"There were problems in Kilo company with drugs, alcohol, hazing [violent initiation games], you name it," she said. "I think it's more than possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when they shot those civilians in Haditha."

CNS: Creationism is not considered a science because it can't be observed or empirically tested. You assert in your book that the theory of evolution has the same problems. Why then has the U.S. public school system been willing to accept the theory of evolution, but snubbed creationism?

Ann Coulter: Because evolution is the official state religion. Although it is possible to believe in God and evolution, it is not possible to not believe in God without believing in evolution -- otherwise, atheists have no explanation for why we are here. Thus, it's very important for the liberal clergy to force small school children to believe in a discredited mystery religion from the 19th century -- evolution -- in order to prepare them to believe in the nonexistence of God, one of the main goals of the American public education system.

The dead from Hiroshima and Nagasaki wish to object, too.

"I argue that the Bush Administration's path to making Katrina a moment of development is through an enclosure, i.e. by uprooting and dispersing a combative, culturally rich and largely black community strategically placed at the geographical centre of the US's oil, natural gas and chemical industries and replacing it with a 'more profitable' and politically docile population.
The US military's intervention during and after Katrina was crucial to stripping black New Orleanians of their rights, even their property rights, in this enclosure."

George Caffentzis/MuteMagazine
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link wood s lot

core values training
Richard Marsden on Bush, Nietzsche and Haditha

"Until that moment, I'd never heard those three words, National Security Letter. I never knew there was such a thing."

Mark Leibovich has a lengthy hit piece on Nancy Pelosi in the erstwhilely liberal NYTimes.

"All the victims had gunshot wounds to the head"
Warning: strong images

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A military investigation into allegations that American troops intentionally killed civilians in Ishaqi, a village north of Baghdad, has cleared them of misconduct, the U.S. said Friday even though it acknowledged the deaths of up to 13 Iraqis in the March raid.
ABCNews 03.Jun.06

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The obscenity rests most precisely in the term "Iraqis".
13 Iraqis. 13 dogs. 13 Niggers. 13 Jews. 13 interchangeable subhumans whose lives don't matter.

link fixed! Children in the news every day:

"These meeting notes make it clear that the pesticide industry's top objective is access to children for experiments. After reading these ghoulish notes one has the urge to take a shower," commented PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, whose organization works with EPA scientists who have been prevented from voicing ethical and scientific concerns about human subject testing."
-CommonDreams/Scoop

Diamonds:

"We have heard that you are very interested in human rights," reads the open letter to Ms Jolie from Bushman organisation First People of the Kalahari. "The government is trying to destroy us and we are asking for your help in our battle to save our people. Many Bushmen families have been split apart by the evictions. Many people don't know where their relatives are and are very worried, desperate. They are not allowed to attend the funerals of relatives.
"Those who have remained inside the game reserve are not allowed to hunt and gather and have no access to water. The health situation is bad in the resettlement camps."

Survival/Scoop

China:

In its Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February, and the first such report since September 11, 2001, the Pentagon highlighted China as the country with "the greatest potential to compete with the United States".
The National Security Strategy, released in March, pointedly criticized China for its efforts to "lock up worldwide energy supplies". This followed similar comments last September by Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, who challenged China to reject mercantilist efforts to secure energy resources and embrace open markets like a "responsible stakeholder".

AsiaTimes 02.Jun.06

China China China:

The union representing journalists in the UK and Ireland has called on its 40,000 members to boycott Yahoo

Yahoo has been accused by the NUJ and other journalism groups of providing information that led to an eight-year prison term for Li Zhi for discussing pro-democracy issues in a Web forum.
The company has also been reported as helping to identify Shi Tao, who was sentenced to prison for 10 years for forwarding a government e-mail to the foreign press.
The NUJ also accuses Yahoo of providing records that led to the imprisonment of Jiang Lijun - who was sentenced to four years in jail for writing articles advocating democracy.

Aljazeera 02.Jun.06
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"I believe strongly in the traditional saying that if you've done nothing wrong, you don't fear the knock on your door at midnight."

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

The First Book of Moses, Called Genesis, Chp. 1, Vs. 26-27
Bartleby, KJV
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President Bush is beginning a major push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage - part of a new campaign to reassure cultural conservatives who say he and his party abandoned them after the 2004 elections.

Mr. Bush is to declare strong support for the amendment - scheduled for a vote in the Senate next week - in his radio address on Saturday, and at an event at the White House Monday with conservative activists, White House officials said today.

JimRutenberg/NYTimes 02.Jun.06
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A sensible, and sensitive, compromise would be to pass a law making it a mandatory requirement that when two people get married, one of the partners must be very masculine - male-ish, and the other must be very feminine - female-ish.
This will make the discomfort a lot of unsphisticated straight people feel about couples who look like each other kissing and having sex a non-issue.

Waking the kids back up:

A meteor's roaring crash into Antarctica - larger and earlier than the impact that killed the dinosaurs - caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history and more than likely spawned the Australian continent.
Ohio State University scientists said the 483km wide crater is now hidden more than 1.6km beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

News24/AFP

Water Pyramids
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link RN

power over those with no recourse:

Shaul talks about incidents of looting and destruction of Palestinian properties; of driving over private cars with armoured vehicles for fun; about the practice of leaving handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinians to "dry out" for hours in the sun, merely "because they smile too much at a checkpoint" and about indiscriminate shelling of a Palestinian neighbourhood with grenades in response to Palestinian gunfire. "After a while, being part of this makes it impossible to continue viewing Palestinians as equal human beings."
[...]
"The Israeli public wants to maintain at any cost this image of the Israeli military as the most moral army in the world and of our operations in the Palestinian territories as 'enlightenment occupation'. Checkpoints are in fact designed not to keep terrorists out but to prevent the realities of the occupied territories from entering Israel. It is as if the Israeli people are saying: 'We know that some shit is going on out there, but please don't tell us about it!' Reports of abuses against Palestinians are regularly dismissed as 'extreme cases', not representative of the general situation."

MichelHoebink/RadioNetherlands 02.Jun.06
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Breaking The Silence
Gallery

A concerted effort to get the children to go back to sleep:

The first detailed analysis of an extraordinary climatic and biological record from the seabed near the North Pole shows that 55 million years ago the Arctic Ocean was much warmer than scientists imagined - a Floridian year-round average of 74 degrees.

AndrewC. Revkin/NYTimes/IHT 01.Jun.06
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The Arctic was once a balmy subtropical paradise with palm trees, alligators and an average temperature of 74F, scientists revealed yesterday.
Core samples dug from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor have shown that an area near the North Pole was much warmer 55 million years ago than first thought.
The research has also given scientists the idea that a simple fern may have helped prevent the Earth from turning into a blazing hothouse and allowed it to develop into the more habitable environment found on most of the planet today.

StephenMcGinty/Scotsman 01.Jun.06

Because he was there:

"You have to sacrifice a few fingers to get to stand on top of Mount Everest as a double-amputee. So for me it's not a biggie to lose some fingers," he [Mark Inglis] says in a booming voice.
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"The people just want to get to the top," Hillary raged, referring to Inglis and other climbers. "They don't give a damn about anybody else who may be in distress and it doesn't impress me at all that they leave someone lying under a rock to die."
In his day, Hillary added, such behavior would have been inconceivable.

"The American people admire the Rwandan people for their efforts at rebuilding and we look forward to being a good partner with Rwanda, both in terms of building a strong and prosperous Rwanda and also a stronger and more prosperous region.

Thank you. I'm sorry. I have to go. I have to catch a plane."

Remarks With Rwandan President Paul Kagame
Secretary Condoleezza Rice 31.May.06

Turgid, purple, ranting, venting:
An essay, in which the author, having changed brands of coffee and not slept adequately for more than a week, gives free rein to the logorrhea that was, and is, his birthright

As the details spill out into the living rooms of the indefinable American public - Haditha, Kabul, these latest straws on the buckling camel's back - just like with Abu Ghraib there'll be an almost residual twitch toward some kind of cathartic "justice"; it's an open file until something happens, something official and authoritative. The P.R.'s too thin, it won't cover enough of what's clearly present now.
The constipatory aspects of undeniable atrocities - committed by our troops, with our bullets, in wars and engagements we flew the flag in support of - the way they get in the way of people trying to imagine a better future, the way they back up and clog the system - that needs relief, release.
Someone has to "pay". The way people have been trained to think criminals "pay" for their crimes by doing whatever it is they do behind bars.
Another Lynndie England won't get it. Trailer-trash hillbillies won't serve as permanent scapegoats for all this, not any more, and there will be at least a modicum of clamor for accountability, possibly an outright strident demand - for someone to blame, for a face to put in the news next to reminders of the horror.

Children were executed gangland-style in their family homes by American soldiers because...

Bush of course, but that's a done deal, he's virtually the official moral punching bag of the USA now.
Optimum continuity: blame it all on him and cheer the new "liberal" alternative leader as soon as she's anointed by the same obscure hand that placed Bush before the wrong-footed electorate. Not going to happen.
We need someone to blame more specifically, closer to a real causative actor - Bush is too obviously not in control of anything, too obviously never has been.
Probably at least a few dozen top brass in the military and the DOD should catch the spotlight and its dessicating heat for this - this being not just Haditha and Kabul, but Fallujah, Al-Latifya, Samara, and all too many other My Lai analogs.
Not to mention illuminating the heck out of the doings of those scuttling figures in the shadows and margins of what naive folks still call the "Bush Administration", the men who arranged the big strings into bundles, and hid the friction as they were pulled.
But none of that has the ceremonial tang of a good auto-da-fe, a good town square hanging - the purpose of public executions isn't to impress the criminal mind with the consequences of bad behavior, the purpose of public executions is to make the public feel good about itself for not being executed.
Lynndie England was an attempt to manipulate that phenomenon, but it wasn't as effective as its delusional creators thought it would be. And no one currently in the pipeline for accusation and shame has the merit, or the power and glory, to really move the public through the maze of this moral nightmare.
We need a surrogate for our crippling greed and delusions, for our addictions and the submission to them that got us stumbling into the quicksand of Iraq in the first place.
Nobody's yet been mentioned as culpable who could really catalyze the public's imagination, and none of the currently possible playlets-of-justice have that certainty, that definitive exactitude that will relieve the building pressure of guilt and shame, and the confusion that follows right after them, as we go from being defenders of freedom to pea-brained thugs in the eyes of the world and ourselves.
None of it has that cathartic rush of the moral pivot, when things really do change and one individual carries the weight of the old world away on his back, leaving us free to enter the new one.
The place where the buck stops should be at the top of the chain, shouldn't it?
Even if it's not precise, even if the real culprits are near legion and mostly invisible, we need a symbol to bear the burden of this feral degradation, to wear this moral breakdown like sackcloth and ashes, out of the village and back into the wilderness.
Send Rupert Murdoch to the Hague for war crimes.