Crisis in the Caucuses 

Despite significant U.S. and Georgian culpability in the crisis in Georgia, most U.S. politicians and media painted Russia as the diabolical “evildoer.” As if the Russian military incursions into Georgia, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia—the latter two are autonomous regions of the former that do not want to be part of that country—happened out of the blue, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice implied that Russia was attempting to bring back the Cold War.

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According to today’s New York Times, two Chinese women, both in their 70s, have been sentenced to reeducation camp. The charge? Applying for a permit to protest, in accordance with rules previously established by Chinese communist authorities. The women wanted to protest the eminent-domain taking of their homes in Beijing for the purpose of economic development (which, of course, brings to mind the Kelo decision which upheld the same sort of thing here in the United States).

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Abusive, Discriminatory Punishment Undermines Education

More than 200,000 US public school students were punished by beatings during the 2006-2007 school year, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a joint report released today. In the 13 states that corporally punished more than 1,000 students per year, African-American girls were twice as likely to be beaten as their white counterparts.

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A Great Idea Whose Time Will Never Come  

The past three weeks I and my husband Eric spent in Peru, birding in cloud and rainforest,  primarily in the high Andes east of Cuzco, along the Madre de Dios River, and at lodges just outside the boundaries of the Manu Biosphere Preserve, a million acres of lowland rainforest that has been set aside for strict ecosystem preservation.

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A few weeks ago, I read the sad story of the beating death of Mexican migrant Luis Ramirez (age 25) in a small town in Pennsylvania. The details as reported in the press are sad and disgusting regarding what allegedly transpired between three white teens charged in the case and Ramirez. The story has stayed in my mind.

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In a recent conversation with a rather conservative evangelical friend of mine, I was dumbfounded by one of the arguments he used to support his views on creationism.  He trotted out the old argument that a literal exammination of the Old Testament reveals that creation is approximately 6000 years old.  Because evolutionary theory describes a process of millions of years, creationists have argued that evolution is contrary to the Bible.

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I wrote about how U.S. foreign policy ignites and engenders a variety of crises, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Such crises are then used to get the citizenry all worked up and panic-stricken, which then enables the government to increase its power over the citizenry.

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Lhasa, Tibet - China's secret police are just terrible at keeping themselves secret.
 
The detective, dressed in her business suit and pumps appropriate to urban Lhasa, did not expect to be trailing my wife and me up the steep hillside to a monastery 15,000 feet up an ice-crusted ridge. Even at 200 yards behind us, I could see her shivering in the thin, frozen air, trying, absurdly, to look like just another hiker on the barren slope.

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In Knoxville We Spoke Up in Solidarity!

Pastor Martin Niemöller, a contemporary of Adolf Hitler wasn't a saint in his younger days, I hear, but he repented of his omissions and commissions later in life.  He is probably most remembered for the following lines that we have all heard at least once:

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The final results are in on this historic November day.  Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars he raised, Barack Obama has lost the 2008 presidential election.  American voters have boldly spoken truth to arrogance.  Turned out that all those pre-election opinion polls that showed Obama's inability to get over 50 percent support were prescient. 

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The Anger, the Longing, the Hope

ONE OF the wisest pronouncements I have heard in my life was that of an Egyptian general, a few days after Anwar Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem.

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Referring to Russia’s incursion into Georgia, President Bush says that invading a sovereign country that poses no threat is “unacceptable in the 21st century.” John McCain echoes that sentiment with, “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.”

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Naomi Klein and Christian Parenti on How Beijing Olympics Highlight Globalization of Police State, Inequality

The equipment and integrated security systems used to detain Olympic protesters will remain long after the Olympics, to be used, many fear, on China’s own population. And some of the biggest beneficiaries of this surveillance boom are US hedge funds and corporations, including Cisco, General Electric and Google.

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Maybe it's time for our leaders to look at the AA 12-Step Program!

I just returned from an Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting, which I have been attending for some three months now.  Whenever we speak we identify ourselves as "I'm So and So, and I'm an adult child of an alcoholic and a dysfunctional family."

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All that was missing was "My Pet Goat"--you know the book George W. Bush continued reading to a classroom of kids after a whisper in his ear told him of the 9/11 attacks.

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The tragic events in the nation of Georgia show that U.S. foreign policy is a bust. In particular, NATO must go. This may seem counterintuitive, but this relic of the Cold War has nothing to contribute to peace. On the contrary, it is a destabilizing tool of America’s provocative imperial foreign policy.

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