Super Moon

post from Kmareka.com on 06 May 2012 08:00:41 PM. © Kmareka.com

From the Painted Desert

This is from Kathy Hodge who is doing an artist’s residency in Arizona. More cool pix and her journal is here.

Read The Full Article:
http://kmareka.com/2012/05/06/super-moon/

Digg this

Neo-Nazis win 6 percent of Greek vote, will have
19 deputies in Parliament

post from US Politics | AMERICAblog News on 06 May 2012 08:00:33 PM. © US Politics | AMERICAblog News

I don't care how bad things are with immigration or any other issue, you don't vote for neo-Nazis, especially when you're a country that was occupied by the Nazis. AFT:Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn warned rivals and reformers Sunday that "the time for fear has come" after exit polls showed them securing their entry in parliament for the first time in nearly 40 years."The time for...

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Americablog/~3/8nu6Y_t0TkI/neo-nazis-win-6-percent
-of-greek-vote.html

Digg this

Former President Bill Clinton Records Robo-Call
Against Amendment One

post from Firedoglake on 06 May 2012 08:00:18 PM. © Firedoglake

Following his daughter's strong statement against Amendment One this week, former President Bill Clinton has recorded a robocall for the Campaign to Protect ALL NC Families to run in these last days before the vote on May 8. He emphasizes the effect on[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/1XEVUr7pW0o/

Digg this

This Week: In Memoriam

post from Crooks and Liars on 06 May 2012 08:00:01 PM. © Crooks and Liars

In Memoriam May 6, 2012

Click here to view this media
(h/t Heather of VideoCafe)

This Week with George Stephanopoulos marks the deaths of five service members in Afghanistan:

US Marines MSgt Scott E Pruitt, 38, Gautier, MS
US Army PFC Christian R Sannicolas, 20, Anaheim, CA
US Army Sgt Nicholas M Dickhut, 23, Rochester, MN
US Army CPT Bruce K Clark, 43, Spencerport, NY
US Army SSG Zachary H Hargrove, 32, Wichita, KS

According to iCasualties, the total number of allied servicemembers killed in Afghanistan is now 2,992. While contemporaneous reporting is difficult to find, an estimated 12,800 Afghan civilians have been killed since the initial invasion.

In addition, the following notable names lost their lives: Professional poker player Amarillo Slim, Israeli academic and activist Benzion Netanyahu, Olympian Alexander Dale Oen, musician Charles 'Skip' Pitts, football player Junior Seau, musician Adam Yauch, comedian Rich Ramirez, supercentenarian Charlotte Hawkins Flowers, and character actor George Lindsey.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/week-memoriam-142

Digg this

The Source of Secularism

post from They gave us a republic... - Front Page on 06 May 2012 08:00:00 PM. © They gave us a republic... - Front Page

By @KYYellowDog

Freakazoids and repugs like to pretend that secularism was invented by American communists in the 1950s, if not by Bill Ayers while mentoring Barack Obama in the 1980s.

Secularism in fact arose more than 300 years ago, during the - very appropriately named - Enlightenment.

Alan Charles Kors in Free Inquiry:

The most influential contribution of the Enlightenment to modern thought, after its transformation of religious toleration from a negative to a positive value, was the secularization of ethical debate. Historically, however, it would be one-dimensional-indeed wrong-to understand this phenomenon as the product of a virgin birth of ideas in the Enlightenment. Both deistic and atheistic Enlightenment authors were part of the same world of thought. Similarly, both eighteenth-century Christian and Enlightenment thinkers were heirs to the same conceptual revolution of seventeenth-century natural philosophy (which included what we now term science), and both moved on the same deeper tidal currents of early-modern intellectual change.
The seventeenth century produced a flowering of deep theological thought, and, indeed, it was the high-water mark of European demonological belief and persecution. It also created the "new philosophy" that was so dramatic an agent of historical change. The new philosophy involved a rejection of the presumptive authority of the past and an experimental and often mathematized model of natural knowledge. This new philosophy, as it indeed was called, emerged within a deeply religious culture. Its unintended consequences, however, would create an increasingly secularized culture in terms of scientific and ethical belief. At the heart of this were the fruits of the systematic study of nature.
SNIP

Enlightenment philosophers established secular moralism more than a hundred years before Darwin's scientific revelations established the foundations of evolution on which freakazoids blame modern atheism.

Enlightenment atheism was unable to offer the explanations of spontaneous, that is, undesigned order that Charles Darwin could offer to unbelief. Rather, it turned its attention, above all else, to what it saw as the moral arguments and imperatives of understanding nature without recourse to a supreme being.
SNIP

Kors concludes:

The particulars of the Enlightenment should not be understood in terms of the particulars of twenty-first century agendas. Rather, it bequeathed values, ways of thinking, and criteria whose potential would only be actualized by later phenomena and are being actualized still. Did Jefferson, for example, believe in the equality of races and of the sexes? No. He was deeply a man of his particular time and place. He urged, however, as "self-evident" that the then generic "man" was endowed with unalienable rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and that governments existed precisely to secure those preexistent rights. That is what Locke believed, and it is what most deists believed. The historical resonance of that belief, which Enlightenment thinkers proclaimed to be universal-whatever its authors thought to be its application in their lifetimes-has inspired virtually every movement for human legal equality and dignity. Did French Enlightenment authors-living in an age when more than four out of five of their countrymen were needed to work the land and most could not read a published book-believe in equal opportunity? No. They identified despotism as an ultimate horror, however, and embraced the view that society was a voluntary association of equal individuals. They rejected the presumptive authority of the past and invited posterity to work for a fairer, less cruel, and more humane future. They set loose in the world the secular values according to which all individuals should enhance their lives and reduce their suffering.
The seeds of a new way of viewing nature and our place in it and of proceeding toward human mastery of the natural causes of well-being or pain were now in the world. They announced a set of goals that changed the possibilities and, at times, the course of history: not only life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but legal equality, a free science, a secular society within which religion is a matter of private and voluntary life, religious toleration, and a belief that government is the servant not the master of its citizens. The Enlightenment also bequeathed to us the freedom to disagree. In its wake, the debates of the modern age began in all of their intensity. For many of us, the Enlightenment also unloosed the great potential of natural humanity in the natural world.

Read the whole fascinating thing.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheyGaveUsARepublic-FrontPage/~3/fpXF9Y_ef5Y/the-s
ource-of-secularism

Digg this

The Dead War Series: The short stories 4 zombie
short stories for 99 cents

post from AAreports on 06 May 2012 07:49:04 PM. © AAreports

The Dead War Series: The short stories 4 zombie short stories for 99 cents The Dead War Series: The Short Stories These 4 short stories are companion pieces to the book The Dead War Series: Book 1 available for the Amazon Kindle here: The Dead War Series These four stories will answer questions [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://glciii.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/the-dead-war-series-the-short-stories-4-zo
mbie-short-stories-for-99-cents/

Digg this

The insanity of the Wall Street ethos

post from Daily Kos on 06 May 2012 07:30:04 PM. © Daily Kos

Occidental Petroleum logo To these guys, you're not human.
Unless you own stock.On Friday, I did something I had never done before: I attended a shareholder meeting of a publicly traded corporation. Technically speaking, I was a proxy for an account that held exactly one share of Occidental Petroleum. My official proxy form entitled me to attend the shareholder breakfast at a posh beachfront hotel in Santa Monica, as well as the shareholder meeting that followed it.

The official order of business for the shareholder meeting was the election of the board of directors, official approval of the compensation package for corporate executives, and appointment of an auditing firm. Technically, all of these were up for a vote of the shareholders, to be either affirmed or rejected at the meeting. In practice, however, the decisions had already been made: interests holding over 90 percent of the stock of Occidental Petroleum had already voted in favor of all packages, leaving the individual ballots we cast for our individual shares at the meeting worth less than a vote against the premier in Soviet Russia (though admittedly, slightly less risky). And although I did get the chance to cast my one share's worth of vote against the executive compensation package, that's not the reason I was there.

Rather, I was there as part of a "mic check" organized by Good Jobs LA to protest the company's practices regarding taxation and executive compensation. At a designated point in the shareholder meeting, the organizers of the event?who also had shareholder proxies entitling them to speak?interrupted the proceedings with the well-known "people's microphone" technique that has become the hallmark of the occupy movement. The chant highlighted the roughly $50 million of compensation paid to Executive Chairman Ray Irani, who was chairing the meeting at the time, while California's education system continues to suffer budget cuts and our streets fall increasingly into disrepair. At the end, the dozens of protesters took up the traditional refrain of "we are the 99 percent" before being escorted out of the room.

After the interruption had ceased, Mr. Irani resumed the scripted meeting. But before doing so, he said something very telling. No cameras or recording equipment were permitted in the meeting room, so this quote is entirely from memory; while not every word may be in precise order, however, the meaning is clear:

They say they're the 99 percent, but over 90 percent of the shareholders have already voted for the proposals. So they're the 99 percent, but of what, I'm not sure.

This statement drew a chuckle from the remaining crowd?mostly corporate types in suits who were there to marvel at the magnificence of the company's annual dividend increase. But Mr. Imani's statement about the 99 percent is telling, not just for its callousness, but about the particular worldview it seems to convey.

In Irani's worldview, entities only matter to the degree to which they own stock. The people who voiced their opinion of protest at the shareholder meeting were indeed shareholders and were part of the lower 99th percentile of annual income in the United States, but since they weren't 90 percent of the stock, their opinions and feelings were not only an irrelevant afterthought. Rather, they literally did not exist.

The idea that someone could be an American citizen and be counted on that basis, to say nothing of being a shareholder in the public entity known as the human race, never occurred to Mr. Irani. Instead, the only world he knows is the world of the corporate boardroom. It is a world where men are not created equal, but shares are; and unlike a functioning democracy, where the rich and the poor have one vote alike, each share is a vote. The wealthier you are and the more shares you own, the more votes you have.

The lack of empathy and for an understanding of common humanity displayed by Mr. Irani was tragic and stunning. The only thing left to wonder is what came first.Does it take a total lack of empathy to become a CEO who gets paid $50 million per year and thinks of nothing but stock prices, or does being a CEO with that sort of compensation generate a total lack of empathy? Hard to say. But at that point, does it really matter?

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/YdEU3r5Am4Y/-The-insanity-of-the-W
all-Street-ethos

Digg this

Hollande Wins French Presidential Election

Socialist candidate Francois Hollande has won the French Presidential election, defeating incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, yet another political victim of the Eurozone crisis.[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/s2-7zAKbSEY/

Digg this

Neo-Nazis win 6 percent of Greek vote, will have
19 delegates in Parliament

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Americablog/~3/8nu6Y_t0TkI/neo-nazis-win-6-percent
-of-greek-vote.html

Digg this

Liz Cheney Won't Deny She's Planning Senate Run

Click here to view this media

The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday refused to deny that she was planning a run for Senate in Wyoming.

Politico noted last week that Liz Cheney had been setting the stage for a possible Senate run by increasing her visibility and speaking at six events in Wyoming this year alone.

"This is planting seeds of thought in people?s minds," Shawn Whitman, a former chief of staff for two Wyoming senators, told Politico. ?There?s nobody I know that goes to those events unless they have a position in the party or they?re trying to run for office.?

Liz Cheney declined to speak to Politico, but she couldn't avoid the question from Chris Wallace on Sunday while appearing on Fox News.

"I love Wyoming," she explained. "Wyoming is my home. And what I have been hearing from people all across Wyoming is how important it is that we defeat Barack Obama in 2012. And they're very afraid about -- you ask people in Wyoming, 'Are you better off now than you were $5 trillion ago?' They'll say, absolutely not."

"There was a report yesterday that you're traveling around the state, and that you're thinking of running for Senate from Wyoming in 2014," Wallace pressed.

"Look, I have been honored to have been asked to help support the Republican Party in Wyoming," Cheney replied. "As I said, it's my home. It's a very special place, but I'm really focused on defeating Barack Obama. We don't have the luxury, frankly, of looking beyond this election because this election is so important."

"And let me tell you, folks: to be continued," Wallace concluded.

Charles Mahtesian, Politico?s national politics editor, pointed out that "[f]or a nation forged by revolution against a hereditary monarchy, America has always had an unusual tolerance for -- or even embrace of -- political dynasty."

"At the moment, there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 members of Congress whose parents also served in Congress, or have a sibling or cousin in Congress, or who succeeded to their husband's seat," Mahtesian wrote. "And there's more waiting in the wings: Seven sons of congressmen are currently seeking election to the House."