Its nice to wake up with this in your in-box...

I got an email from a human rights activist in Henry County who wants to get together to say hello.

Its nice to know my web efforts pay off in this way. Its why I do it really...

Luke 11:33-36
33 "No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a bushel, but on a stand, that those who enter may see the light. 34 Your eye is the lamp of your body; when your eye is sound, your whole body is full of light; but when it is not sound, your body is full of darkness. 35 Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. 36 If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light."

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

on the fly blogging...

Back from the gym... eating lunch... found this... gotta run to school now...

Ten Reasons to ban gay marriage

Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.

Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.

Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

Here in the South one has to wonder...

What ever happened to the "Business Republicans"

On Gay Marriage in California:

"You know, I’m wishing everyone good luck with their marriages and I hope that California’s economy is booming because everyone is going to come here and get married."

Source: Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenenegger

Can we justifiably say...

Read this...

I remain very grateful to my Catholic upbringing and education for giving me relative immunity to nationalism. In the 1950s, the nuns who taught me from age five to twelve were virtually all Irish or Irish-American with sentimental attachment to certain elements of Celtic folklore, but they made sure to inculcate into us that the only serious human society was the Church which was an explicitly international organization. The mass, in the international language, Latin, was the same everywhere; the religious orders were international. This absence of national limitation was something very much to be cherished. “Catholica” in the phrase “[credo in] unam, sanctam, catholicam, et apostolicam ecclesiam” should, we were told, be written with a lower-case, not an upper-case, initial because it was not in the first instance part of the proper name of the church, but an adjective meaning “universal,” and this universality was one of the most important “marks of the true Church.”

Then tell me this... can we not say--or at least question--that those who profess Nationalism fail to have heeded Paul's call of universalism? Is it not un-christian to pit one klan over another? If you believe in a historicist approach to Christianity I guess not--you are the chosen people. If you believe in the ethics of jesus and that Christianity is an action not some political propaganda to spew about I might speculate that you must.

Support Delta Flight Attendants!

I will have the pictures I took up soon!!

Interesting take on resolving Darfur crisis...

A new chance for the people of Darfur

The regime is not monolithic. Factions within the regime might prove supportive of new policies aimed at tempering the climate of violence in Sudan, decreasing its trade dependency on China, improving conditions for refugees and lowering international tensions. Such policies might include:

Normalising diplomatic relations in exchange for removing obstacles to the deployment of UN-AU forces in Darfur.

Replacing sanctions on Sudan with new investment opportunities and gradually forgiving its foreign debt in exchange for achievement of benchmarks tied to repatriating refugees, rebuilding villages, and demobilising the Janjaweed;

Calling on not only the government, but also the rebel forces, over which the West has some influence, to bargain in good faith;

Engaging China's desire for international prestige by encouraging it to assume a public role in designing and overseeing repatriation, demobilisation, and vocational programmes;

Offering aid to the Sudanese in rebuilding the tribal reconciliation councils that were destroyed during the civil war;

Reintegrating Sudan into the international community through academic exchanges, conferences, political visits and the like;

Strengthening the AU, which Western analysts have consistently underestimated with almost indescribable arrogance, in order to foster African solutions to African problems.

The emerging policy consensus towards Sudan is predicated on an approach that has already undermined respect for Western values throughout the non-Western world. Its interventionist measures won't work. They are unrealistic and, ultimately, counterproductive. There is no time to lose in trying something new.

local politics... please come and and show your support...

IWW Documentary...

Thoughts on Hamas and Carter...

Wherever you stand on the issue... the conflict over Palestine and the Palestinian people that has been going on since the British years ago is a horrible page in history.

When I heard the NPR story about Carter going to speak with Hamas I couldn't help but feel proud to be a citizen whose leaders will work to solve the problems of this world--for 8 years we've seen the opposite.

As long as you accept the teachings of Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.. You can never turn away from a place for dialogue and communication no matter how bad the difference are. Resistance and action against violence and coercion--always. But rejection of dialogue means the terrorists win, the violence wins, our biologic/genetic ancestry wins out over man's potential for humanity.

Here is a Billy Bragg song on a tragic glimpse of the every day violence that the civiians on all sides have to face every single day... only this time through the eyes of American who stood up for peaceful resistance and civil disobeience. We have a marvolous history of many who have stood for this prinicple of non-violent resistance.

I cry every time I watch it.

Excellent post...

By Brian Leiter defending John Yoo from the zealots..."American Freedom Campaign" Organizing E-Mail-Campaign to Fire John Yoo

Nobody likes defending the speech rights of the KKK, and certainly nobody likes defending the academic work and tenure of a guy who underwrote torture by the American government.

Its tough work but somebodies got to do it kudos to Leiter!

If Professor Yoo's arguments to "encourage the use of torture" and his "fundamental lack of respect for the rule of law" are the reasons he should be terminated, then he is to be terminated precisely for his "views", views which he has expressed in law reviews, as well as to Bush. Are we really to believe--fifty years after the McCarthyist witch hunts!--that academics should be punished because their bad ideas are then used by bad people to do bad things? Dean Edley's remarks on this score are pertinent:

As critical as I am of his analyses, no argument about what he did or didn't facilitate, or about his special obligations as an attorney, makes his conduct morally equivalent to that of his nominal clients, Secretary Rumsfeld, et al., or comparable to the conduct of interrogators distant in time, rank and place. Yes, it does matter that Yoo was an adviser, but President Bush and his national security appointees were the deciders.

As longtime readers of the blog know, I certainly think that Bush and his gang of war criminals deserve to have their status confirmed by a court of law. If Professor Yoo is convicted of a crime, then this would be a different case. But it is not even clear (for the reasons noted by Dean Edley) that he is guilty of any crime, and he has, quite plainly, not been convicted of any. Anyone calling for him to be fired is calling for him to be punished for his ideas, and nothing else. Attempts to claim it is more "complicated" are just attempts to rehabilitate the idea that having bad ideas, even bad ideas others act on, is a crime.

(I'm sticking this under contending conservatism since I think banning speech and firing people for their views comes out of Conservative philosophy not that of the Enlightenment)

Saving us from the Aliens...

We all know how the conservatives want to save us--and all of western civilization--from the illegals who are participating in a true free market fashion of going to where the jobs are. They do this pejoratively and lecture paternalistic on how they are protecting good citizens.

Well it turns out we should spend more time protecting us from ourselves [via Rockridge Institute]

A study by the Public Policy Institute of California, a non-partisan policy research organization, finds that immigrants and their children are much less likely to commit crime than the US-born, concluding that "spending additional dollars to reduce immigration or to increase enforcement against the foreign-born will not have a high return in terms of public safety. The foreign-born in California already have extremely low rates of criminal activity."

The right to love and commit to another... the right to make a contract...

Gore comes out for same-sex marriage. You can see the video clip here

Not sure what prompted this, but Al Gore has quietly released a video with a forceful endorsement of equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians. It pushes the Democratic establishment that much closer to a position he now shares with Eliot Spitzer and some other leading Dems, and is prompting a bit of grumbling in gay political circles that this batch of candidates aren't quite there.

"Gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women -- to make contracts, to have hospital visiting rights, to join together in marriage, and I don't understand why it is considered by some people to be a threat to heterosexual marriage," he says on the video, which appears on his Current TV network. "Shouldn't we be promoting the kind of faithfulness and loyalty to ones partner regardless of sexual orientation?"

Gore's words come after the leading presidential candidates have tiptoed up to, but not crossed, the line of support for same-sex marriage. All three support equal substantive rights for gay and lesbians couples, and they've sought to woo gay voters in other ways: Elizabeth Edwards has voiced her support for same-sex marriage, for instance, and Barack Obama recently scolded the black church for homophobia, in a speech to an African-American congregation.

Conservatives will have a Field day. But its a question of values. To push people away. To not let them have basic rights of creating contracts, making commitments to be with another till death. If we keep the homosexual community alienated, discriminated against; we keep them apart from the rest of the community. We will help breed the unhealthy behaviors of abuse, neglect, and self indulgence that comes from people feeling they have no reason to take care of themselves; the kind of behaviors that conservatives stand up and shamefully moralize about to in attempts to divide America.

Help contend conservatism and keep an eye out for any reaction to this... send it my way via a comment and share it with others. We want to expose the intolerance of conservatives if it should come popping up within the media.

This isn't about anything other than keeping the government out of peoples private lives and public rights.

Unfortunately giving homosexuals basic human rights has become one of the scare tactics conservatives use to divide people who have a common goal of getting people health insurance, getting decent educations to our kids, and bringing a sane foreign policy to the world. Don't let Conservatives divide us using one more political hobgoblin from their tool box.

Torture

MatthewY has a great email on torture

As has been amply documented ("The New Yorker" had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture--were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That's what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.

Its one of those "pass it on" moments...

American Freedom Campaign

"We are Americans, and in our America we do not torture, we do not imprison people without charge or legal remedy, we do not tap people's phones and e-mails without a court order, and above all we do not give any president unchecked power."

IMPEACH DICK CHENEY

pssst... do something.

Impeach Cheney

Its a party....

I'm throwing a cd release party for the Instant Karma Cd coming out next Tuesday.

here is the link to the announcement on the Save Darfur website.

Human Rights Monitor denied access to US Jail (New Tag's: Human Rights, Leadership by example)

U.N. Official Says He’s Been Denied Access to U.S. Immigrant Jails

A United Nations human rights official said he was barred from visiting an immigration detention center in New Jersey yesterday. It was the second time he was denied access to an American immigration jail on a weeklong monitoring tour.