities that occur at polling places and boards of elections while they are happening, enabling the media and public to watch-dog the electoral process across our country.
Well, not exactly a leopard, nor even a leopard frog, but it caught your attention, eh? This little fellow was living comfortably under the bark of a fir log in our firewood pile. How he could stand all the mold is beyond me, but he didn’t care to move even after I removed the roof of his house.
US stakes claim on space
New policy just slightly territorial
By Lucy Sherriff
Published Thursday 19th October 2006 13:06 GMT
The US has claimed “dibs” on the Universe with its new space policy. The document, signed by President Bush, was released on a Friday, just before a long weekend in the States. This, in itself has caused a bit of a stir, but not more so than the tone and content of the document.
In it, the US government allocates itself rights to access and use space without anyone else getting in its way. It also sets security at the heart of the space agenda, frequently citing its right to use space as part of its national defence.
Significantly, however, it does not commit to restrict, or even to join talks about restricting the development of space-based weapons. This is despite a UN vote last year in which 160 nations voted in favour of such talks.
The first bullet point outlining the principles of the programme sets the tone for the rest of the document:
“The United States is committed to the exploration and use of outer space by all nations for peaceful purposes, and for the benefit of all humanity. Consistent with this principle, ‘peaceful purposes’ allow US defence and intelligence-related activities in pursuit of national interests.“
In other words: “Everyone has to use space peacefully, except us. We can do what we like, cos we were here first(*). And anyway, if you try to stop us, it won’t stay peaceful for long, which would spoil the first part of our principle.”
The rest of the article is here.
I believe our quote of the day is in this piece (in bold below).
Occupation of Iraq: One Crime Too Many
By Mike Whitney
Al-Jazeerah, October 20, 2006
[snip]
To Bush, it makes no difference whether the number is 600,000 or 6 hundred million; the cost in human terms is irrelevant. In America, the life of one microscopic stem-cell is of more value that the entire population of Iraq. That’s what happens when racism merges with apathy; the dead simply don’t count.
Compare Bush’s indifference to the Iraqi death-toll to his “pro-life” rhetoric at home. Consider how he cancelled his Crawford vacation to speed back to Washington to sign legislation to save the life of Terri Schiavo even though Schiavo was showing no mental-activity and 19 courts had already ruled in her husband’s favor to allow her to die peacefully. Later, an autopsy confirmed that her brain had calcified and shrunk to half its normal size.
Still, Schiavo’s political value was of greater importance to Bush than the 650,000 men, women and children he has slaughtered in Iraq.
There’s simply no way to measure this degree of cynicism.
Read it here.
To the World Can’t Wait Community:
National Emergency Teach-in, October 30, on War, Torture, Theocracy, and the Assault on Women’s Rights
IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK:
Where the Bush Regime is Taking the World and Why They Must Be Stopped
Neither the full magnitude nor the staggering implications of the Bush program are well understood. The administration systematically lies about its actions and agenda, while the major media and leading Democrats allow the Bush program to frame the overall discussion.
As a result, the most crucial issues are not discussed truthfully either in the public arena or in election campaigns. This is why “The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime”, in conjunction with the Bush Crimes Commission and others, have organized this major event October 30.
Featured Speakers:
Dr. Les Roberts . An author of the study in The Lancet that there are a projected 650,000 civilian deaths caused by the war on Iraq, far above the Bush regime’s casual numbers of 100,000. Roberts is an epidemiologist, now at Columbia University. He will speak on the Bush administration’s attacks on science, including their attempts to discredit data pointing to genocide.
William Goodman . Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, speaking on the incredible changes in law and civil liberties, particularly the implications of the new Military Commissions Act and the legitimization of torture.
Larry Everest has covered the Middle East for over ten years and is the author of Oil, Power, and Empire. He will speak on “what’s happening in Iraq, how did we get here, and what should be done about it?”
Chris Hedges . Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, winning a Pulitzer Prize. He will address the moves toward theocracy and its influence on the threatening moves toward a war on Iran.
Cristina Page . Vice President of the Institute for Reproductive Health Access at NARAL Pro-Choice New York and a prominent reproductive rights activist. Her recent book How The Pro-choice Movement Saved America describes the assault of the Christian right on both abortion and contraception.
Stay tuned for further plans from World Can’t Wait on the elections.
Debra Sweet
National Coordinator, The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime
For more detail, see www.worldcantwait.org.
And psychoanalysis probably provides as good an explanation of what’s happened over the last 5 years as anything does …
George Bush has never explained Iraq in terms which a logical person could understand. Iraq has been an emotional appeal from the first day going after Saddam was raised. It was never about any actual threat, but an emotional desire to prove we could dominiate anyone who opposed us.
For Bush, who has failed at every task ever put before him, from work, to the military to school, this was going to be his vindication. He so desperately wanted to be a hero and Iraq was going to solve all of his issues. He would defeat an enemy, prove himself worthy and gain the respect from his family he so desperately wanted.
Which is why he chose men his father kept at arms length. Bush never wanted advice, he wanted confirmation of his beliefs. His narrow world view, shaped by the dust dry plains of Midland as much as any movie, this idea that a man didn’t need or want questions, he just did.
Which is how he approached the American people, not with facts, but an emotional appeal. He’s out there, he’s guilty, let’s get him first. That was the goal, get them first, show them who is boss, Those who don’t get that are weak, even if they are in uniform. We will show the world they better not fuck with us again. Iraq will be first, and the rest will bend to our will. We will show them what a superpower does.
Read all of it here.
Hubris, Bravado and Hypocrisy
The Evening of Empire
By WERTHER
When the admirable Tiberius upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. “Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?” He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: “How eager you are to be slaves.”
— Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Amid the onrush of Caligulan sex scandals, suspension of the Constitution, depressing bulletins from the Babylonian front, and all manner of bogus “events,” a recent news item has passed with remarkably little public stir, despite being featured above the fold on the front page of The Washington Post, a bulletin board as eagerly read by the capital city’s strivers as Pravda in its day by the fellow-traveler, or Osservatore Romano by the untramontanist Catholic.
The article [1] informs us that the President has signed off on a “National Space Policy.” The cornerstone of this new policy is the administration’s intention to “oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduct research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interest.”
The document adds elsewhere that the new policy must “enable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our interest there.” Note the unctuous use of the modifier “our”–as if the interests of parasitic contractors, government placemen, and neoconservative scribblers constituted the res publica.
If the English language means anything, the plain intent of the policy is to assert that the United States (or rather its governing clique) can do anything it likes, and treaties be damned, including the Outer Space Treaty currently in force. This conclusion would be consistent with the administration’s treatment of other judicial impedimenta, such as the Geneva Convention or the late Constitution. Similar to the Senate’s craven grant of plenary power to the Roman Emperor, a supine legislative branch has encouraged the administration to believe its own whim is law–to make war, to torture, to “unsign” treaties.
Yet the Post journalist, in the idiot-savant manner made famous by Bob Woodward, stenographically quotes a “senior government official who was not authorized to speak on the record” as saying “This policy is not about developing or deploying weapons in space. Period.”
Ah, just as the Military Commissions Act was not about torture! How like the administration to assign one of its “senior” functionaries to pretend to speak without authorization in order to add verisimilitude to an assertion that it plainly wanted to disseminate–an assertion at odds with the plain text of its policy. And the Post’s reporter fell for it like a yokel at the Barnum circus. Thus the rest of the article becomes a fraudulent “debate” between the administration’s allegations and those of its critics; thereby lending weight to the presumption that there are legitimately “two sides” to any issue involving the administration.
While the Establishment press (other than the Post) gave little attention to the space policy story, the blogosphere (to the extent it paid any attention) behaved in a predictable fashion: the usual hand-wringing about the militarization of space, the unilateralism of the Bush administration, and forecasts of dark tidings generally. There is some truth to these assertions, but they are subsidiary to a more significant point.
The space policy document is not so much a blueprint as a symptom. But of what?–of fiendish Machiavells, plotting to storm the very heavens? Perhaps that is the intent of these laptop Flash Gordons, but between the desire and the fulfillment falls the shadow: the shadow of utter incompetence.
What is to be said about an administration which dreams of policing outer space, when for three and a half years its legions have been stalemated in their occupation of a broken-down country with a pre-war GDP less than that of Fairfax County, Virginia? The Iraq war has been such a riot of fecklessness as to take one’s breath away.
Read the rest here.
Tarot by Kate 512-454-2293
kate_braun2000@yahoo.com
“Dem Bones gonna rise again”
Tuesday, October 31, 2006, Samhain, Halloween. Tyr’s day. Lady Moon is in her second quarter, in Pisces. Second quarter moons are a time to put into action the plans made in first quarter moons, so this Halloween is an auspicious time for those of us who have plans ready to set in motion. Tyr is the Norse god of single combat and heroic glory. His rune is in the shape of an arrow pointing up (t)). Tyr’s strength and determination will likely be helpful in pursuing your goals. If you include a small toy arrow or a drawing of the rune on a piece of paper in your guest’s party favors, it will serve as a reminder that plans need action and focus to reach their proper conclusion, especially when mutable Pisces-energy is also a factor to be considered.
Decorate your home, your altar, and yourself in the colors black and orange. Silver is another color associated with this time of year, and makes a marvelous accessory-color. In honor of Lady Moon, you may twine some sparkly silver tinsel around your table and altar decorations and sprinkle some silver glitter in your hair. This is a time when the veils between the worlds are at their thinnest and when communication between the quick and the dead is facilitated. In Celtic mythology, Cerridwen is the Crone-goddess who stirs souls in her cauldron until they are ready to reincarnate, hence the cauldron is an appropriate accessory for both table and altar adornment. Cauldrons come in many sizes; you may use a larger one for a centerpiece and smaller ones filled with bits of apples and sweets as party favors for your guests. Small pumpkins can be carved with symbols of protective spirits to let candle-light shine through either outside as luminarias or on your table in place of more formal candle-sconces.
Apples, food for the dead, are a traditional focus of Samhain, but pumpkins and all root crops are also appropriate for this Third Harvest. There are many delicious ways to prepare pumpkin other than pie. Here is a recipe for candied pumpkin which you and your guests may find enjoyable, either to be eaten during your celebration or wrapped and added to the small cauldrons as take-home delights: Ingredients: 5-lb. pumpkin (approx.), 4 cinnamon sticks, zest of 1 orange, juice of 1 orange, 1¾ c. dark brown sugar and ¼ c. molasses, 4 c. water. Preparation: cut off the stem of the pumpkin. Cut pumpkin in half and scrape out seeds and stringy parts. Cut each piece in half lengthwise again and again until you have 8 – 10 long pieces of pumpkin. Cut the skin off each piece and then cut the flesh into 1” to 2” pieces. Put the brown sugar, molasses, orange juice, orange zest, cinnamon sticks, and water into a large saucepan/pot and bring to a boil. Carefully add pumpkin pieces and reduce to a simmer. Simmer for approximately 2 hours or until pumpkin is fork tender and the rest of the ingredients have reduced to a thick glaze. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature before serving.
This is a time to honor one’s ancestors as well as enjoy good food and fellowship. Take some time during your festivities to remember those who have passed over. Say their names and make a toast to their blessed memory. They will be with you in spirit.
* * * * * * * * *
reminders: I will be participating in Celtic Fest on Saturday and Sunday, November 4 & 5, 2006 at Fiesta Gardens. The event runs from 10 AM to 9 PM both days. :Look for me under the blue tent, where I will be joined by Charlotte Craig.
November 11 & 12, 2006 is the last Metaphysical Fair of the year. Come and see all the readers and vendors at the Park Plaza Hotel, on Middle Fiskville Road between Highland Mall and Lincoln Village. Free lectures both days, $7.00 entry fee good for both days, 10 AM – 6 PM on Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM on Sunday.
December 2 & 3, 2006 is Wheatsville’s Arts Fest, in the north parking lot of Wheatsville Food Coop, 3101 Guadalupe. The event goes from 10 AM to dusk both days. Look for me under either the green-and-white patio umbrella (if rain is likely) or the multi-colored beach umbrella (if not).
If you come to any of these events because you read about them in this Seasonal Message, please stop by my table and let me know. By monitoring the results of these messages I am better able to serve my clients.
We’re goin’ on a road trip, so maybe a picnic lunch would be good. This video looks to be an amateur effort, and I like that. It gets the message across very effectively, and I like that. And it’s a nice tune, and I like that. Here’s what the YouTube poster says: The music is recorded by the Burns Sisters on Ithaca Records. The song is written by Steve Van Zandt. Footage of Camp Casey, in Crawford Texas, August 27 to 29 2005. My first attempt to document what I see… miabreak
I Am A Patriot –
The YouTube poster says, Pictures from the US led Coalition Invasion of Iraq taken in 2004. Music is by Neil Young – “Shock and Awe”
The Invasion of Iraq – Episode IX – Shock and Awe
Note: SOS = Singin’ on Sunday
Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
