it's ok to kill them

they're gay. once again, a giant f u to the catholic church

Vatican criticized for opposing UN decriminaliztion of homosexuality.»

The Vatican is drawing criticism from gay rights groups and newspapers editorials after Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the United Nations, told a French Catholic news service that the Vatican opposes “a proposed U.N. resolution calling on governments worldwide to de-criminalise homosexuality.” Migliore claimed that the resolution “would create new and implacable discriminations” against opponents of same-sex marriage. Critics call that position “grotesque“:

A strongly worded editorial in Italy’s mainstream La Stampa newspaper said the Vatican’s reasoning was “grotesque”.

Pointing out that homosexuality was still punishable by death in some Islamic countries, the editorial said what the Vatican really feared was a “chain reaction in favour of legally recognised homosexual unions in countries, like Italy, where there is currently no legislation”.............

odetta

she was one of the reasons i fell in love with music (folk music in this case). her voice slapped me in the face then gently kissed my cheek.






Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77
By TIM WEINER
Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77. The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, made highly influential recordings of blues and ballads, and became one of the most widely known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin.

Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in the quest to end racial discrimination.

Rosa Parks, the woman who started the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. She replied, “All of the songs Odetta sings.” ..........

a nyt interview with odetta; the last word

it's a baby step

but it IS a step. i don't know tim wakefield personally, but i do hope he'd be both proud of you AND honored

YOU GO GRRRL!!!
Japanese schoolgirl signs pro baseball contract
By MARI YAMAGUCHI
TOKYO (AP) — A 16-year-old Japanese girl signed with a regional baseball team Tuesday, becoming the country's first female professional baseball player.

Eri Yoshida, a knuckleball pitcher, will play for the Kobe 9 Cruise in a new independent league starting in April 2009. The team selected her last month along with 31 male players in the league draft.

"I still don't feel like I've really become a pro baseball player, but I want to do my best," Yoshida said at a news conference after signing her contract. "My specialty is the knuckleball, so I really want to be able to get batters out using it effectively."

The Cruise are more like a farm team and a far cry from Japan's mainstream pro teams such as the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. But the 5-foot, 114-pound Yoshida has broken a barrier in baseball-crazy Japan, where women are normally relegated to amateur, company-sponsored teams or to softball.

Yoshida, who started playing baseball when she was in second grade, said she wants to emulate Boston Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield, who has built a successful major league career as a knuckleballer.........

found via good

this is also rather funny

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

and it's also from 23/6

my favorite stevie ray song

but we DON'T torture!

we have become those we hate. those we call savages. those we want to thrust our idea of democracy upon.

we have become the bad guys

can we become the good guys again?

Former interrogator slams torture: Torture has cost nearly as many lives as 9/11.»

In a Washington Post op-ed today, a former Special Operations interrogator who worked in Iraq in 2006 sharply criticizes American torture techniques as ineffective and dangerous. “Torture and abuse cost American lives,” he writes:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. … It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans..........

the wapo article:



By Matthew Alexander
I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.......

c'mon

tell me somethin' good

sheer brilliance

THIS IS

(from 23/6

no one should feel invisible

how would it feel to be invisible (found via wooster collective)

From rainbath:

"did this downtown by my house on one of the busiest days! the day after thanksgiving. basically the installation reads...why do so many look away. how would it feel to be invisible? even for just a day? how would it feel to be homeless for whatever reason it may be."

another take on the mumbai

massacre

and it mentions our dear king MORE than once. here's but one passage

............Veteran Mideast reporter Patrick Cockburn writes, "The origins and motives of the men who slaughtered so many people in Mumbai will emerge in the coming days. But already the butchery should be underlining one of the greatest of the many failings of the Bush administration post-9/11. Pakistan was always the real base for al-Qa'ida. It was the Pakistani ISI military intelligence which fostered and partly directed the Taliban before 2001 and revived it afterwards. It is Pakistan which has sustained the Islamic jihadi fighters in Kashmir where half the Indian army is tied down. Yet the Bush administration in its folly allied itself to General Pervez Musharaf and the Pakistani army post-9/11, ensuring that jihadi groups always had a base............

and here's the link to the story itself (an interesting one)
Mumbai Attacks: Piecing Together the Story
AlterNet
What happened?

Saikat Datta of Outlook India writes that by mid-September, Indian agencies knew that the attack would come from the sea, by mid-November, they knew that the Taj hotel would be targeted. And yet the attacks still happened. A blow by blow account of how the plan to attack Mumbai by sea was hatched and executed.............

it doesn't matter which theories are correct or not correct. this NEVER should have happened

i'm glad we're bringing 'democracy' to iraq

you can see it in action every place you turn

well i guess this type of thing doesn't matter TOO very much. after all it IS just murdering women. not like it's about murdering REAL people or anything.

Hitmen charge $100 a victim as Basra honour killings rise

Fathers and husbands who openly hire assassins on the streets of the city are going unpunished
Afif Sarhan
Authorities in the southern Iraqi city of Basra have admitted they are powerless to prevent 'honour killings' in the city following a 70 per cent increase in religious murders during the past year.

There has been no improvement in conviction rates for these killings. So far this year, 81 women in the city have been murdered for allegedly bringing shame on their families. Only five people have been convicted.

During 2007 the Basra security committee recorded 47 'honour killings' and three convictions. One lawyer in the city described how police were actively protecting perpetrators and said that a woman in Basra could now be murdered by hired hitmen for as little as $100 (£65).

The figures come despite international outrage which followed The Observer's coverage of the death of 17-year-old Rand Abdel-Qader, who was murdered by her father last April in an 'honour killing' after falling in love with a British soldier in Basra. The 4,000 British troops stationed in the city since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 withdrew to the airport last September.

Rand Abdel-Qader was killed after her family discovered that she had formed a friendship with a 22-year-old infantryman whom she knew as Paul. She was suffocated by her father then hacked at with a knife. Abdel-Qader Ali was subsequently arrested and released without charge.

Rand's mother, Leila Hussein, who divorced her husband after the killing, went into hiding but was tracked down weeks later and assassinated by an unknown gunman. Her husband had told The Observer that police had congratulated him for killing his daughter.....

stop honour killings

another agency full o' king george appointees

all messed up. their priorities in the pockets of the good ol' white boy network. their cares NOT where they belong. WITH US, the citizens of the united states of america
Labor Dept. Accused of Straying From Enforcement
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer

................Labor activists say that focusing so closely on the concerns of employers shortchanges workers and that a shift in emphasis is long overdue. Under President Bush, they say, the pendulum has swung far away from enforcement, leaving workers vulnerable to dangerous workplaces and with little protection from exploitive employers.

In July, the Government Accountability Office issued a report alleging that the Labor Department did an inadequate job of investigating complaints by low-wage workers who alleged that their employers were stiffing them for overtime, or failing to pay the minimum wage. That report followed another that found troubling inconsistencies in how the department handled individual worker complaints. Department officials have disputed both reports, calling them inaccurate.

Still, they caught the attention of President-elect Barack Obama, who while campaigning in July fired off a letter to Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao expressing "serious concern" that the agency was not fulfilling its enforcement mission.

"It is important that the department put procedures into place that will lead to improvements in the enforcement of workers' rights," Obama wrote. "This is the core mission of the department and failing to adequately enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act is unacceptable." ...............

so ok, let me get this straight

it's ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NOT RIGHT TO BE PRO-CHOICE, but it's a-ok to send over 4,000 of our men and women to their deaths in iraq? (a country we invaded for NO reason. a country where tens of thousands have been killed by US and by each other. a country where over a million people have been displaced because of us. oh there so much more, but why continue?)

the catholic church should shut the fuck up about confessing if one voted for obama. the catholic church should worry about THEIR OWN as in SOME of their priests and the cover ups they're ALL responsible for (the all is those in charge, not necessarily the parishioners). the catholic church should worry about helping those in dire need of food and housing and shelter. the catholic church should start worrying about the way they treat women (did you know back in the day priests WERE allowed to marry? want to know why they can no longer? i'll tell you. because their wives and families inherited 'stuff' when the priests died. the catholic church didn't want to part with that 'stuff'. you think i'm making this up? i'm NOT). the catholic church should re-think their stance on birth control if they don't like people being pro choice. the catholic church should PREACH BIRTH CONTROL

OR

they should shut the fuck up

Priest urges confession for Obama supporters
Homily singles out president-elect's stance on abortion
McClatchy Tribune

MODESTO, Calif. - The Rev. Joseph Illo, pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Modesto, Calif., has told parishioners in a homily and in a follow-up letter that if they voted for Barack Obama, they should consider going to confession because of the president-elect's position on abortion.

"If you are one of the 54 percent of Catholics who voted for a pro-abortion candidate, you were clear on his position and you knew the gravity of the question, I urge you to go to confession before receiving communion. Don't risk losing your state of grace by receiving sacrilegiously," Illo wrote in a letter dated Nov. 21.

The letter was sent to more than 15,000 members of the St. Joseph's parish. It is one of 34 parishes in the Stockton Diocese, which has more than 200,000 members in Stanislaus, San Joaquin and four other counties in California.

Though Obama's support of abortion rights angered many Catholics nationally during the campaign, Illo's letter is believed to be the first in Central California from a priest to his parishioners on the topic.

The Most Rev. Stephen Blaire, bishop of the Stockton Diocese, disagrees with Illo. He said Catholics should not feel compelled to disclose how they voted to their priest........

i can

Can You Name 16 Forms Of Gender Violence?

stunned

(not really, of COURSE they're taking their bonuses). good ol' white boy network AT WORK

AIG Gives ‘Retention’ Pay After Scrapping Bonuses (Update2)
By Hugh Son

Nov. 26 (Bloomberg) -- American International Group Inc., the insurer that said yesterday it scrapped bonuses for top executives after a U.S. bailout, will still pay 130 managers “cash awards” to stay with the firm, including $3 million to retirement services chief Jay Wintrob.

Wintrob, 51, will get the “retention” payment in two installments, the first in April 2009 and the rest a year later, New York-based AIG said today in a regulatory filing. The firm previously disclosed the program in a Sept. 26 filing and said today that Wintrob and Chief Financial Officer David Herzog elected to get the payments four months later than planned.

“The expectation from the public and Congress was that they weren’t getting bonuses, not that they’d be pushed off by several months,” said David Schmidt, a consultant at executive pay firm James F. Reda & Associates. “That clearly violates the spirit of AIG saying they’ll forgo their bonuses.”

Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy is encouraging top employees at AIG subsidiaries to remain so the units retain their value while he finds buyers. The insurer is selling businesses, including the U.S. retirement group Wintrob heads, to repay a $60 billion loan included in the expanded government rescue package AIG got this month. ...........

the answer to the headline of this story is

OBVIOUSLY YES. if one looks up women and girls in afghanistan, they will see they are hardly treated better NOW than before the taliban ruled

vital voices
a little help

Is Laura Bush Delusional?"
Posted by Julia , Firedoglake

The Bush family have recorded a Story Corps interview about George W. Bush's presidential legacy, and what they're most proud of. This is what Mrs. Bush had to say

Well, it’s certainly been very rewarding to look at Afghanistan and both know that the president and the United States military liberated women there; that women and girls can be in school now; that women can walk outside their doors without a male escort.

I worry about Afghanistan, but I will always have a special place in my heart for the women that I’ve met there, both on my visits to Afghanistan and then the many women from Afghanistan who’ve traveled to the United States on scholarships or with the Afghan American Women’s Council, or with a lot of other ways that American citizens have opened their homes to women in Afghanistan so they can be educated quickly, because they missed their education when they were children or young women, because they weren’t allowed to learn anything.

Well, then. I would have been more charitable, but since Mrs. Bush has chosen this as her legacy, allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Bush's legacy:............

wow, sounds like this

is WELL worth trying out!
Ocean currents can power the world, say scientists
A revolutionary device that can harness energy from slow-moving rivers and ocean currents could provide enough power for the entire world, scientists claim.
By Jasper Copping
The technology can generate electricity in water flowing at a rate of less than one knot - about one mile an hour - meaning it could operate on most waterways and sea beds around the globe.

Existing technologies which use water power, relying on the action of waves, tides or faster currents created by dams, are far more limited in where they can be used, and also cause greater obstructions when they are built in rivers or the sea. Turbines and water mills need an average current of five or six knots to operate efficiently, while most of the earth's currents are slower than three knots.

The new device, which has been inspired by the way fish swim, consists of a system of cylinders positioned horizontal to the water flow and attached to springs.

As water flows past, the cylinder creates vortices, which push and pull the cylinder up and down. The mechanical energy in the vibrations is then converted into electricity...............

........The system, conceived by scientists at the University of Michigan, is called Vivace, or "vortex-induced vibrations for aquatic clean energy".

Michael Bernitsas, a professor of naval architecture at the university, said it was based on the changes in water speed that are caused when a current flows past an obstruction. Eddies or vortices, formed in the water flow, can move objects up and down or left and right.

"This is a totally new method of extracting energy from water flow," said Mr Bernitsas. "Fish curve their bodies to glide between the vortices shed by the bodies of the fish in front of them. Their muscle power alone could not propel them through the water at the speed they go, so they ride in each other's wake."......

VIVACE (Vortex Induced Vibrations Aquatic Clean Energy)

a bit more on mumbai

was it Lashkar-e-Taiba? was it pakistan in general? i don't know. i don't want to be quick to point my finger either. i know it was beyond insane. i know in a MILLION years i will never understand how the deaths of innocents help one's 'cause'. i will never understand how the deaths of innocents make you more lovable in your god's eyes. i just will never understand NOR ACCEPT terrorism
pic: Terrifying: One of the gunmen carrying an automatic rifle in the train station in Mumbai
'I was told to kill to my last breath': Captured terrorist's account of Mumbai massacre reveals plan was to kill 5,000
By Ian Gallagher
The only terrorist captured alive after the Mumbai massacre has given police the first full account of the extraordinary events that led to it – revealing he was ordered to ‘kill until the last breath’. Azam Amir Kasab, 21, from Pakistan, said the attacks were meticulously planned six months ago and were intended to kill 5,000 people. He revealed that the ten terrorists, who were highly trained in marine assault and crept into the city by boat, had planned to blow up the Taj Mahal Palace hotel after first executing British and American tourists and then taking hostages....... ..........He described how its mastermind briefed the group to ‘target whites, preferably Americans and British’. Some of the militants, including Kasab, posed as students during a visit to Mumbai a month ago, filming the ‘strike locations’ and familiarising themselves with the city’s roads..........

how does this help america?

how is this in any way shape or form acceptable? is this a republican trait or the trait of a single offshoot administration run by madmen? if it's a republican trait why, why would ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND be a republican? don't they have families? don't members of their families work? don't they need protection?

i don't get it (one of many things i do NOT understand)
Bush aides push for rule to hamper worker health protections
Bush administration aides are rushing to pass a safety rule which would make government regulation of workers' exposure to toxic chemicals more difficult; a rule President-elect Barack Obama opposes.

Public health officials worry the decreased protections will result in additional, unnecessary deaths.

It is just one of about 20 controversial Labor Department proposals being pushed by large business interests, according to a published report.

Other proposals would allow power plants to be built closer to parks and wildlife preserves, and further limit the role of environmental and animal experts in determining where major infrastructure projects may be carried out.

President-elect Obama has long been critical of the Bush administration's removal of workplace protections. During the campaign, Obama co-sponsored legislation which would prohibit this specific deregulation.
.......