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OK, Agonistas- this week has been beyond horrible- every single story of ours since the last Jukebox, every news outlet, every blog site – look at them, look at us! So before the regular Jukebox kicks in on Saturday, “Water & Wine”, Not necessarily sacramental Post away!
First water- then wine from me Led Zeppelin: When the Levee Breaks Okay, Agonistas, enough is enough. Yes, Hamas refuses to recognize Israel as a “state”. But the carnage has taken on the fury of a slaughter. Yesterday, killed and wounded at a HOSPITAL; today, more than twice as many killed and wounded at a U.N. SCHOOL used to shelter refugees. I am going crazy over this Goliath v. David scenario: total role reversal of Israel v. Hamas in a damned refugee encampment for gods’ sake! I am going to think very, very carefully a bout my U.S. IRS taxes going into armaments, munitions, and materiel to the Israelis. I don’t give a flying rat’s ass about how the tallies of Hamas rockets have terrorized Israelis since so far, the toll stands two Israeli civilians v. over 600 civilian Gazans. Those #’s do not justify retaliation on the scale that the Israelis are deploying. Period. Screw anyone claiming anti-Semitism in this screed. It is simple humanitarian care and concern for non-combatants who are being decimated by massive superior force. I am so repulsed by the usual polite discussions of “proportional force” and why Israel has to use it on civilians. vonbahr The Intercept, By Jeremy Scahill & Ryan Devereaux, July 23 The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept. The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place “entire categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.
There’s a fundamental problem in our world today: neither our governments nor our press are doing their jobs. Both groups seem to be working for someone else, because governments are either trying to conceal their motives (hence their love for secrecy) or they try to obfuscate by presenting a false motive for their actions. The press is worse than useless, because they go along with the desire of the politicians to hide their motives and conceal their bad behavior from the people. The press behaves more like a cheering section than “the fourth estate,” whose job is to inform the people. As the old champions die off or retire, they are not being replaced. The news media are more concerned with entertaining their audience than they are with informing them. Poor show, as the Brits would say! Shame on you! Continue reading One Dimensional Press – One Dimensional Policy AP -FLORENCE, Ariz. — A condemned Arizona inmate gasped and snorted for more than an hour and a half during his execution Wednesday before he died in an episode sure to add to the scrutiny surrounding the death penalty in the U.S. Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne’s office said Joseph Rudolph Wood was pronounced dead at 3:49 p.m., one hour and 57 minutes after the execution started. Wood’s lawyers had filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court while the execution was underway, demanding that it be stopped. The appeal said Wood was “gasping and snorting for more than an hour.” Word that Justice Anthony Kennedy denied the appeal came about a half hour after Wood’s death.
Read this story and tell me where the logical fallacies comes in. Done? OK, let’s get to work: Continue reading Compassion in Action Reuters, By Jon Herskovitz, July 21 Austin, TX – Texas Governor Rick Perry said on Monday he planned to send 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to the Mexican border to boost security during an influx of illegal immigration by children, a move that could increase pressure on President Barack Obama. Perry, seen as a possible Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential race, said the guard troops were needed because the flood of children crossing from Mexico had pushed federal border protection to its limits. “The price of inaction is too high for Texas to pay,” Perry told a news conference. The governor’s announcement came just days before Obama plans to meet with the leaders of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador on Friday to discuss cooperation dealing with the flow of child migrants from Central America. You remember, the UN, created to respond to international crises, before the holder of the office of the Secretary General had to be hand-picked by the US (Goodbye, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan, for sure), and the misuse of the veto by East and West and..and… Even the near-appearance of a UN session, such as Colin Powell’s charts and pointers. is gone. Now we have: MH17: UN resolution on ensuring crash site access set for Monday Russia will support final version in security council vote if no one is blamed, according to reports in Australian newspaper Militant jihadist group kills dozens of Syrian troops and workers in its largest attack yet on the regime Reuters, July 19 Jihadists have killed 270 Syrian regime fighters, civilian security guards and employees since seizing a gas field in Homs province, a monitoring group said Friday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights described Thursday’s takeover of the Shaar field as “the biggest” anti-regime operation by the Islamic State (IS) since it emerged in the Syrian conflict last year. The watchdog, updating an earlier toll of 115, said it had documented “the death of 270 people killed in the fighting or executed” since Thursday. “A large majority of the men killed were executed at gunpoint after being taken prisoner following the takeover of the camp,” said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman. Reader Supported News
Hobart & William Smith Colleges does a Steubenville Two weeks after the fall term started, an unknown number of male students, apparently including members of the undefeated football team at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Hobart), raped an 18-tear-old freshman girl who’d had too much to drink. Hobart’s response was to re-rape the child bureaucratically by ignoring evidence and finding the alleged rapists not guilty. It was a sham of an administrative adjudication that failed to meet even a shadow of fairness, competence, or even intellectual plausibility. Hobart stands by its dishonest decision. Case closed. The Intercept, By Glenn Greenwald, July 17 Ayman Mohyeldin, the NBC News correspondent who personally witnessed yesterday’s killing by Israel of four Palestinian boys on a Gazan beach and who has received widespread praise for his brave and innovative coverage of the conflict, has been told by NBC executives to leave Gaza immediately. According to an NBC source upset at his treatment, the executives claimed the decision was motivated by “security concerns” as Israel prepares a ground invasion, a claim repeated to me by an NBC executive. But late yesterday, NBC sent another correspondent, Richard Engel, along with an American producer who has never been to Gaza and speaks no Arabic, into Gaza to cover the ongoing Israeli assault (both Mohyeldin and Engel speak Arabic). Mohyeldin is an Egyptian-American with extensive experience reporting on that region. He has covered dozens of major Middle East events in the last decade for CNN, NBC and Al Jazeera English, where his reporting on the 2008 Israeli assault on Gaza made him a star of the network. NBC aggressively pursued him to leave Al Jazeera, paying him far more than the standard salary for its on-air correspondents. [The New York Times’ television reporter just reported on Twitter that NBC has “reversed its decision” and is now sending Mohyeldin back to Gaza as soon as possible]. Democracy Now: Glenn Greenwald: Why Did NBC Pull Veteran Reporter After He Witnessed Israeli Killing of Gaza Kids? NYT – On Friday, Open Source continues to follow the aftermath of the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in rebel-held eastern Ukraine to supplement the latest coverage of New York Times reporters on the ground. Updates below mix breaking news reports with new information on the investigation into the disaster and the reaction to the tragedy gleaned from social networks. NYT crowd sourcing or the ultimate blog- whatever. Continuous updates also from the BBC. |
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