The Global War on Women
February 27, 2012 by Peter · Leave a Comment
The pervasive oppression of women and girls is humanity’s greatest travesty.
Consider these facts:
- The leading cause of death for pregnant women is homicide.
- Women and girls ages 15 to 44 are more likely to be maimed or killed by men than by malaria, cancer, war or traffic accidents combined.
- The children most at risk of attempted abduction by strangers are girls ages 10 to 14, many on their way to or from school.
- Only about one third of countries around the world have laws in place to combat violence against women, and in most of these countries those laws are not enforced.
- According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey — the country’s largest and most reliable crime study — there were 248,300 sexual assaults in 2007.
- One out of every three women will be a victim of violence in her lifetime.
And the reward: Women work 67% of the world’s working hours, yet earn only 10% of the world’s income.
The silence of the left: Obama, Bush and extrajudicial killing
February 25, 2012 by Peter · Leave a Comment
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has spent the duration of Obama’s presidency asking a fundamental question of the left: Why are George W. Bush’s transgressions, which elicited fury from Democrats and liberals, acceptable when President Obama adopts – and embraces – them? In a recent post, Glenn decries the intellectual dishonesty he sees reflected in a Washington Post poll:
During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the “assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution”: so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices — rather than a big, bad, scary Republican — all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll demonstrates.
Václav Havel on Kim Jong-il
December 19, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
On a day when two prominent leaders on opposite sides of the moral spectrum pass on, it’s worth reading what one thought of the other:
Today, the testimony of thousands of North Korean refugees, who have survived the miserable journey through Communist China to free South Korea, tell of the criminal nature of the North Korean dictatorship. Accounts of repression are supported and verified by modern satellite images, and clearly illustrate that North Korea has a functioning system of concentration camps. The Kwan-li-so, or the political penal-labour colony, holds as many as 200,000 prisoners who are barely surviving day-to-day or are dying in the same conditions as did the millions of prisoners in the Soviet gulag system in the past.
Climate change: our generation’s great failure
October 24, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
Future generations will look back with anger and disbelief at our recklessness.
We’ve turned our planet into a garbage dump, while millions of Americans — led by a radicalized Republican Party — are reacting by denying the undeniable: car fumes, bus fumes, truck fumes, airplane fumes, factory fumes, chemical waste, human waste, toxins coursing through our waterways and in our food, forests burned, species going extinct, oceans dying, filth we create in immense quantities polluting the earth and filling our atmosphere with poisonous exhaust.
Faced with headlines like this, “Global Warming Close to Becoming Irreversible,” climate deniers blithely dismiss scientific consensus, endangering their children and ours.
Climate change is our generation’s great failure…
The rising sea will wash across great swaths of South Florida. Salt water will contaminate the well fields. Roads and farmland and low-lying neighborhoods will be inundated. The soil will no longer absorb the kind of heavy rainfalls that drenched South Florida last weekend. Septic tanks will fail. Drainage canals won’t drain. Sewers will back up. Intense storms will pummel the beachfront. Mighty rainfalls, in between droughts, will bring more floods. The economic losses and the mitigation costs associated with the effects of global warming over the next few decades will be overwhelming. It will cost a medium-sized town like Pompano Beach hundreds of millions just to salvage its water and sewage systems.
A sobering study released by Florida Atlantic University contemplated the effects of global warming in specific terms, particularly for South Florida, considered one of the more vulnerable metropolitan areas in the world, with six million residents clustered by the ocean, living barely above sea level. The study from FAU’s Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions, adding to an overwhelming scientific consensus about the disastrous effects of global warming, and along with growing hard evidence that temperature changes are already altering the environment, ought to have sent tremors through the halls of government.
Except it didn’t. Perhaps the most peculiar phenomenon associated with global warming has been a burgeoning disdain for climate science even as scientific consensus grows more urgent. … “It is really quite an unbelievable time,” said Harold Wanless, chairman of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami. Wanless, who contributed to the FAU study, described the “dramatically accelerating melt from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.” He said, “We have forced the greenhouse gasses to levels that have not been reached since sea level was about 100 feet higher than present.”
Occupy Wall Street versus Tea Party: a video comparison
October 4, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
As OWS defies the skeptics and gains national traction, I figured it would be worth contrasting these interviews, the latter of which were conducted during Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” rally:
OCCUPY WALL STREET
RESTORE HONOR/TEA PARTY
Fearing death and facing death on September 11, 2001
September 11, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
On the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, tributes and remembrances abound, as they should. We learn by remembering. And we honor the fallen.
Every New Yorker has a story to tell about that day. My wife and I had just flown back home on September 10th and had admired the majestic towers on the drive into Manhattan. The thought that those twin icons would vanish 24 hours later was unimaginable.
On that crisp morning, we woke up and began preparing business documents we were delivering to our accountant, whose office was in World Trade Center building 7. We planned to train it down to Chambers from the Upper West Side, stroll down and arrive around 9 am. A couple of minutes before we left, a family member called and told us to turn on the television. We did. Our lives changed forever, as did the lives of everyone around us. [Afterwards, we purposely moved down to lower Manhattan, making Battery Park City our home, surrounded by the spirit(s) of those who gave their lives on that life-changing day. And we still have the package addressed to a building that no longer exists.]
Vindicated by new polls, progressive bloggers and activists will determine President Obama’s political fate
September 6, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
The defining conflict of the Obama presidency is not between the White House and Republicans. It’s not between the White House and the Tea Party. It’s between President Obama and the left, specifically between Obama and progressive opinion-makers and online activists.
It’s no coincidence that the angriest barbs from this White House have been directed at the netroots. And it’s no surprise that the media and political establishment – along with a vitriolic cadre of Obama supporters – are mortified by the principled left, simultaneously dismissing them as bit players and accusing them of being ingrates who are damaging Obama’s reelection prospects (hint: you can’t be both).
I’ve repeated a version of this thesis for years: a handful of influential progressive opinion-makers are canaries in the coal mine, propounding and presaging views and arguments later adopted by rank and file Democrats.
It’s been that way since the dawn of the blogosphere and has only been magnified with Twitter and other online platforms. Just as the netroots laid the groundwork for the eventual downfall of the Bush presidency, the sharp, insistent, principled critiques of President Obama emanating from the left on civil liberties, women’s reproductive rights, gay rights, the environment, secrecy, executive power, the economy, war, among other issues, have had a profoundly outsized effect on perceptions of this president.
Recent polls (including Gallup, which shows a double-digit decline among liberals) indicate significant erosion of support for Obama among groups who propelled him to victory in 2008, reinforcing the idea that reality is catching up with netroots criticism. This crumbling of support is typically attributed by pundits to the poor economy, but the problem is more complicated: it’s the poor economy coupled with the sense (fair or unfair) that Barack Obama has no convictions, no moral center, nothing for which he will take an unwavering stand.
That perception of a lack of convictions can’t be attributed solely to attacks from the right, since they can be discounted as partisan. It’s when the left makes that argument that conventional wisdom congeals.
Kill switch redux: British PM Cameron considers muzzling social media during riots
August 12, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
The government is considering whether social media services should be shut off at times of disorder, the British prime minister, David Cameron, has told parliament.
Cameron’s comments were made in a speech to the House of Commons on Thursday. Parliament has been recalled from its summer recess to respond to the violent disorder that has affected London, Manchester, Birmingham and other UK cities.
“Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media,” Cameron said. “Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.”
Well, true, things would be much easier without that pesky “free flow of information.” Read more
GOP radicals and the end of American exceptionalism
August 9, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
Last November, Karen Tumulty wrote an interesting article titled American exceptionalism: an old idea and a new political battle:
[T]he idea that the United States is inherently superior to the world’s other nations has become the battle cry from a new front in the ongoing culture wars. Lately, it seems to be on the lips of just about every Republican who is giving any thought to running for president in 2012.
The proposition of American exceptionalism, which goes at least as far back as the writing of French aristocrat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, asserts that this country has a unique character. It is also rooted in religious belief. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 58 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: “God has granted America a special role in human history.“
How the Democratic establishment shunned the left, spawned the Tea Party and moved America right
August 1, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
In the aftermath of the debt ceiling fiasco, there’s a lot of head-scratching and soul-searching going on among activists, pundits and political observers.
How can the Tea Party exert such outsized influence?
Is President Obama an awful negotiator incapable of getting progressive results or a good negotiator getting exactly the anti-progressive results he wants?
Is liberal activist anger at Obama a problem or does the White House welcome it?
Do Democrats stand for anything? If so, what?
Are Republicans reckless enough to destabilize the US economy for political ends? If so, how do they get away with it?
Is Washington really broken or does it work just fine for the rich and powerful?
Is America a democracy, kleptocracy, or corporatocracy?
Are our best days ahead of us or behind us?
On the left, and specifically the online activist left, early disappointment with Obama and Democratic leaders has given way to outright disgust. The level of frustration and rage is at a boiling point and Obama is fortunate that there’s no viable primary opponent or he’d have a problem with a flood of energy, money and media attention flowing to that candidate. Granted, he and his strategists can take solace in strong (early) fundraising and relative stability in the polls among Democrats, but the netroots are canaries in the coal mine, and if I had to bet, I’d say that the president’s re-election campaign will rue the day the netroots were spurned.
Reuters- BBC News
- NY Times
- Business News
- OIL FUTURES: Crude Down 1.2% To New 2012 Low Of $92.81 A Barrel - Wall Street Journal
- All It Takes Is a Greek Story to Further Scare Markets - CNBC.com
- Federal Reserve concerned about fiscal cliff - CNN
- FOREX-Euro slides to 4-month low as Greek fears persist - Reuters
- How JPMorgan's storm in a teapot grew - Financial Times
- Science/Tech News
- Upgrading Your Verizon Device? Say Goodbye to Unlimited Data - PC Magazine
- New MacBook Pro Retina display will cost Apple, consumer too? - Los Angeles Times
- Apple's Patent Win Delays Shipments of Two HTC Smartphones - Wired News
- A post-IPO Facebook strategy - Reuters
- Google Revamps Search Engine To Make It Smarter - Wall Street Journal
- Health News
- Healthful food is not necessarily more expensive than junk food - Los Angeles Times
- Half as many women dying in pregnancy, childbirth as 20 years ago - Los Angeles Times
- Paralyzed woman uses mind-control technology to operate robotic arm - CBS News
- New Report Says Fish Pedicures May Carry Dangerous Bacteria - KBOI
- Flesh-Eating Bacteria Risk Rare Despite New Case - Sci-Tech Today
- Earthwire
- Environment
- Health/Poverty
- Maternal deaths continue to decline but more progress needed - UN report
- Hypertension and diabetes on the rise worldwide, says UN report
- Sub-Saharan Africa cannot sustain growth without ending hunger - UN report
- New UN-backed guidelines aim to protect rights to land, fisheries and forests
- Funding gap threatens efforts to assist millions facing hunger in Africa - UN official
- Human Rights
- UN expert urges Canada to adopt national strategy to ensure right to food
- Senior UN official condemns killing of Syrian citizen journalist
- UNESCO chief calls for investigation into death of Honduran journalist
- UN envoy welcomes deal to end hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in Israel
- Mexico: UN and regional experts urge government to take action to protect journalists
- Women/Children
- Increase of women in parliament is a step towards gender equity in Algeria - UN
- UN mission in Afghanistan condemns attacks on schools by insurgents
- As death toll rises, UN urges greater protection of civilians in Yemen, especially minors
- Children in Mali suffering from triple disaster, warns UNICEF
- UN launches initiative to help end new HIV infections among children by 2015