There’s no turning back the hands of time, except in pictures
by Cliff Griggs
Ten years, heinous acts by madmen, and thousands of lives ruined by war and hatred, have gone by, and it still isn’t over. Even though we are trying to extricate our country from Iraq and Afghanistan, that leaving is still years away.
As for the costs, best estimates are that we have spent, or obligated our country to $2.6 trillion that we didn’t have, to pay for two large wars, and now a host of smaller ones that we will be involved in for years to come.
It would be easy to dismiss this as religious in nature, similar to disputes in Ireland, Catholics against Protestants, here Islam against Christianity. But I don’t see it that way.
I see it as a result of the petulance of a rich kid, used to a lot of attention when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, who suddenly was ignored after they left. So he went out like a stupid kid who only gets attention when he does something really bad.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is lying in his new book and in media appearances promoting it. Watch this video for a fact check on Cheney’s public statements.
The very fate of our human species, yes, and your state too — as well as this country and the earth — may well depend on a compromise between science and religion.
Yes, you read that correctly. Not that I ever wanted to admit it before.
This will be a precarious journey with no guarantee of success like the fate of all life itself, from the beginning into the infinite future.
A top American scientist from Alabama writes that religion and science “are the two most powerful forces in the world today, including especially the United States.” That is from Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, which he wrote to Southern Baptist preachers who hold sway over millions of votes that could have a positive, or negative, impact on all kinds of government policies.
A federal appeals court reinstated a landmark lawsuit challenging the Bush Administration’s abuse of the privacy of innocent Americans with amendments it pushed in the name of security after 9/11 to the Foreign Surveillance Act, a statute that gave the executive branch virtually unchecked power to collect international e-mails and telephone calls.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights organizations, labor groups, legal and media outlets whose work requires them to engage in sensitive and sometimes privileged telephone and e-mail communications with colleagues, clients, journalistic sources, witnesses, experts, foreign government officials and victims of human rights abuses located outside the United States.
In a statement today, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer call the ruling a huge victory for privacy and the rule of law.
“The government’s surveillance practices should not be immune from judicial review, and this decision ensures that they won’t be,” Jaffer said. “The law we’ve challenged permits the government to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications, and it has none of the safeguards that the Constitution requires. Now that the appeals court has recognized that our clients have the right to challenge the law, we look forward to pressing that challenge in the trial court.”
The debate about America’s future “begins and ends concretely with the question of jobs,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said this week in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Trumka urged President Obama to make next week’s State of the Union address “a call to action, a call to invest in our future, to create jobs, to be the country we can and must be.”
“We have just been through one lost decade — when America’s standard of living fell, when our wealth shrank, when millions lost their homes, when young people could not find work America cannot afford another lost decade,” Trumka said.
Whether the news media covers them or we talk about them or not.
A Facebook friend shared this video with me this morning, and it reminded me of Spider Martin’s last words. To read the true story of Civil Rights Photographer Spider Martin’s death, and for a literary explanation of what this Website is all about, in case you missed it here’s the story:
“Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.”
– William Faulkner, from Light in August (1932)
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
It seems almost inevitable that about this time every year, while joining the rest of the press in searching the world over for a good man or woman to highlight as the person of the year, I sort of feel like Diogenes the Cynic, who you may recall from the story, supposedly walked around naked and homeless in ancient Athens, Greece — holding up a lantern looking for an honest man.
While none of Diogenes’ writings actually survive from his time of about 400 years before Jesus trod the earth, the tale has been passed down through history in many forms over the generations. The story of Diogenes is remembered as a lesson in ethics. He mocked the idea of finding true human virtue and even the idea that we could ever really know the truth about human nature.
The most famous such search in the modern media, of course, is Time magazine’s cover story on the person of the year. For 2010, the magazine named Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg: “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives.”
As a recent convert to Facebook myself, I can see why the editors made that choice, although it clearly remains to be seen whether Zuckerberg’s creation will ultimately be used for good or evil. It allows for some amazing connections to be made and helps citizens bypass traditional barriers to knowledge, but it also has a couple of serious down sides. The loss of individual privacy for one.
Then, it is another tool that continues to allow the hyper concentration of wealth into the hands of too few people, a problem that will plague this country until enough people face the facts and fight to turn the tide. Perhaps we can use Facebook to do just that — unless they screw it up and corporatize it, which seems to be the direction the Internet is going like every technology that came before.
It only took nine years, but finally in the lame duck session of Congress — before the Democrats go back to minority status in the House next month — enough Republicans got onboard to pass a bill providing health care and other relief for the first responders to America’s worst ever terrorist attack on September, 11, 2001.
You will be glad to find out today that perhaps your favorite brand of toilet paper may no longer come from wood harvested out of some of the South’s more important hardwood forests. But the deal that led to that agreement raises some interesting economic and political questions that are not being explored either by the non-profit groups which forged the deal — or the mainstream media covering it. Let’s connect some dots and raise some healthy, democratic skepticism.
Three non-profit environmental organizations are basking in the glow of victory this week and heaping massive praise on the Georgia-Pacific paper company, for establishing a policy not to purchase trees from so-called “Endangered Forests” or from new pine plantations established where natural hardwood forests once stood. The policy statement was developed in consultation with the Dogwood Alliance, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rainforest Action Network.
The NRDC press release hails the agreement as a “bold commitment to forests,” and the Dogwood Alliance praises the “iconic Southern paper giant” for “announcing bold new steps … to prevent the conversion of (more than) 90 million acres of natural hardwood forests to pine plantations and protect endangered forests in the Southern U.S. –- the largest wood and paper producing region of the world. History is in the making. Times are changing. A major economic force affecting forests has shifted.”
While the new forest policy applies to all of its operations, according to the agreement, it is just a “first step” in implementing the company’s commitment to working with environmental groups and scientists “to identify 11 Endangered Forests and Special Areas totaling 600,000 acres in the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Eco-Region, as well as 90 million acres of natural hardwood forests in the Southern region.”
“No other U.S. company has demonstrated this level of initiative in mapping unique forests across such a broad region,” said Debbie Hammel, the senior resource specialist with NRDC. “Through this process, GP has proven that — by harnessing scientific advances and seeking conservation guidance — corporations can help protect unique places without sacrificing profitability.”
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
