Archive for January 23rd, 2015
How come this night was so calm?
Posted by: adonis49 on: January 23, 2015
How come this night was so calm?
I slept the sleep of the caves tonight.
Inconsequential and soft dreams were forgotten by the morning.
It was a “dreamless night”
The morning news were anything but quiet:
Fighter jets and drones bombed villages
Rockets buried entire families.
Many blew themselves in crowded market places, kids’ schools, restaurants
It was a “dreamless night”
Last night was pretty loud:
Thunder claps, wind rattling doors and windows,
Sleet rocked roofs, millions of tin roofs
Millions of shacks and refugee tents.
It was a dreamless night
Dogs, wolves, jackals barked and howled
Rats squealed
Millions of insects and animals were devoured
A million procreated to cover up the loss
In the struggle of survival among the livings
It was a dreamless night
A few feet from ear shot
Hundreds of prisoners were tortured
Kicked, slapped, boxed, drowned, burned
Suffocated, drenched in freezing water
Screams we opted to shut off
From our hard ears, minds and hearts.
The horror of silent nights:
In Waiting, the silence of the coming horror
Persistent and violent knocks on your door:
Your house is burning
Your neighbour was shot dead
The enemy invested your town
Dozens are being rounded up
Don’t take anything. Run for your life.
Last night was not calm:
New-borns were crying their heart out
Babies freezing to death
Kids dying of famine
Sick people kept moaning
Hundreds died in car accidents, handicapped
Airplanes disintegrated in the sky
Passenger ferries and ship sank
And yet, tonight was a calm and dreamless night
Tomorrow night and the nights after
Will be louder and leaden with nightmarish dreams.
Tomorrow is another day.
Violent and brutal horror stories for survival
Among the livings.
Good night all.
Hypocrisy of the Free Speech Fundamentalists: More on the Charlie Hebdo
Posted by: adonis49 on: January 23, 2015
Hypocrisy of the Free Speech Fundamentalists: More on the Charlie Hebdo
Erkki Tuomioja, Finland foreign minister, said lately:
“You caricature and criticize women, you are a chauvinist
You caricature and criticize Jews, you are an anti-semite
You caricature and criticize Blacks, you are a racist
You caricature and criticize Islam, you are smack into free expression zone
As a Muslim, I’m Fed Up With the Hypocrisy of the Free Speech Fundamentalists
Remember his puerile declaration after 9/11 that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”? Yet now, in the wake of another horrific terrorist attack, you appear to have updated Dubya’s slogan: either you are with free speech… or you are against it.
Either vous êtes Charlie Hebdo… or you’re a freedom-hating fanatic.
I’m writing to you to make a simple request: please stop.
You think you’re defying the terrorists when, in reality, you’re playing into their bloodstained hands by dividing and demonising. Us and them.
The enlightened and liberal west v the backward, barbaric Muslims. The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it “a war declared on civilisation“.
So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who crassly tweeted about a “clash of civilisations” and referred to “Europe’s belief in freedom of expression”.
In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really is a “bid to assassinate” free speech (ITV’s Mark Austin), to “desecrate” our ideas of “free thought” (Stephen Fry)?
It was a crime – not an act of war – perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004.
Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech.
We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.
Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so (and I am glad it hasn’t).
Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘Je suis Chérif'” – the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted?… Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?
Let’s be clear: I agree there is no justification whatsoever for gunning down journalists or cartoonists. I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a duty to offend.
When you say “Je suis Charlie“, is that an endorsement of Charlie Hebdo‘s depiction of the French justice minister, Christiane Taubira, who is black, drawn as a monkey? Of crude caricatures of bulbous-nosed Arabs that must make Edward Said turn in his grave?
Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic. Also, as the former Charlie Hebdo journalist Olivier Cyran argued in 2013, an “Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over” the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on “members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power”.
It’s for these reasons that I can’t “be”, don’t want to “be”, Charlie – if anything, we should want to be Ahmed, the Muslim policeman who was killed while protecting the magazine’s right to exist. As the novelist Teju Cole has observed, “It is possible to defend the right to obscene… speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech.”
And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that Charlie Hebdo sacked the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinet in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark?
Were you not aware that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would “provoke an outcry” and proudly declared it would “in no circumstances… publish Holocaust cartoons”?
Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren. Context matters, too. You ask us to laugh at a cartoon of the Prophet while ignoring the vilification of Islam across the continent (have you visited Germany lately?) and the widespread discrimination against Muslims in education, employment and public life – especially in France.
You ask Muslims to denounce a handful of extremists as an existential threat to free speech while turning a blind eye to the much bigger threat to it posed by our elected leaders.
Does it not bother you to see Barack Obama – who demanded that Yemen keep the anti-drone journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye behind bars, after he was convicted on “terrorism-related charges” in a kangaroo court – jump on the free speech ban wagon? Weren’t you sickened to see Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of a country that was responsible for the killing of seven journalists in Gaza in 2014, attend the “unity rally” in Paris?
Bibi was joined by Angela Merkel, chancellor of a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by up to five years in prison, and David Cameron, who wants to ban non-violent “extremists” committed to the “overthrow of democracy” from appearing on television.
Then there are your readers. Will you have a word with them, please? According to a 2011 YouGov poll, 82% of voters backed the prosecution of protesters who set fire to poppies.
Apparently, it isn’t just Muslims who get offended.
Erkki Tuomioja, Finland foreign minister
Mehdi Hasan is the political director of the Huffington Post UK and a contributing writer for the New Statesman

How the poor get by in America?
Posted by: adonis49 on: January 23, 2015
How the poor get by in America?
The poor pay more for everything, from rolls of toilet paper to furniture.
It’s not because they’re spendthrifts, either. If you’re denied a checking account, there’s no way for you to avoid paying a fee to cash a paycheck.
If you need to buy a car to get to work, you’ll have to accept whatever higher interest rate you’re offered.
If you don’t have a car, the bus fare might eat up the change you’d save shopping at a larger grocery store as opposed to the local corner store.
Max Ehrenfreund January 14, 2015
This powerful Reddit thread reveals how the poor get by in America
It’s easy to feel that “when you are poor, the ‘system’ is set up to keep you that way,” in the words of one Reddit user, “rugtoad.”
That comment is at the top of an extraordinary thread full of devastating stories about what it’s like to get by with nothing in the United States of 2015.
“Growing up really poor means realizing in your twenties that Mommy was lying when she said she already ate,” wrote “deviant_devices,” another commenter.
You can buy only a single pack of paper towels at a time, rather than saving on a bundle of 10, as “Meepshesaid” noted:
When you are broke, you can’t plan ahead or shop sales or buy in bulk. Poor people wait to buy something until they absolutely need it, so they have to pay whatever the going price is at that moment. If ten-packs of paper towels are on sale for half price, that’s great, but you can only afford one roll anyway. In this way, poor people actually pay more than others for common staple goods.
You can’t pay for health insurance, and instead buy medicine from pet stores, as “colorcoma” writes:
I buy “fish” antibiotics online because I can’t afford health care. … Amoxicillin and such. Mostly for husband who has Lyme’s disease. We can’t afford our monthly health care rates. We are 30somethings in the US. Really feel like a “bottom feeder“.
You can’t also buy shoes that will last for more than a few months, according to “DrStephenFalken“:
I’m making $150- $200 a week and I need new shoes. So I can buy $60 shoes that will last or $15 walmart shoes. So I buy the walmart shoes and some groceries instead of just the $60 shoes and no groceries. Three months later I’ll need new shoes again. But I’ll also have to pay rent and my light bill is due. So I’ll pay the light bill and buy some “shoe glue” for $4 to fix my shoes for another few weeks until I can buy the $15 ones again.
Economists have documented the “ghetto tax,” as the additional costs of living paid by the poor are often known.
A Brookings study from 2006 found that someone who is not able to open a checking account will typically pay between $5 and $50 to cash a $500 check, and that people in poor neighborhoods paid several hundred dollars more for homeowner’s insurance, or to buy a car of a given make and model, than someone living in a wealthier neighborhood.
A television that costs $200 might cost $700 on one of the payment plans that poor people are obliged to use, the study found.
There are all kinds of reasons why the poor pay more. Maybe they can be summed up this way: The ability to draw on a pool of cash always saves you money down the line.
Lenders will give you a better rate on a car. You can avoid relying unscrupulous firms with exorbitant rates to make it to your next paycheck.
As Elise Gould, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute told me, the poor are “liquidity-constrained.”
“There’s all these vicious cycles that poor people face,” she said. “You get a job, but you need a car to get to a job.” A guarantee of financial security in the future often costs money now.
This is a problem not just for the very poor, but also for the middle class, Gould noted. Their kids might have to take out loans to go to college, for example, while wealthier parents can pay in cash. And they lose the discounts on fees that financial institutions give to clients with large balances.
Even among the very rich, economist Thomas Piketty’s data suggests that those with more money are able to earn higher returns on their investments.
To be sure, however, the problem is most acute at the bottom of the income distribution. The commenter “drink[expletive]fight.” whom I’ll quote at length, vividly describes a poor upbringing:
Hauling food out of the dumpster at 7-11, because they threw away piles of chip bags that were a day over their expiration. (Manager caught us one day, they apparently told the employees to stab a hole in each chip bag after that. NBD, we just had to sniff each bag to make sure nothing was contaminated). Checking neighbors’ trash bins – rescuing half a damn pizza some idiots had ordered the night before, then threw away after a handful of slices. Hauling in furniture from alleyways – my littlest sibling, my sister, received a twin bed mattress that had a grotesque brown stain on it, looked like someone had [expletive] a gallon of wet feces onto it. No [expletive] given, we scrubbed that [expletive] with bleach over and over, and she slept on it for years.
And then there were times when the welfare checks or food stamps didn’t arrive, and the trash bins were not producing food. I grew up in a fairly rural area. When that happened?
I know that in winter, Grey Squirrel tastes [expletive] gross. Sure, people from the South can claim that their brown and red squirrels are delicious, but I would rather eat [expletive] out of a pig’s ass than eat another bite of goddamn squirrel meat. Or jackrabbit. Or goddamned dandelion greens.
It says a lot about the contemporary U.S. economy that some people have to stop taking part in it altogether.