this takes like 5 minutes and unlike most petitions and stuff circulating around your www inbox, this might actually work.

• read.
• act.

You can now send emails, faxes and print to congresspeople and world leaders, automatically from amnesty international USA’s online action center. You need to enter your address, and it will automatically determine who your senators and representatives are and send it to them.

I sent a bunch in the last few days supporting Amnesty’s recent report on Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, against making John Bolton UN ambassador, and some others to representatives and senators and I actually got replies back. At least one of the replies was not completely automatically generated, as it responded to the topic of the email (John Bolton). It may have been replied to by some intern or something, but generally when congresspeople reply with a specific topic it means they are keeping track of how many letter they got on these issues in their constituencies.

This editorial covers a story that hasn’t seen much light in the mainstream media. The story’s fairly new and came to my attention through this video clip from Bill Maher’s show, which I saw on robin’s blog. Paraphrasing Maher’s comments, if this had happened under Clinton, he would have been lynched. But clearly, Republican presidents receive special attention, which we know given the whole missing munitions scandal, the little Abu Ghraib boo boo, and the minor fact that the main reason for going to war turned out to be incorrect. Clearly, all of these things were nothing compared to lying about sexual relations with an intern, an act which undermines the trust and the very fabric of American society–much moreso than male prostitutes with FBI/CIA clearance in the Whitehouse.

But at least somethings are getting out there, like the failure of Bush’s education policy

This is a pretty sweet visualization of the words used in each of Bush’s State of the Union addresses. Click the more link, or visit the nytimes.
(more…)

From Chris Rock in an interview in the Onion’s AV club:

I try not to get caught up with the critics. The critics like only a few people. Most of them aren’t that funny. I’m always of the mindset that if only smart people like your shit, it ain’t that smart. If a guy drives a truck and he doesn’t get your jokes, something’s wrong there. I’m not saying you have to dumb it down, but they sell newspapers to everybody, not just the smartest people in the country. Everybody buys the newspaper. Everybody kind of watches the news. Your comedy can appeal to a wider audience if it’s funny.

In other words, why GW got elected.

I felt a little bit better after reading this article by William Rivers Pitt, New York Times and international bestseller of “War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know’”and ‘”The Greatest Sedition is Silence.” I’ll probably write more later on why, but it’s partly due to his insane anecdote, and partly because he’s another voice who’s agreeing with the Chomskyan view I currently hold, that it’s the continued success of “manufacturing consent”, not just “moral values”, that was the real reason things turned out the way they did. (though neither of us is denying the facts about this moral values thing…). Anyway, I recommend it.

To whet your appetite, here’s an except (or you can click the link):

Despite these bright spots, the inscription on my memorial rock – ‘There Are Worse Things Than Losing An Election’ - seems absurd in the face of all this. Maybe it’s the concussion talking, but I honestly believe the rock is right. For one thing, worse than losing the election would be a collective acceptance of the reasons we are being given for why the election was lost. We hear from every mainstream media quarter that the election was lost because more people lined up with Bush on the question of ‘Values.’ There is a degree of truth to this. Eleven states had referendums on the ballot about gay marriage, for one example. The Republican base flooded to the polls to vote against it. This helped Bush, surely, along with some other ‘Values’-oriented issues, but this does not account for the final result. He was going to get that vote anyway. There is an elephant in the room here, and ignoring it would be worse than the electoral defeat.

The result of this election is nothing more or less than the culmination of a three-year terror campaign waged by the Bush administration and his campaign crew. Every day for three years, the American people were bombarded with messages of fear from the administration. Day after day, the Bush administration used September 11 to cow any and all dissent, to bend popular will, to frighten people into thinking that voting against Bush was a vote for death and destruction.

(more…)

I was looking something up on dictionary.com and saw this ad. it worked i guess, b/c I was curious enough to click on it. It brought be to this web page for this book & it’s author: retro vs. metro. Not terribly enlightening, but a great little title, and the Rants & Raves section is pretty funny/scary.

I here people talking a lot about these clashes of civilizations though (and by people I mean editorials and random Ds and Rs calling in to NPR). The Islamic world “versus” the Judeo-Christian West. . . the conservative, religious south & midwest (retro) vs. the scattered, progressive, urban areas (metro). My brain keeps going back to Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. I haven’t looked at the original works in about 7 years… since I was 17… and I can only remember the gists of these great works. Man is good, man is bad, conflict is a result of the state, fighting is innate. But as usually my mind is stuck on philosophy and what the Truth is about human nature and society (note the capital “T”).

On a side note, I think it’s interesting that Rousseau, the guy who thought people are innately good and noble, is portrayed in the paintings as a smiling, happy dude with a nice wig and fancy French duds, whereas Hobbes, the dude who says people are animals and the state is necessary to keep us in line, is portrayed as a crotchedy old man with a Puritanical fashion sense.

God I have work to do! All I was trying to is remember the exact, formal definition of what makes up an “algebra” and - ZAP! - 30 minutes of my life gone. Damn you internet! (or lack of personal willpower (!)).

I probably shoulda went to FOLDOC anyway. More precise (nerdy) and no ads. Had I gone there, I would be certain to follow links allowing me to learn (waste time learning) about things like magmas and abelian monoids. Clearly more useful procrastinative efforts than thinking about the fundamental nature of humanity.

More than one decent thing in the NY Times today! Huzzah! Coverage of John Stewart’s scathing appearane on Crossfire - which, by the way, you should watch if you haven’t. There’s a blog that has a bunch of version of it posted.

Thank god Craig Kilborn was replaced by John Stewart (who is of course, one of the chosen people). If only I had more time to watch television!

Some quotes…
(more…)

There’s a really great op ed on the nytimes right now call ‘A Promise Unkept‘ - (click the first link there to the oped, I can’t get the javascript to make it pop-up in this blog thing). The title refers to the international community’s promise of never again, with reference to genocide, despite the fact that genocide’s happened in the plain sight of the community many times since the holocaust.

Anyway, I’m finding that most of the Darfur coverage is watered-down rhetoric. Words like ‘genocide’, ’suffering’ and ‘Africa’ cause most people to immediately turn the blinders on, because it can be depressing and it’s hard for most people to make the connection between them and this invisible problem. Part of this, is because these sound bites and buzz words are all we get in the news, when what people need to hear are the real stories from the people going through it. This piece is short, pretty balanced and well put together and it will ground all of the rhetoric you’re seeing on TV, news, etc. It reminded me of a documentary I saw about the Rwandan genocide at an Amnesty Int’l regional convention not long after it had taken place. While it was difficult to watch, we all need to hear these stories.

If anything exposing yourself to this will put it in your head, make you think about it, and make you talk about it. I like to think that I’ve learned a few little things through 10 years of activism. One of them is that it’s very very easy to feel like there are all these huge problems that you can’t do anything about, that the real power is wielded by corporations and governments and such, and that the people are powerless. But the only reason Bush and Kerry had to address the issue in the debates is precisely because people are talking about it. The “special interests”, i.e. corporations who fund their campaigns, don’t give a shit about genocide (not because they’re run buy demons, but because the people running them feel like they can’t, it won’t make the corporation money). They addressed the problems because people are voting for them, and they’re polling people have told them that some people are concerned about it — that is, people are talking about it and maybe even writing letters.Which brings me to another thing I learned about activism.

Talking about something to people who normally wouldn’t think about that thing is activism, possibly the most powerful activism you can engage in. Debating with like-minded friends is useful to get your beliefs and assumptions clear. Talking non-likeminded people is sometimes more useful. If they are people who’ve thought about it already a lot, it’s probably not worth the time — you usually can’t change people’s base assumptions. There are a lot of friends of mine who I just don’t bother debating with anymore about a lot of things, because I know their assumptions and I know that I don’t have much chance of changing them. Challenging peoples values is like challenging them - their ’self’ - the collection of values that allows them to distinguish themselves from other people — (I know this is someone else’s philosophy, but I can’t think of who… George Herber Mead maybe?) — it’s actually threatening to them at a very deep level (cf. ‘face’ threats, Brown & Yule, etc…).

Luckily, most people, conservative, democrat, liberal, libertarian, crazy, dumb, ugly, smart, whatever, believe that human rights are a good thing and killing innocent people is generally a bad thing. And luckily, this is all you really need to get stuff done in cases like Darfur. ‘So watch this feature, let it sit in your brain, and then tell some people about it. It’s not okay that the government of Sudan decided that the best option to deal with some political problems was the cheapest option - where the cheapest option was to hire psychotic mercenaries to butcher thousands of little kids, women and men, and to cause thousands of others to be so scared that they left their homes and died of thirst, hunger or heat. It wouldn’t be okay if it happened in the US, and it’s not okay that it’s happening in Africa.

(If people are worried about terrorism, it’s often people living in conditions like this that lose their minds and go become terrorists. But that’s a side point.)

Editorial by Paul Krugman, New York Times, Aug. 23, 2004. Here’s a quote: (more…)