Alegi, 72, said Europeans are appalled by the Republican administration's willingness to set aside conventional civil rights for detainees captured in Iraq or Afghanistan. Ken Sherman, a Hamilton, Ont., resident who was selected as a delegate pledged to Barack Obama, said that when he visits Europe, he uses his Canadian rather than American passport because international anger over U.S. foreign policy. "In the last five years with George Bush, I don't pull out my American passport unless I need it." But Obama's rise has made Sherman, 71, prepared to embrace his American citizenship again. "Something has happened in the past two years that has made me proud to be an American again. People are rising up." Wayne Weightman, a 46-year-old Cambodian lawyer, came to Vancouver to support Barack Obama who, he believes, can revive respect overseas for America.
Signing Out-By Ken Silverstein (Harper's Magazine) - 0 views
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This is my last post here at Washington Babylon and I'll be leaving my positions as Harper's Washington Editor (I will remain as a contributing editor to the magazine). I've received a fellowship at the Open Society Institute and will also be leading special investigations at Global Witness, which has offices in London and in Washington. My work for both will focus on long-term international investigations.
The use and abuse of bar graphs - Brendan Nyhan - 0 views
Daughter says pilot in Texas IRS crash was a hero - Yahoo! News - 0 views
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Joe Stack's adult daughter, Samantha Bell, spoke to ABC's "Good Morning America" from her home in Norway. Asked during a phone interview broadcast Monday if she considered her father a hero, she said: "Yes. Because now maybe people will listen." Authorities say Stack, 53, targeted the IRS office building in Austin on Thursday, killing employee Vernon Hunter and himself, after posting a ranting manifesto against the agency and the government. He apparently set fire to his home before flying his plane into the office building. Hunter's son, Ken Hunter, said he's alarmed by comments that the pilot was a hero. "How can you call someone a hero who after he burns down his house, he gets into his plane ... and flies it into a building to kill people?" Hunter told ABC." "My dad Vernon did two tours of duty in Vietnam. My dad's a hero." Bell said she offered her deepest condolences to Hunter's family. She said her father's last actions were wrong. "But if nobody comes out and speaks up on behalf of injustice, then nothing will ever be accomplished," she told ABC. "But I do not agree with his last action with what he did. But I do agree about the government,"
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Rough Water - 0 views
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For most of the last 1,500 years, the river supported a sustainable salmon economy. Salmon were at the heart of all the Klamath’s tribal cultures, and Indians were careful not to over-harvest them. Each summer, the lower Klamath’s Yurok and Hoopa tribes blocked the upstream paths of spawning salmon with barriers; then, after ten days of fishing, they removed the barriers, allowing upstream tribes to take their share. As the salmon completed their lifecycle, dying in the waters where they’d been spawned, they enriched the watershed with nutrients ingested during years in the ocean. Among the beneficiaries were at least 22 species of mammals and birds that eat salmon. Even the salmon carcasses that bears left behind on the riverbanks fertilized trees that provided shade along the river’s banks, cooling its waters so that the next generation of vulnerable juvenile salmon could survive. “We tried to go to court, to go through the political process, but it didn’t work. …The big issues were still out there, and we still had to resolve them.” Salmon’s biological family may have started in the age of dinosaurs a hundred million years ago. They’ve survived through heat waves and droughts, in rivers of varying flow, temperature, and nutrient load – but they were as ill-prepared for Europeans’ arrival as the Indians themselves. Gold miners who showed up in the mid-nineteenth century washed entire hillsides into the river with high-pressure hoses and scoured the river’s bed with dredges. Loggers dragged trees down streambeds, causing massive erosion, and dumped sawdust into the river, smothering incubating salmon eggs. Cattle grazed at the river’s edge, causing soil erosion and destroying shade-giving vegetation. Farmers diverted water to feed their crops. The dams were the crowning blows. Between 1908 and 1962, six dams were built on the Klamath. The tallest, the 173-foot-high Iron Gate, is the farthest downstream, and definitively blocked salmon from the river’s upper quarter – after it was built, the river’s salmon population plummeted. In addition, the dams devastated water quality by promoting thick growths of toxic algae in the reservoirs. For Klamath basin farmers, however, the dams were deemed indispensable, as they generated hydropower that made pumping of their irrigation water possible.To the farmers, the potential loss of the dams’ hydropower was considered no less crippling than an end to Klamath-supplied irrigation.
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For most of the last century, the farmers were oblivious to the damage that dams and water diversions caused downstream, while the tribes and commercial fishermen quietly seethed. The annual salmon run, once so abundant that people caught fish with their hands, was roughly pegged at more than a million fish at its peak; in recent years it has dropped to perhaps 200,000 in good years, and as low as 12,000 – below the minimum believed necessary to sustain the runs – in bad years. Spring Chinook, which once comprised the river’s dominant salmon run, entirely disappeared. Two fish species – the Lost River sucker and the shortnose sucker – that once supported a commercial fishery, were listed as endangered in 1988. Coho salmon were listed as threatened nine years later. All this has had a devastating impact on the tribes. Traditionally able to sustain themselves throughout the year on seasonal migrations of the river’s salmon, trout, and candlefish, tribal members suffered greatly as the runs declined or went extinct. For four decades beginning in 1933, the tribes were barred from fishing the river even as commercial fishermen went unrestricted. Members of the Karuk tribe once consumed an estimated average of 450 pounds of salmon a year; a 2004 survey found that the average had dropped to five pounds a year. The survey linked salmon’s absence to epidemics of diabetes and heart disease that now plague the Karuk. The 2001 cutoff left farmers without irrigated water for the first time in the Klamath Project’s history. Over the next four months, many farmers performed repeated acts of civil disobedience, most notably when a bucket brigade passed pails of banned water from its lake storage to an irrigation canal while thousands of onlookers cheered. The protests attracted Christian-fundamentalist, anti-government, and property rights advocates from throughout the West; former Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage likened the farmers’ struggle to the American Revolution.
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Maybe the Klamath River basin would have turned itself around without Jeff Mitchell. Back in 2001, at the pinnacle of the conflict over the river's fate, when the Klamath earned its reputation as the most contentious river basin in the country, Mitchell planted a seed. Thanks to a drought and a resulting Interior Department decision to protect the river's endangered fish stocks, delivery of Klamath water to California and Oregon farmers was cut off mid-season, and they were livid. They blamed the Endangered Species Act, the federal government that enforced it, and the basin's salmon-centric Indians who considered irrigation a death sentence for their cultures. The basin divided up, farmers and ranchers on one side, Indians and commercial fishermen on the other. They sued one another, denounced one another in the press, and hired lobbyists to pass legislation undermining one another. Drunken goose-hunters discharged shotguns over the heads of Indians and shot up storefronts in the largely tribal town of Chiloquin, Oregon. An alcohol-fueled argument over water there prompted a white boy to kick in the head of a young Indian, killing him.
Skepticblog » Capitalism-A Propaganda Story - 0 views
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When Michael Moore said that capitalism should be replaced by democracy, it didn’t make the most sense, I agree. However, it is well known that the economic system of socialism change how effective a political system works. Captialism, when allowed to go to extremes can also interfere with our political system.
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Suggestion #1 Shermer should stay out of politics and economics. #2 He and all of you should read this: How the Servant Became a Predator, Finance’s Five Fatal Flaws By William K. Black Assoc. Professor, Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City
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Michael Moore is a fantastic skeptic. He doesn’t fall for the cultural mythologies of our age. The fervor that some people hold for their favorite economic systems is much akin to that held for religions. People get bent all out of shape when someone is sacrilegious enough to point out the problems and disconnects within their worshipped system. Some people think that there is some kind of magical something or other to their economic system that makes it function automatically. When you go looking for the “man behind the curtain”, you find out how frail the system really is.
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