Please excuse me while I vomit

...since there won't be any Native Americans to have already done a certain amount of prepping land for human occupation, nor to be exploited later.
Patricia Wrede, planning her abomination of a book The Thirteenth Childe in which Native Americans are blithely written out of the history of the Americas so as to allow Whites to play with mammoths. Empty land, just like the whites of history tried so hard to set up.


See more of her thoughts here

via:dragovianknight

Re: racefail 09

via:puritybrown on Livejournal

Buffy Sainte-Marie - My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying

Now that your big eyes have finally opened
Now that you're wondering how must they feel
Meaning them that you've chased across America's movie screens
Now that you're wondering how can it be real
That the ones you've called colorful, noble and proud
In your school propaganda
They starve in their splendor
You've asked for my comment I simply will render

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

Now that the longhouses breed superstition
You force us to send our toddlers away
To your schools where they're taught to despise their traditions
You forbid them their languages, then further say
That American history really began
When Columbus set sail out of Europe, then stress
That the nation of leeches that conquered this land
Are the biggest and bravest and boldest and best
And yet where in your history books is the tale
Of the genocide basic to this country's birth
Of the preachers who lied, how the Bill of Rights failed
How a nation of patriots returned to their earth
And where will it tell of the Liberty Bell
As it rang with a thud Over Kinzua mud
And of brave Uncle Sam in Alaska this year

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

Hear how the bargain was made for the West
With her shivering children in zero degrees
Blankets for your land, so the treaties attest
Oh well, blankets for land is a bargain indeed
And the blankets were those Uncle Sam had collected
From smallpox-diseased dying soldiers that day
And the tribes were wiped out and the history books censored
A hundred years of your statesmen have felt it's better this way
And yet a few of the conquered have somehow survived
Their blood runs the redder though genes have paled
From the Gran Canyon's caverns to craven sad hills
The wounded, the losers, the robbed sing their tale
From Los Angeles County to upstate New York
The white nation fattens while others grow lean
Oh the tricked and evicted they know what I mean

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

( Read more... )

Stuff I want

Interlinks's MacMillan Caribbean scifi/fantasy imprint

Glenn Greenwald pretty much as usual, says what I want to say, minus the expletives, on Obama's

little war criminal abetting ass:

We wouldn't want to inflame anti-American sentiment

We're currently occupying two Muslim countries. We're killing civilians regularly (as usual) -- with airplanes and unmanned sky robots. We're imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims with no trial, for years. Our government continues to insist that it has the power to abduct people -- virtually all Muslim -- ship them to Bagram, put them in cages, and keep them there indefinitely with no charges of any kind. We're denying our torture victims any ability to obtain justice for what was done to them by insisting that the way we tortured them is a "state secret" and that we need to "look to the future." We provide Israel with the arms and money used to do things like devastate Gaza. Independent of whether any or all of these policies are justifiable, the extent to which those actions "inflame anti-American sentiment" is impossible to overstate.

And now, the very same people who are doing all of that are claiming that they must suppress evidence of our government's abuse of detainees because to allow the evidence to be seen would "inflame anti-American sentiment." It's not hard to believe that releasing the photos would do so to some extent -- people generally consider it a bad thing to torture and brutally abuse helpless detainees -- but compared to everything else we're doing, the notion that releasing or concealing these photos would make an appreciable difference in terms of how we're perceived in the Muslim world is laughable on its face.

Moreover, isn't it rather obvious that Obama's decision to hide this evidence -- certain to be a prominent news story in the Muslim world, and justifiably so -- will itself inflame anti-American sentiment? It's not exactly a compelling advertisement for the virtues of transparency, honesty and open government. What do you think the impact is when we announce to the world: "What we did is so heinous that we're going to suppress the evidence?" Some Americans might be grateful to Obama for hiding evidence of what we did to detainees, but that is unlikely to be the reaction of people around the world.MORE

see also:Obama's latest effort to conceal evidence of Bush era crimes

and About the Foto Flip-Flop

It's inexcusable, Obama's flip-flop on the DOD abuse photos.
Not (just) because I think he's wrong on the law and he'll probably not get Cert with SCOTUS, making this a big pose.
Rather, it's inexcusable because Obama issued new guidelines on FOIA that he now abandons:

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.
All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

Granted, a bunch of Generals and Colonels would undoubtedly be embarrassed by the disclosure of abuse that happened on their watch (above all--as Nell suggests--Stanley McChrystal, newly tapped to take over in Afghanistan). Granted, some of those Generals and Colonels (the aforementioned McChrystal) would probably lose their next promotion if these pictures became public. Granted, pundits speculate, abstractly, that the release of another round of torture pictures will inflame the already volatile Iraq and Afghanistan.
But those are all invalid excuses, according to President Obama's own FOIA guidelines. If you're going to set a rule, follow it yourself. http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/05/13/about-the-foto-flip-flop/">MORE

Isn't it interesting how "god is in the mix" when it comes on to being a homobigot, but is noticeably absent when it comes on to treating people humanely and lawfully? Refraining from breaking international law? Refusing to coddle and protect war criminals?

While we are at it

...A simple fact is being overlooked in the Bush-era torture scandal: the number of cases in which detainees have been tortured to death. Abuse did not only involve the high-profile cases of smashing detainees into plywood barriers (“walling”), confinement in coffin-like boxes with insects, sleep deprivation, cold, and waterboarding. To date approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death.
The bottom line is that many detainee homicides in Iraq and Afghanistan were the direct result of approval and orders from the highest levels of government, and that high officials in the government are accomplices. MORE

Yeah. Talk about inciting anti-American sentiment, that. Here's a suggestion. You want to deal with anti-American sentiment cause by the fact that government and army official are torturing. murdering war criminals? PROSECUTE THEM. How about that?

remind me again how its obama's volunteer program that will end in hitler's youth or whatever?

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.

“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfireand death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.
“Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.”MORE