Author: Madman in the Marketplace

chillin’ – Liberal Street Fighter

A sobering piece in the NY Times highlights the snowballing (sorry, couldn’t resist) damage being caused in the artic by global warming:

At age 73, Dr. Koerner, known as Fritz, still regularly hikes high on the ancient glaciers abutting the warming ocean to extract cores showing past climate trends. And every one, he said, indicates that the Arctic warming under way over the last century is different from that seen in past warm eras.

Many scientists say it has taken a long time for them to accept that global warming, partly the result of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, could shrink the Arctic’s summer cloak of ice.

But many of those same scientists have concluded that the momentum behind human-caused warming, combined with the region’s tendency to amplify change, has put the familiar Arctic past the point of no return.

The particularly sharp warming and melting in the last few decades is thought by many experts to result from a mix of human and natural causes. But a number of recent computer simulations of global climate run by half a dozen research centers around the world show that in the future human influence will dominate.

Even with just modest growth in emissions of the greenhouse gases, almost all of the summer sea ice is likely to disappear by late in the century. Some of the simulations, including those run on an advanced model at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., show much of the summer ice disappearing by 2050, said Marika Holland, a scientist there who is working on the sea-ice portion of that model.

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foreboding tales from Liberal Street Fighter

… and I have no power to stop it.”

Torture in Iraq – By Human Rights Watch

Residents of Fallujah called them “the Murderous Maniacs” because of how they treated Iraqis in detention. They were soldiers of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, stationed at Forward Operating Base Mercury (FOB Mercury) in Iraq. The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor.(2)

    One officer and two noncommissioned officers (NCOs) of the 82nd Airborne who witnessed abuse, speaking on condition of anonymity, described in multiple interviews with Human Rights Watch how their battalion in 2003-2004 routinely used physical and mental torture as a means of intelligence gathering and for stress relief. One soldier raised his concerns within the Army chain of command for seventeen months before the Army agreed to undertake an investigation, but only after he had contacted members of Congress and considered going public with the story.

    According to their accounts, the torture and other mistreatment of Iraqis in detention was systematic and was known at varying levels of command. Military Intelligence personnel, they said, directed and encouraged Army personnel to subject prisoners to forced, repetitive exercise, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness, sleep deprivation for days on end, and exposure to extremes of heat and cold as part of the interrogation process. At least one interrogator beat detainees in front of other soldiers. Soldiers also incorporated daily beatings of detainees in preparation for interrogations. Civilians believed to be from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted interrogations out of sight, but not earshot, of soldiers, who heard what they believed were abusive interrogations.

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Imagine a better future – Liberal Street Fighter

… is naught but a failure of imagination.

The Four Horsemen don’t cause the Apocalypse. After all, they’ve been riding for centuries, hanging over our heads. They merely symbolize what life on Earth is already like. […]

There are some people with a vested interest in keeping the world as it is, because that is the world they have power over.” — Promethea – Alan Moore

These people own our entire political system, our economic system and much of our media. BOTH political parties are war parties. Those identified as “leaders” of the party of opposition, Democrats like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden and so many others, enable our aggressive stance toward the world, CELEBRATE our aggressive stance against the world, honestly believing that there is no other way to win elections OTHER than to out-sabre-rattle the Republicans. As Scott Ritter told Raw Story this past spring:

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been caught web surfin, once … Liberal Street Fighter

I stumbled across a couple of interesting tidbits today in my link hopping. Pat Robertson’s bete’ noire, President Hugo Chavez, made another provocative statement in a BBC interview:

Asked why he thought the US was trying to invade Venezuela, Mr Chavez said: “We have denounced intentions.

“A coup happened in Venezuela that was prepared by the US. What do they want? Our oil, as they did in Iraq.

“We have detected with intelligence reports plans of a supposed invasion, one that would never happen. But we have to denounce it,” Mr Chavez said.

So what does this have to do with France?

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A review of a pile from Liberal Street Fighter

I just watched Last Best Chance on HBO, and I can’t decide whether to be disgusted, outraged or laughing my ass off.

A sanctimonious pile of poorly written, poorly acted agitprop, Last Best Chance is yet another instance of the rightwing in this country turning history and real problems on their heads in order to score political points and scare the shit out of people.

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