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:
Fortunately, people who use direct eyewitness testimony in attempts to expose the greatest crimes against humanity can be found in each era and all over the world. Rithy Panh described the terror of the Khmer Rouge, Kanan Makiya detailed the brutal prisons of Saddam Hussein and Harry Wu has tried to show the perversion of the Laogai system of Chinese forced labour camps.
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.
The Northern part of the Korean peninsula is governed by the world’s worst totalitarian dictator, who is responsible for taking millions of human lives. Kim Jong-il inherited the extensive Communist regime following the death of his father Kim Il-sung, and has shamelessly continued to strengthen the cult of personality.
…
Kim Jong-il wants to be respected and feared abroad, and he wants to be recognized as one of the most powerful leaders in today’s world. He is willing to let his own people die of hunger, and uses famine to liquidate any sign of wavering loyalty to his rule.
Through blackmail, Kim Jong-il receives food and oil, which he distributes among those loyal to him (first in line being the army), while the international community has no way to ascertain who is receiving aid inside North Korea.
Innocent North Koreans are dying of hunger or are closed in concentration camps, as Kim Jong-il continues to blackmail the world.
Now is the time for the democratic countries of the world – the European Union, the United States, Japan and, last but not least, South Korea – to unify under a common position. These countries must make it perfectly clear that they will not make concessions to a totalitarian dictator. – Václav Havel
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. Not only are we turning our planet into a garbage dump, but a good number of people are denying the undeniable effects of our actions: 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 turning our atmosphere into a repository of poisonous exhaust.
The following compendium of articles and blog posts summarizes where things stand on climate change, 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.
Are rightwing bloggers to blame for the Norway massacre?
July 25, 2011 by Peter · Leave a Comment
In an article titled Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S., the New York Times highlights the connection between Anders Behring Breivik and American bloggers:
The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them…
His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.
Mr. Breivik frequently cited another blog, Atlas Shrugs, and recommended the Gates of Vienna among Web sites. Pamela Geller, an outspoken critic of Islam who runs Atlas Shrugs, wrote on her blog Sunday that any assertion that she or other antijihad writers bore any responsibility for Mr. Breivik’s actions was “ridiculous.”
Much as I find Geller’s writing execrable, the primary responsibility for the slaughter in Norway rests with the cowardly killer and not the hate-mongers he quotes in his pathetic manifesto.
That’s not to say that there are no consequences for spewing a constant stream of hatred and intolerance.
After the Giffords shooting, I wrote about eliminationism on the right. My focus was on the invective directed by rightwingers at the left, but it also applies to anti-Muslim bigotry rampant on a number of conservative sites…
Reuters- BBC News
- NY Times
- Business News
- Veterans jobs corps: beating swords into plowshares? - Christian Science Monitor
- Greek Leaders Hold Off Talks Until Sunday - Wall Street Journal
- Gazprom says unable to meet greater Europe gas demand-report - Reuters
- Unemployment fell again in January, still over 8 percent - The Colorado Independent
- Dow at Highest Since May 2008 - Wall Street Journal
- Science/Tech News
- Microsoft's Search Head: Google 'Realized We Were Ahead And They Overextended ... - Business Insider
- Look who's listening in to FBI - Sydney Morning Herald
- Microsoft Windows 8 Unification Plan: Grand, But Risky - InformationWeek
- Super Bowl Science Blitz: Watch Out! - Discovery News
- Google Privacy Policy Changes Concern Congress, Europe - eWeek
- Health News
- CDC: HPV vaccination for all, including boys - The State Column
- Komen Foundation bows to social media firestorm, reverses Planned Parenthood ... - San Jose Mercury News
- 9 Super Bowl snacks made healthy - Fox News
- Social media reason behind twitching disorder - Times of India
- Latest illnesses point to raw milk's popularity - USA TODAY
- Earthwire
- Environment
- Health/Poverty
- UN says Somali famine over, but warns action needed to forestall new crisis
- For World Cancer Day, UN stresses early diagnosis to reduce mounting deaths
- UN backs vaccination campaign after yellow fever outbreaks hit Cameroon and Ghana
- Small Indian hill state aims to improve agricultural livelihoods with UN loan
- New UN initiative aims to harness power of social media to fight global hunger
- Human Rights
- Ethiopia's anti-terrorism laws must not be misused to curb rights - UN
- UN official voices concern about possible excessive use of force by Senegalese forces
- El Salvador: UN panel voices concern at arbitrary detention, prison overcrowding
- Somalia: UN envoy deplores murder of radio station director
- Former Haitian leader must face charges for human rights abuses, says UN
- Women/Children
- UN Women to focus on boosting economic empowerment and political roles
- UNICEF appeals for nearly $1.3 billion to assist children in 2012
- Italy must urgently act to end violence against women, UN rights expert says
- Women's education ‘smartest global investment,' Ban tells World Economic Forum
- UN and South-east Asian nations partner to end violence against women and children