Bush Administration to Loosen Rules on Endangered Species

Via USA Today:

The Bush administration is providing insufficient time for public comment as it seeks to loosen rules protecting endangered species...

an administration proposal... would allow federal agencies approving or funding dams, highways and other projects to decide for themselves - without input from government experts - whether endangered species are likely to be harmed.

Bush and his anti-Earth administration are obviously trying to pass this proposal without a lot of media attention and without giving people and organizations time to do much about it. Fortunately, members of congress, along with conservation groups, are calling for additional time. Let's hope it comes out on our side, because we know that those federal agencies responsible for such major construction projects are not actually going to stop one of their projects because of an endangered animal.

Green v. Democrat

The Green Party has put together a comparison of the McKinney/Clemente and Obama/Biden platforms. Granted, it only really covers health care and the economy/trade, but it's worth a read.

McKinney/Clemente and Obama/Biden compared on health care, labor, the economy

Breaking: Could be 100,000+ dead in Myanmar

From MSNBC:

"...while the top U.S. diplomat in Myanmar said Wednesday that up to 100,000 people may have died in the devastating cyclone."

100,000 people

Myanmar

According to new information, the number of dead in Myanmar could be well over 22,000, with over 1 million homeless and 40,000 missing. That's almost unfathomable.

Even more unfortunate than the tens of thousands of lives lost and the million-plus lives turned upside down, the government of Myanmar, according to MSNBC, "is dragging its feet on giving visas to aid workers who are waiting to help the survivors of Cyclone Nargis." This means that aid is being put together in countries all over the world, by the government of the victims is slowing down much needed recovery efforts. How horrible is that?

France is trying to convince the United Nations to allow nations to go ahead and take aid to Myanmar without going through the government, since time is very, very important in a case like this. Hopefully either Myanmar's government (which isn't known to care much about its people) will step up and let aid agencies in, or the UN will take France's advice. People are suffering and politics need to be the last thing on people's minds right now.

If you want to help the victims and recovery efforts in Myanmar, here are a few organizations you can check out:
UNICEF
Oxfam International
Doctors Without Borders

Help Children... And Improve the Future

"We are all born helpless. Without a parent's kindness we could not survive, much less prosper. When children grow up in constant fear, with no one to rely on, they suffer their whole lives. Because the minds of small children are very delicate, their need for kindness is particularly obvious." - H.H. The 14th Dalai Lama, How To Practice the Way to a Meaningful Life.

Children all over the world suffer from a number of causes - famine, disease, land mines, war. They are unable to have much of a say in the way their governments act, and thus are caught in the middle of the disastrous plans of a distant leader. It's well-known that women and children suffer the most in developing and warring countries, and there is a lot that needs to be done by developed nations to fix this problem.

One can argue that the most important reason (other than basic human rights) that children need to be helped is that because they are heavily influenced by their experiences and surroundings. A child raised in a compassionate, kind atmosphere is more likely to end up as a compassionate, kind adult than a child raised with no food and a gun in their hand.

UNICEF - The United Nations Children's Fund provides children in developing regions with proper food, education, medicine, and protection from violence. They teach both children and their parents the importance of nutrition, equality, and how to deal with emergences.

Coalition To Stop the Use of Child Soldiers was created and 1998 and does exactly what their name suggests - they prevent the use of children as soldiers.

International Campaign to Ban Landmines not only helps children, but everyone in a landmine ridden area.

War Child International also serves to put an end to children being forced to fight wars.

Abstinence Only! Protect Your Shame-Cave

Make sure you watch this the whole way through:


The sad truth: girls are being raised to think of their vagina as bad and shameful. Women are taught that it's entirely their own fault if they get pregnant, women who enjoy sex are sluts while guys are players, and then you have the whole "purity" nonsense (like purity balls, where teenage girls pledge their virginity to their fathers, ugh), and so on.

Smell the Roses While You Still Can

A new study has determined that flowers are losing their scent due to pollution from power plants and cars. To make matters worse, not only are we facing a future lacking in the gorgeous scents of blooms, but insects won't be able to find pollen. According to National Geographic News:

Flowers produce volatile scent molecules that bond with pollutants such as ground-level ozone, in the process breaking down the plants' sweet smell.

With more pollution in the air, the aromatic molecules don't remain potent as long and travel shorter distances on the wind.

What you can do
Since the pollution is coming from cars and power plants, the obvious solution would be to drive hybrids or plug-ins (or, even better, walking or biking!) and to either limit energy use or rely on pollutant-free energy such as wind or solar power.

Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?

HIV in Jamaica

Tribal Fashion in Africa

The Daily Mail has a recent feature composed of striking images of tribal fashion in Africa. It's worth a look.


Out of Africa

British Prime Minister Reclassifies Cannabis

From the Telegraph:

Gordon Brown today gave his backing for cannabis to be reclassified as a more serious drug later this month in a move that will reverse its downgrading by his predecessor....

At his monthly press conference, the Prime Minister revealed his strong support for reclassifying cannabis as a "class B" rather than "class C" drug....

People found in possession of Class B drugs can face a five-year jail term and an unlimited fine.

I don't know much about British prison systems, but if it's anything like America's putting people in jail for having possession of weed is resulting in overflowing prisons. Shouldn't taxes go toward keeping real criminals behind bars? Considering marijuana doesn't kill people (like alcohol poisoning and harder drugs can), more attention should be paid to actually dangerous activities. Plus, a lot of studies have shown that marijuana can be beneficial to many people. So why is it still illegal? Because our governments are making too much money from imprisoning pot heads.

Moby - Disco Lies

Farewell Not In Our Name

Not In Our Name, a organization that was founded after Sept. 11th to protest Bush's wars, will no longer be active.

This decision was not an easy one for those of us who have taken up the crucial work of Not in Our Name over the past 6 years. We know that resistance to war and repression continues and needs all of our immediate participation if we are to see any real changes, no matter who takes office in 2008. Though we are closing our office, many around the country will still take out the sentiment and politics of Not in Our Name, as it is at heart a grassroots project.

Edward Guinan's "If We Listen Well"

The Class of Nonviolence is an online "course" of essays discussing peace and nonviolence. I've decided to read through about one per day, and the first is "If We Listen Well" by Paulist priest Edward Guinan.

According to Guinan, peace is active nonviolence, rather than something passive that we look for in times of war. He writes that, “We continue to deal in symptomatic terms as if war and destruction and violence are the extensions and natural outgrowths of malignant attitudes, values, relationships, and beliefs that we continue to embrace.”

Guinan's philosophy of peace is similar to that of Mohandas Gandhi's, who felt that nonviolence was not only equal to violence, but more effective. A victory won with nonviolence will last longer than one won with violence, because when violence is used there will be bitterness and eventually violence will probably break out once again.

This essay sheds light on a form of violence that isn't exactly visible to many because of the way we've been socially conditioned. "Hunger, poverty, squalor, privilege, powerlessness, riches, despair, and vicarious living are forms of violence - forms that a society approves and perpetuates. We have been too willing to discuss violence in terms of ghetto uprisings, student unrest, street thievery, and trashing, and have been unwilling to direct our attention to the more pathological types of violence that are acceptable - the types that daily crush the humanity and life from untold millions of brothers and sisters."

Under the Same Moon commercial

Recession: The Movie

New Weapon: Nipple Rings

A woman in Texas trying to board a plane was forced to remove her nipple rings (because, you know, they're so dangerous), although they allowed her to leave in a belly button ring.

Via Crooks and Liars:

The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin's chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The agent then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said.

Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.

She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

"Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her," said Hamlin's attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA's Office of Civil Rights and Liberties. [..]

She said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she was still wearing a belly button ring.

Daughter dies while parents pray - instead of seeking medical care

An eleven year old girl in Wisconsin died when her parents decided to treat an illness with prayer instead of a trip to the hospital.

Her mother, Leilani Neumann, tells The Associated Press her daughter's condition worsened suddenly, and the parents stayed in prayer, believing she would recover.

She also says she's not concerned about a police investigation, because she and her husband believe their lives are in God's hands and they did nothing criminal, only tried to do the best they could for their daughter.

Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin says an autopsy showed the girl died from a type of diabetes that left her with too little insulin in her body. He says she had probably been ill for about 30 days.

I'm all for healing with self-treatment (although I'm more partial to aromatherapy and tea than prayer), but it the parents' fault in this case that their daughter died. The girl was probably too young to make the decision to go to a hospital or have her parents pray for her, and who's to say she didn't want to go to the hospital and her parents just kept on praying? Obviously I don't know the specifics inside this family, and I'm just speculating, but these parents need to have some sort of charges bought against them. Until someone is old enough to make the decision to go without professional medical care, the hospital is the right place for them.

WKBT

Innocent Ethnic Uighurs In Guantanamo Bay

There are currently seventeen Uighurs in Guantanamo Bay who have been told that they would all be freed (in 2004) and that they are innocent.

"We fail to know why we are still in jail here," [Abdulghappar] Turkistani says...

"We are still in hope that the US government will free us soon and send us to a safe place."

So if they're innocent, why are they still imprisoned?

American officials have acknowledged that while they will not be pressing charges against the 17 Uighurs, they cannot be sent back to China because they are likely to face persecution.

Therefore, the US government is keeping them in small, insanitary cells against their wishes for twenty-two hours a day.

"Being away from family, away from our homeland... being forbidden from the natural sunlight, natural air, being surrounded with a metal box all around is not suitable for a human being," Turkistani wrote.

Al Jazeera

Lynndie England blames the media

Lynndie England, one of the people responsible for the Abu Ghraib scandal, is once again putting the blame somewhere else.

I feel sorry and wrong about what I did. But it would not have escalated to what it did all over the world if it wouldn't have been for someone leaking it to the media.

Obviously it's okay so long as people don't know about it. Because, according to England, "what we did happens in war."

She also makes the statement that there were worse pictures the public didn't get to see, and that, "if it had been broken by the news without the pictures it wouldn't have been that big."

So, as you can see, it was the media's fault that it was such a big deal. Not the people responsible, because that's just what happens during a war.

USA Today

New energy positive building

A new building in the United Arab Emirates, planned to be finished in 2010, will be the world's first energy positive building. This means that it will produce more energy than it uses. It will be built in Masdar City, which is completely powered by renewable energy. A Chicago firm, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture has designed this remarkable tower. According to the press release, the building "will utilize sustainable materials and feature integrated wind turbines, outdoor air quality monitors and one of the world's largest building-integrated solar energy arrays."Masdar Headquarters

CREDO Mobile

CREDO Mobile is a cell phone company owned by Working Assets that allows the user to donate to an organization of their choice every time they make a call. There is a long list of groups that you can support through the company, covering civil rights, economic and social justice, peace and international freedom, the environment, and voting rights and civic participation.

I love seeing new ways to make effortless changes. How hard is it to sign up with CREDO verses Verizon or Sprint? Unfortunately, at the moment the coverage isn't as good as the more well-known companies (I was disappointed to see my area not yet covered). However, maybe the advancement of companies like this will encourage the big-name corporations to start making changes.

CREDO Mobile

Fred Phelps

One of my (more time-consuming) hobbies is watching documentary after documentary, in the hopes that I'll learn a little more about a number of issues I care about. Once in a while I'll watch one that makes me furious by the time it's over. Jesus Camp is a good example of one. And now I want to discuss the one I just finished, Fall From Grace.

Fall From Grace is the story of Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. He and his congregation have devoted themselves to hating homosexuality, on which they blame all of America's troubles. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists them as a hate organization, and with good reason.

One of the things that they're most famous for is protesting at funerals. The people of Westboro Baptist Church frequents the funerals of soldiers killed in action to protest homosexuals, whose fault it is, according to WBC, that the soldiers are dying. According to Phelps, "I'm thankful for all that get killed over there in Iraq, I just wish it would be not 2,000 but 2 million." They parade around at these funerals and anywhere else they feel the need to spread their influence with signs reading "God hates fags" and "Thank god for dead soldiers." These are the people responsible for the hate website godhatesfags.com.

According to three of Fred Phelps children that separated themselves from the family say that abuse was prevalent. From the SPLC:

Mark and Nathan Phelps and sister Dortha "Dotti" Bird offer plenty of brutal details - details that their father has long dismissed as "a sea of fag lies." Nathan told the Intelligence Report that he was beaten with a leather strap regularly. Then, he says, Fred Phelps switched to a mattack handle - like an axe handle - and beat Nathan until he "couldn't lie down or sit down for a week." The three charge that Phelps also beat their mother, forced the children to fast and more.

One of the things that always strike me when watching this sort of documentary are how brainwashed their children are. Jesus Camp, which I've already said above enraged me, is a perfect film to show the effects that fundamentalist Christians have on children. These children are taught to hate people different from them. They don't know tolerance, and will probably never know tolerance, because they're taught from the time they are old enough to understand that it is okay to be hateful.

Since I became aware of politics in high school, there has been one things I've feared more than anything else: the Christian far right. Separation of church and state is very important to me, as I imagine it is for many Americans, and Christian fundamentalists want to control all aspects of American life, which means that non-Christians will essentially lose all their rights. This threat is real.

Fall From Grace
Jesus Camp
Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg - one of the best books I've ever read. I highly recommend this.
Southern Poverty Law Center
Americans United for Separation of Church and State

Global Warming's Effects of Transportation

According to a new study transportation is facing growing threats from global warming. These are the five biggies, from National Geographic News:

-- More heat waves, requiring load limits at hot-weather or high-altitude airports and causing thermal expansion of bridge joints and rail track deformities.

-- Rising sea levels and storm surges flooding coastal roadways, forcing evacuations, inundating airports and rail lines, flooding tunnels, and eroding bridge bases.

-- More rainstorms delaying air and ground traffic, flooding tunnels and railways, and eroding road, bridge, and pipeline supports.

-- More frequent strong hurricanes, disrupting air and shipping service, blowing debris onto roads, and damaging buildings.

-- Rising arctic temperatures thawing permafrost, resulting in road, railway, and airport runway subsidence and potential pipeline failures.

I've said this before, but it's sobering to realize just how much global warming is going to affect every aspect of our lives.

Back from break

I'm back from Spring break, and although my break was relaxing, I'm now suffering from the flu, which I haven't been lucky enough to catch since I was about seven years old. Unfortunately, my university has a ridiculous attendance policy: you can only miss the amount of days you meet per week. For most of my classes that's three. Which means that people end up going to class ill, which infects other students and professors alike. Starting about a month before break, we had a large outbreak of the flu, with something like 100 students going to the health center in just a couple of weeks. I have a feeling that if students were given the opportunity to be responsible they wouldn't put so many other students at risk for catching an illness. However, obviously our school officials think we're children who can't make good decisions for ourselves.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm now seriously considering attending class tomorrow, whether I'm ill or not. I've already missed two days in most of my classes due to sinus problems. It's the school's fault people are making the bad decision to go to class when they're ill.