They're dangerous to others and take up too much space

The Paris City Council voted on Tuesday to urge socialist Mayor Bertrand Delanoe to take an SUV ban under advisement. If the mayor decides to include the ban in an upcoming project to improve city traffic, the ban could become effective in Paris in as little as 18 months.
The resolution states that:

"These vehicles emit almost four times as much carbon dioxide as more environmentally friendly cars. Some consume up to 24 litres of fuel per 100km on an urban traffic cycle. At a time when dwindling oil resources are generating conflicts and price hikes, that is totally irresponsible."

London Mayor Ken Livingstone made simliar remarks in May, saying SUVs were "bad for London -- completely unnecessary" and SUV owners were "complete idiots."
An American reporter returning from Paris recently opined that Paris's success as a city was a result of their lowered car count.

sllort/kuro5hin Jun.10.04

...prisoners "are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you've lost control of them"
two moreMajor-General Geoffrey Miller, who was in charge of the Guant�namo Bay camp and
two morenow oversees US prisons in Iraq
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"I didn't know in September, I didn�t know in October, I didn't know ever" about any abuse, she[Janis Karpinski] said.
"Those pictures which I saw on the 23rd of January were more shocking to me than probably the rest of the world ... I was absolutely sickened by those images and I couldn't even fathom a guess as to what happened to these people to make them go in such an opposite direction of how they were trained."
But Brig-Gen Karpinski, who has been suspended from her command for alleged failings at Abu Ghraib but not charged with any crime, said military police would not have taken Iraqis out of cells to pose them for photographs without being told to do so.

Scotsman Jun.16.04

booby-trapped phones

Lawrence of Cyberia demythologizes the shallow balancing act of the New Yorker's Jeff Goldberg

George Galloway and Respect

Huub Lauwers has died at 88

The real cause of declining fish catches is over fishing, not hungry whales

Ronald Reagan - a great friend of Israel's extremists
and the powerful Jewish-American neoconservative elite adored him

Only the ideologically twisted would deny Ronald Reagan his due. He was a wildly successful president, accomplishing a remarkable amount of his agenda.
He entered office in 1980 determined to block advancement for black Americans, to halt the sluggish march towards equality for American women, to make America walk tall again by beating up tiny poverty-stricken nations, to allow insatiable greed and ruthless personal ambition to reap lavish rewards, to fire up the economy through trillions of dollars in defence expenditures, to invite industry to desecrate the environment and to legitimate a morality in which any means justified his ends.
Notwithstanding his unparalleled laziness, ignorance and immersion in fantasy, in all these areas his administration triumphed, a splendid role model for conservatism in the modern world.
The new values were never in question. This was conviction politics. One of the very first acts of the Reagan administration was to cast the only vote against the World Health Organization's code of ethics on feeding third world babies with instant formula prepared with contaminated water.
Gerald Caplan/rabble news (CA) Jun.09.04.

water on Black Mesa

Today, few Navajo lead their sheep to water, the cattle troughs are no longer full, and the Hopi have abandoned many of the terraces as their springs, washes and groundwater have gone dry. Instead, they drive as far as 25 miles, often over untended roads, to water stations where they fill 55-gallon barrels roped into pickup trucks. The disappearance of their water is threatening a traditional lifestyle for the Navajo and Hopi, who so value tradition that they voted not to have gaming and the millions of dollars it has brought to other Native American tribes. They do not blame the drought that has plagued the West for so many years now. They blame Peabody Western Coal Co.'s Black Mesa mine, which they say has been siphoning their water for three decades, and their own tribal governments that have allowed that water use.

LATimes/Bakersfield Village News Jun.06.04

We Owe Arabs Nothing

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Taslima Nasrin is of course not an Arab, she is a Bangladeshi, a Pakistani, a poet, a woman:

Because of her repeated criticisms of religious and traditional values, her strong language and uncompromising attitude against male domination, she became a target for Muslim fundamentalist groups.
Since 1990, there has been a series of campaigns against her. These included staging street demonstrations, blocking her residence and government offices, breaking into newspaper offices from which she used to work, demanding her immediate execution by hanging, and offering rewards for her death.
Instead of protecting her and taking action against fundamentalist mobs, the government bowed to the latter's pressure, stopping her from writing, confiscating her passport, ordering her detention, and ultimately forcing her to go into exile.
Since 1994, Nasreen has been moving from one European country to another while continuing her pro-women campaign and writing novels. Among her 24 books, Lajja (Shame) is the most popular. Most of her works have been translated into 10 European languages in addition to Hindi, Malayalam, Urdu, Nepalese, Persian, and Arabic.
Moreover, she received, during the period 1994-2000, prestigious literary and non-literary awards from India, Sweden, Belgium, France, US, the European Union, and international human rights organisations.Dr. Abdullah Al Madani/Gulf News Jan.25.04

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Mr. Kilroy Silk owes his position to the immense economic and political power of his invisible masters and his servile obedience to their wishes. He has contributed greatly in his own small-hearted way to the climate of intolerance, fear, and irrational hatred that puts Taslima Nasrin's life in so much unnecessary danger.

The so-called ethical foreign policy of Mr. Blair

...anti-Islamic racism, for that is what it is, is the last "respectable" racism in the world...[readers] who wouldn't dream of uttering such comments about black people or Jewish people or Catholics, do so with equanimity when it comes to Muslims. For them every Muslim is a fundamentalist and every fundamentalist is a terrorist and this is an equation which we utterly reject, which is poisonous in the effect that it has on communal relations in the country and on the mindset of the British people when invited to support the going to war with Muslims abroad. We say that the war against Muslims abroad is one side of the coin and the other side of the coin is war against Muslims at home, and Cohen, who ought to know better as a Jewish man, should not be casually smearing a whole community in this way. We have the support of, I think, the vast majority of Muslim voters in this election, and virtually none of them are fundamentalists, and virtually none of those support terrorism. In fact, the fundamentalists hate us - Hizb Al Tahrir, Al Mouhajiroun - the separatist organizations actually hate us and try to wreck our meetings, try to persuade the Muslims not to vote at all, arguing that democracy itself is "haram". So far from being in alliance with the Muslim fundamentalists, we are just in alliance with the Muslims.

George Galloway/Victor Kattan-electronic intifada Jun.09.04

We don't care

Recently, 10 Palestinians were slaughtered by an Israeli tank that fired into a crowd of civilians, most of them children, during a non-violent protest against the Israeli Army. Um Tarik asked her son to translate the word "troubling" into Arabic. She heard George Bush's statement that the murder of those Palestinian children was "troubling" to him.

Palestine is a killing field for the Israelis. Close to 600 children have been killed by the Israelis since September 2000. During the month of May in Rafah, more than 43 Palestinians were murdered or assassinated by the "only democracy in the Middle East," and 1,500 more Palestinians have been made homeless yet again. It does not matter to Palestinians that Amnesty International has condemned the Israeli actions in Rafah as "war crimes," or that the United Nations has characterized them as "crimes against humanity." These are empty words and offer little comfort. The Rafah crimes are nothing new for Palestinians.

Jess Ghannam/Pacific News Service May.15.04

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The immediate and vicious retaliation of very loud and very powerful people, that any condemnation of the actions of the Israeli government is "anti-Semitic" or "Jew-hating" needs to be repudiated, forcefully and repeatedly, until it's very clear.
It's the same as "American" and "anti-American" - the "Americans" are killing innocent people in Iraq, and the "Americans" are being killed in Iraq.
I'm an American, I'm neither killing nor being killed in Iraq. I'm against the "American" presence there, and I'm against the "Americans" who support that presence. But I am an American.
There are Jews and citizens of Israel who neither support nor excuse the bestial madness of the Israeli government and its covert supporters in the rest of the world. They are being attacked from behind by irrational blanket condemnations of "Jews" and "Israelis", just like we here in the US are being denied our right to be Americans, though we're protected from the hatred many of the voiceless in the world today have for America.
That's what's being taken away from us, our being, our identity, our American-ness.
The language is being manipulated, and as always it benefits the unnamed. Jews who oppose the butchery and cunning of Sharon and his dog-pack are crippled by the imprecision of the language.

60,000 more times

My black mourning clothes turned gray from wearing them so much. By the time I turned 12, I had five dog tags hanging from my neck. The guys' moms or wives or sisters gave them to me in appreciation for help I might have given in organizing the funeral -- collecting the sugar, washing the coffee cups, or walking long distances to get bread from a relative in a different neighborhood.

La Segua/Pacific News Service May.15.04

Protected Geographical Indication (I.G.P.) food status

Pasquale Potenza, who emigrated to Argentina as a youth, may have remembered whispered tales about the amorous side effects of the sweet onion of his native Calabria. After years of research, the biochemist at the University of Buenos Aires discovered that the Tropea onion contains nitric oxide, the active ingredient used in the little blue pill to regulate blood vessels and sustain erections.

"I'm not exactly sure what the implications may be," said the researcher, whose last name happens to mean "potency" in Italian. "It will take complex studies to see whether it could be used on a pharmaceutical level -- the connection is there though."

zoomata Apr.13.04

Any moral movement that encourages children to avoid drugs and at the same time allows the sadistic inhumanity of the juvenile penal system to metastisize, as it is, is collaborating with evil. Which is the same in the end as being evil. Of course children know the difference between pot and Zoloft. Because you make it very clear to them, don't you? Even though you don't have the slightest clear idea what the difference is.
I urinate on your stupidity. Right here right now I piss on your stupidity. I shame you right here. All those simple-minded commercials on TV. There will never be a time when anyone looks back and thanks you for what you've done, because what you make possible, by being in the way, is something much worse than kids smoking pot.
You insist that children remain inside a building that's on fire, because of the rules. Remember that? The Muslim fundamentalists who wouldn't let those girls leave the schoolroom because they weren't veiled? So they burned up. That's you. You wasted all that time, and that's all the time there was.
In the end it was your cowardice you gave them, you showed them, you taught them. All that power and all that money and all those free minutes on TV. And you did nothing with it. I did more than you ever will, alone, with nothing, from this cage in a madhouse.
I piss on you. I spit on you. If I wasn't screaming with bitterness and rage and clenched with unshed tears I'd mock you to your faces.

The true hero is Senator Romero, the Latina legislator, who has stood up to the prison guard union

...it is time to shut down the California Youth Authority. The youth prisons do not work. We are spending $80,000 per kid in the youth authority. It costs -- you can send two kids to Yale for the cost sending one kid to jail, and yet there's a 91 percent recidivism rate. It is an $80,000 prep school for adult prisons where children are beaten and abused, and it's time to shut the California Youth Authority down and replace it with something more humane and effective.

AMY GOODMAN: Who is the most powerful lobby in the state for keeping the CYA prisons?

VAN JONES: The California prison guard's union, the CCPOA, is the most powerful lobbying interest in Sacramento. They are such a powerful force, and they have such a stranglehold on the Democratic Party in this state, that California spends more money on prisons than Texas. And, last year, when everybody was talking about the California budget crisis, the huge shortfall, the shortfall is bigger than the budget of most countries, while teachers were being given pink slips in the state, prison guards got a 7.5 percent pay raise. That's how powerful this union is, and they have a stake in maintaining these factories of abuse for these children. We say no.

Van Jones Interview/Democracy Now!/Ella Baker Center Apr.16.04

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At least one of the soldiers charged in Iraq - Corporal Charles Graner, Jr. - was a prison guard in Pennsylvania. The righteous and justified outrage at the images we have seen from Abu Ghraib must be directed not only at that facility, but also at the root of these failures - prisons here at home.

Van Jones/Alternet May.28.04
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Books Not Bars
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Face-to-face interviews between journalists and specific prisoners are now banned by the California Department of Corrections (CDC) unless, subject to prison approval, the reporters are on the prisoners� visitor list. If this wasn�t bad enough, reporters cannot bring to these visits the tools of their trade � cameras, tape recorders, pens or paper on which to write. Making access even harder, the CDC recently cut the number of inmate visiting days from 4 to 2.
Senator Gloria Romero at ca.gov
original essay ACLU Open Forum 2004
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With a recidivism rate of up to 90 percent, CYA has become nothing more than a finishing school for felons.

Taxpayers shell out $80,000 annually per CYA ward for programs aimed at turning them into productive citizens. But inside these youth prisons the violence has reached unprecedented levels, mental health services are severely flawed, and educational instruction is spotty at best. In fact rehabilitation is the exception and not the rule.

Senator Gloria Romero/California Bar Journal June 2004

Senator Gloria Romero homepage
Corporate 3 Strikes Act killed by California Senate
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link Naomi Klein/nologo

PartiallyClips poeticizes class warfare into koanic irreducibility

Reagan opened his 1980 campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi,
His speech extolled states' rights*.

Reagan's great accomplishment was ideological--propelling the ascendancy of the right--but the actual governing results always looked more like hoary old interest-group politics. Wealthy individuals, corporate and financial interests got extraordinary benefits (tax reductions and deregulation) while the bottom half got whacked whenever an opportunity arose. His original proposition--cut taxes regressively, double military spending, shrink government and balance the federal budget--looked cockeyed from the start. Yet when the logic self-destructed in practice, conservatives were remarkably content, since they had delivered the boodle to the right clients. After my notorious account of Reagan's economic failure, based on my conversations with Stockman, was published in the December 1981 Atlantic Monthly, the Gipper likened me to John Hinckley, the would-be assassin who shot him. So much for Mr. Nice Guy.

William Greider/The Nation Jun.28.04.04

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link KWSnet Jun.11.04
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Brief history of Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner killings in Neshoba, Mississippi w/audio

Andrew Goodman
James Earl Chaney
Michael Schwerner

Andrew Goodman Foundation

* "States' Rights" was a political code word for unapologetic racists in the South, who were opposing federal attempts to desegregate and integrate Southern schools and civic institutions. The right of states to enact and enforce racist legislation was actually being debated at the time of the murders of Goodman Schwerner and Chaney,

Hell no, he still won't go

�When you stop pissing in my shoes and when I stop pissing in your tea!�

mobile speed bump

The city of Vancouver is exploring the idea of sanctioning a grass-roots traffic-calming program that enlists the silent majority of reasonable, rational, law-abiding drivers to stop being so silent.

Instead they'd slap NEIGHBORHOOD PACE CAR stickers on their vehicles and set a highly visible example by rolling down Vancouver streets at lawful speeds.

Word Spy Jun.11.04