Spreadin' Freedom

I would love to know how the soldiers knew that the person driving his car down the street was an enemy combatant. My feeling is that to the soldiers and marines all Iraqis are the enemy. In that case who the fuck are we liberating?

We lost another good person

I just read on Israel's leading paper's website, Haaretz.com, that linguist and peace activist Tanya Reinhardt died last night. I first learned about her from the Nation magazine which ran advertisements for her book simply titled Israel/Palestine. Of course, I had to buy a copy of it and I did. The book is a powerhouse. In it she dismantles so much of the Israeli rhetoric and shows the true story of the second Intifada. She recently published a book called A Road Map To Nowhere that I have not had a chance to read.

Printed below is Prof. Chomsky's reaction to her loss. I have stole the writing from CounterPunch.org and have posted it here.
I hope the guys at Counterpunch will be okay with that. Tanya studied under Prof. Chomsky at M.I.T.

She Drew Away the Veil on Criminal and Outrageous Conduct
In Memory of Tanya Reinhart
By NOAM CHOMSKY

It is painful, and hard, to write about the loss of an old and cherished friend. Tanya Reinhart was just that.
Tanya was a brilliant and creative scientist. I can express my own evaluation of her work most concisely by recalling that years ago, when I was thinking about the future of my own department after my retirement, I tried to arrange to offer Tanya the invitation to be my eventual replacement, plans that did not work out, much to my regret, mostly for bureaucratic reasons.
I will not try to review her remarkable contributions to virtually every major area of linguistic studies. Included among them are original and highly influential investigations of syntactic structure and operations, referential dependence, principles of lexical semantics and their implications for syntactic organization, unified approaches to cross-linguistic semantic interpretation of complex structures that appear superficially to vary widely, the theory of stress and intonation, efficient parsing systems, the interaction of internal computations with thought and sensorimotor systems, optimal design as a core principle of language, and much else. Her academic work extended well beyond, to literary theory, mass media and propaganda, and other core elements of intellectual culture.
But Tanya's outstanding professional work was only one part of her life, and of our long and intimate friendship. She was one of the most courageous and honorable defenders of human rights whom I have ever been privileged to meet. As all honest people should, she focused her attention and energy on the actions of her own state and society, for which she shared responsibility _ including the responsibility, which she never shirked, to expose crimes of state and to defend the victims of repression, violence, and conquest.
Her numerous articles and books drew away the veil that concealed criminal and outrageous actions, and shone a searing light on the reality that was obscured, all of immense value to those who sought to understand and to react in a decent way. Her activism was not limited to words, important as these were. She was on the front line of direct resistance to intolerable actions, an organizer and a participant, a stance that one cannot respect too highly. She will be remembered not only as a resolute and honorable defender of the rights of Palestinians, but also as one of those who have struggled to defend the moral integrity of her own Israeli society, and its hope for decent survival.
Tanya's passing is a terrible loss, not only to her family and those fortunate enough to come to know her personally, and to those she defended and protected with such dedication and courage, but to everyone concerned with freedom, justice, and an honorable peace.

Even So I'am Pro-CHoice

Here is an essay I found on the web. I can't give the proper credit because the person just went by the name of Wulf.

If you're still under the impression that homosexuality is a choice:
You're confused about the facts. You're wrong about the science.
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but a lot of specious arguments have been invoked here to defend that mistaken belief, including burglary, bestiality, and the Bible.
Could we have some minimal standards for evidence, please? This isn't a political question, or a moral question, or a theological question--it's a scientific question. It's a question about human behavior, about human nature, about biology, about why we do what we do. And you don't have to be a card-carrying scientist to approach the question analytically. But you have to be willing to give up a comforting or cherished belief--you have to be willing to go where the evidence leads.
Because this is a question about human sexuality, there are three possible sources of evidence:
--what we (collectively) observe _--what others report _--our own introspection
Since we know that human beings don't always understand why they do what they do or feel what they feel, and since we know that human beings sometimes lie about what they do know, we have to approach the second and third potential sources of evidence with caution.
One other caution: whatever conclusion we come to about homosexuality needs to make sense in the context of the rest of human sexual behavior (and, for that matter, primate sexuality and mammal sexuality in general). We can't have a special theory for homosexuality in isolation.
So what kind of observational evidence do we have a reasonable consensus on?
--Among mammals generally, females are attracted to males and males are attracted to females.
--However, homosexual acts have been observed in many mammal species, and
--Homosexual pairings have been observed in other social, pair-bonding species.
--There are significant differences between male and female sexual behavior (biologists call this "sexual dimorphism").
--These differences in behavior are linked to differences between male and female brains and between male and female endocrine systems (hormones).
--The level and mix of our sex hormones affects our social-sexual behavior. Alter the level or the mix and you alter the behavior.
--We all started out female. The basic human body plan is female. It takes at least three 'hormonal events early in a pregnancy to transform this default female design into the modified male version. The changes include altering the fine structure of the developing brain--not only how it is 'wired,' but how it will respond to sex hormones at puberty. Neurologists have labeled this process "masculinizing the brain."
--Because of this complex transformation process, and the possibility that it is disrupted, not every outwardly male body contains a fully "masculinized" brain (and not every outwardly female body contains an unaltered female brain). In fact, a wide range of variations is possible.
What are the implications of this evidence? That there exists a natural developmental path which can account not only for 'instinctive' heterosexuality, but male homosexuality, female homosexuality, true bisexuality, and gender dysphoria (both "a woman trapped in a man's body" and "a lesbian trapped in a man's body"). It's possible that all sexual orientations trace their origin to this process.
Would that explain all human sexual behavior? No. Just as with food, we are creative pleasure-seekers. We are fully capable of experimenting with toys, textures, electricity, intense sensations, fruits and vegetables, other species, our own sex, in the pursuit of pleasurable experiences. And when we find one, we're generally inclined to repeat it. Here's where we do see a significant element of choice. Here's where we get a lot of sexual acts (by straights, gays, bisexuals) which have no obvious connection to reproduction.
For my money, this model does a good job of accounting for what we see: most sexual behavior (of all orientations) driven by deep instinctive drives, some driven by experimental pleasure-seeking. The remainder, sadly, probably has to do with people who are in one way or another damaged goods--with enough power over someone, you can warp and even break them sexually (something all too often done in the name of an Abrahamic religion).

Dolphin Massacre In Japan

Beware. Graphic Footage below.

glumbert.com - Dolphin massacre in Japan

This is just wrong.

Ann Coulter must be a good Christian

Luckily, according to one of our commenters, gays choose to be faggots.



The superior intellect causes her truoble.


I just love fucking hypocrits. If I remember, Jesus Christ had a whole speech about hypocrits and never said a word about faggots. To be fair, it could be argued that he was crowned with a faggot, a thorny faggot.


Thanks Super News.


The best part about the clip of Ann calling Edwards a "faggot" is that the crowd cheered. This shows you exactly what the Republican party stands for. It isn't as if the crowd gasped, like the crowd at the comedy club Kramer was at, but instead they agreed. The Republican party is the party of hatred, straight up. Why else attack gays, migrant workers, women, educators, intellectuals, the poor, labor or anyone else different.
From what I can tell there is absolutely nothing about the Republican party that says anything other than hate. Some say that the Republicans are for small government, yet they have increased the size of government at a faster pace than Clinton did. If my memory serves me right it was Clinton who claimed that big government was dead. Some say the Republicans are libertarian in nature but the want to tell us who to marry, what substances we choose to put into our bodes, who can die and who can't.... in other words it is complete bullshit. The Republican party is full of hate.

And again.