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ACA's Demonstrable Success Means Obamacare Is Here To Stay

September 24, 2014, 7:14 am
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"Obamacare: Where's The Train Wreck?"
Republicans deliberately contradict reality and routinely deny demonstrable truth.
In the main, American conservatives are dis-eased people.
They start by lying to themselves. Then they lie to others.
Their falsehoods and fabrications are so suffusive that they mistake their enveloping milieu of mendacity as Truth.

"American Conservatives And Oppositional Defiant Disorder"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/arrested-development-american.html

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Insurers are increasingly buying into Obamacare. "Participation in the 36 states using the federal enrollment Web site, HealthCare.gov, is expected to increase from a combined 191 insurers in the 2014 enrollment period to 248 in 2015, according a HHS report issued Tuesday. Eight states running their own marketplaces will see insurer participation increase from 61 last year to 67 in 2015....Consumers in some states with especially limited choices in 2014 will see increased competition during the next enrollment period, according to the HHS report....However, HHS still hasn’t finalized contracts with insurers to sell in the insurance marketplaces, meaning some could still pull out." Jason Millman in The Washington Post.
Obamacare is meeting broad goals. "Last week, Medicare Administrator Marilyn Tavenner said 7.3 million of the 8.1 million who signed up for coverage this year actually paid their premiums. Yesterday, HHS reported that 8 million people enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP coverage since open enrollment began in October 2013. In her speech at Brookings, Burwell said the number of uninsured adults has fallen by 26 percent, or 10.3 million people from 2013." Tony Pugh in McClatchy Newspapers.
Related: Don't expect perfection on HealthCare.gov. Jayne O'Donnell in USA Today.
Related: Where did Obamacare's $3.7B go? Sarah Ferris in The Hill.
Background reading: What would a GOP Senate mean for Obamacare? Jennifer Haberkorn in Politico.
Obamacare decision puts Boehner lawsuit on notice. "On Monday, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a suit filed by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons in 2011, saying the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue....The suit is similar to that authorized by House Republicans in July to sue the president over the same delay. Of course, the GOP’s argument differs from the doctors’. They say Obama’s use of executive authority to bypass Congress 'threatens the separation of powers.' Still, legal experts also have doubts about that case’s standing." Brianna Ehley in The Fiscal Times.
Other health care reads:
Companies' health costs are decreasing at lower clip. Question is, will that continue? J.D. Harrison in The Washington Post.
The weird bipartisan consensus on birth control. Sara Libby in The Atlantic.
They took on Medicare fraud — and won. Eric Pianin in The Fiscal Times.


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Bertrand Russell: "The Secret To Happiness"

September 24, 2014, 8:07 am
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By lowering expectations, disillusioned discouragement is less likely.

The "trick" is to look squarely at what is horrible now
and use that "vision" as inspiration for improvement.

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"The truth is we are all caught in an economic system which is heartless." 
Woodrow Wilson



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Synagogue Talk Of Israel And Gaza Goes From Debate To Wrath To Rage

September 24, 2014, 8:17 am
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Rabbi Ron Aigen of Congregation Dorshei Emet in Montreal, a Reconstructionist synagogue. “It used to be that Israel was always the uniting factor in the Jewish world,” he said. Christinne Muschi for The New York Times
Laurie Goldstein
September 24, 2014
With the war in Gaza still raging, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum offered an unusual prayer for peace last month during a Friday night service at the large predominantly gay synagogue she leads in New York. Cautioning her flock not to “harden our hearts” against any who had suffered, she wove throughout the prayer the names of young Israeli soldiers — as well as Palestinian children — who were killed in Gaza.
The reaction was swift: A member of the board posted his resignation letter on Facebook, accusing Rabbi Kleinbaum of spreading propaganda for the militant Palestinian group Hamas, and three more congregants soon left.
From the other direction, Rabbi Ron Aigen heard criticism at his synagogue in Montreal this month after he gave a sermon asserting that in the recent battle, Israel had endeavored to live up to the highest standards of Jewish teaching on ethical and just war. He said that he received a letter from a member who had not heard the sermon, but announced that she was quitting because there was no room to express criticism of Israel in the synagogue, which is Reconstructionist and one of the most liberal in Montreal.


After Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum read names of children killed in Gaza, she was vilified online but retained the backing of her synagogue’s board. 

Forty-seven years after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Middle East war — celebrated by Jews worldwide — Israel’s occupation of Arab lands won in battle and its standoff with the Palestinians have become so divisive that many rabbis say it is impossible to have a civil conversation about Israel in their synagogues. 

Alan: I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan's insight: "To the spoils belongs the victor."

Debate among Jews about Israel is nothing new, but some say the friction is now fire. Rabbis said in interviews that it may be too hot to touch, and many are anguishing over what to say about Israel in their sermons during the High Holy Days, which begin Wednesday evening.
Particularly in the large cohort of rabbis who consider themselves liberals and believers in a “two-state solution,” some said they are now hesitant to speak much about Israel at all. If they defend Israel, they risk alienating younger Jews who, rabbis say they have observed, are more detached from the Jewish state and organized Judaism. If they say anything critical of Israel, they risk angering the older, more conservative members who often are the larger donors and active volunteers.
The recent bloody outbreak of fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip may have done little to change the military or political status quo there, but rabbis in the North American diaspora say the summertime war brought into focus how the ground under them has shifted.

"Blowback And The Pardoxical Futility Of Modern Warfare"
“It used to be that Israel was always the uniting factor in the Jewish world,” said Rabbi Aigen, who has served Congregation Dorshei Emet in Montreal for 39 years. “But it’s become contentious and sadly, I think it is driving people away from the organized Jewish community. Even trying to be centrist and balanced and present two sides of the issue, it is fraught with danger.”
Israel is still, without a doubt, the spiritual center and the fondest cause of global Jewry. Many rabbis said that Hamas’s summer assaults on Israel, by rocket fire and underground tunnels, the anti-Semitism that erupted around the world and the rise of the terrorist group that calls itself the Islamic State in neighboring Syria left them feeling more aware of Israel’s vulnerability and more protective of it than ever.
“There’s just been a tremendous outpouring of support, a sense of real connection and identification with our brothers and sisters in Israel,” said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, which represents the Conservative movement, summing up what she heard during a recent “webinar” for rabbis preparing for the High Holy Days.
But many rabbis said in interviews conducted in recent weeks that, though they love and support Israel, they feel conflicted about its direction. These are rabbis in the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements — not the Orthodox, who make up about 10 percent of American Jews and tend to lean right on Israel. Some are rabbis who believe that the expansion of settlements in the West Bank is undermining the possibility for Palestinians to have a state of their own. They believe Israel must defend itself, but they questioned the Israeli bomb strikes in Gaza that killed so many women and children. Now, they said, they are more reluctant than ever to be open with their congregants about their views.
“There is the sense that the ability to criticize Israel has been diminished because of the war, because of the atrocities that Hamas perpetrates among its own people, and because Israel needs our support since the international community is so overwhelmingly anti-Israel,” said Rabbi Jonathan A. Stein, a recently retired senior rabbi at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan.
“The easy sermon for a rabbi to give this year will be on the rise of anti-Semitism across the world. That is a softball,” said Rabbi Stein, who is also the immediate past president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which represents the Reform movement. “The more difficult sermon to give will be one that has any kind of critical posture.”
His sentiments were echoed by others who did not want to be identified because they felt they would risk their jobs. In a recent effort to quantify the phenomenon, one-third of 552 rabbis who responded to a questionnaire put out last year by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs said they were reluctant to express their true views on Israel. (Most who responded were not Orthodox.) The “doves” were far more likely to say they were fearful of speaking their minds than the “hawks.”

Alan: Humankind's enduring bias favors simian chest-thumping.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinical Call for Human Rights, a liberal group with 1,800 member rabbis, said: “Rabbis are just really scared because they get slammed by their right-wing congregants, who are often the ones with the purse strings. They are not necessarily the numerical majority, but they are the loudest.”

Alan: There is a lockstep relationship between big money and aggression.
One Midwestern rabbi in the Conservative movement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is raising money from Jewish donors, said he was rejected for a position at a temple after he told the board that “there’s not just one Jewish point of view” on Israel. Another rabbi’s board put a note in her file saying she cannot speak about Israel.
After she read the names of children killed in Gaza, Rabbi Kleinbaum found herself vilified on social media. But she retained the backing of her board at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the largest gay synagogue in the country, and some new members joined, she said. Her message, she said in an interview, is not so controversial. “If we as Jews don’t feel the pain for the loss of life of children,” she said, “we’re losing a piece of our soul.”
There is more space to be critical of Israel in Israel than in North America, said Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, a former president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who wrote an article for the current issue of Reform Judaism magazine on rabbis who feel “muzzled.” He said in an interview, “There are a range of opinions in Israel, and there should be a range of opinions here.”

Alan: It is ironic but understandable that censorship - in the form of self-censorship - is more pronounced in the United States than in other developed countries. We are unable to openly discuss huge socio-political topics like class warfare, rampant racism, our sotta voce prison-state, the national passion for warfare and the galloping spread of neo-fascism. All these horrors must go unmentioned to maintain America's traditional pose as a "civilized" country. The "United" States of America would be more accurately denominated The United States of Barbaria.
Rabbi Yoffie suggested that synagogues draw a “red line” excluding those who support boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Few rabbis who publicly support the “B.D.S.” movement lead congregations. Rabbi Brant Rosen, one of the few, announced to his congregants in a mournful letter this month that in the coming months he will step down from leadership at the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Ill., after 17 years because “my activism has become a lightning rod for division.”

Rabbi Brant Rosen's Wikipedia Page
Rabbi Rosen said in an interview: “For many Jews, Israel is their Judaism, or at least a big part of it. So when someone challenges the centrality of Israel in a public way, it’s very painful and very difficult, especially when that person is their rabbi.”
Last year, the Board of Rabbis of Southern California of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles tried and failed to organize an event exploring how to have a dialogue about Israel, in part because of logistics and in part because it was just too contentious, said Jonathan Freund, vice president of the board.
“It was kind of ironic,” Mr. Freund said, “because we couldn’t in the end figure out how to talk about how to talk about it.”


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Voting Rights Battle Could Boost Minority Turnout

September 24, 2014, 8:40 am
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Pax On Both Houses: Compendium Of Voter Fraud And Voter Suppression Posts

Voting rights battle could aid minority turnout


WASHINGTON — Democrats and civil rights groups hope the fight to restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act will boost turnout among minority voters this year, particularly in the South.
"We're going to do some things to raise the profile of the Voting Rights Act and the fact that the Supreme Court gutted it,'' said Rep. Cedric Richmond, a Democrat from Louisiana. "You will see us be more active. We tried to do it in a very bipartisan manner ... But it just doesn't seem like that's going to go far enough soon enough, so it's going to be a fight. ''
Richmond is among those working to pass legislation that would revive a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court threw out last year. The bill's supporters are making their case at press conferences, town halls and in newspapers — online and in print — to mobilize voters.
The issue will be the focus of several panels at the Congressional Black Caucus' annual legislative convention in Washington this week.

USATODAY
Voting rights cases may be headed back to Supreme Court

USATODAY
Senate debates voting rights proposal
A coalition of civil rights and voting rights groups recently collected more than 500,000 online signatures for a petition calling on Congress to act. Coalition members said they tried to present the petition to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, last week but found his Capitol Hill office locked.
"They cannot punt this football forever,'' Rep. Linda Sánchez, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus Task Force on Civil Rights, said of Republicans. "Every day that Congress fails to act, voters are in danger.''
Advocates acknowledge the measure stands little chance of passing before the November midterm elections. The House returns next week, but the Senate will be out until after the elections.
The Voting Rights Amendment Act proposed by Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., would resurrect the law's "pre-clearance" provision requiring some states with a history of voting discrimination to get federal approval before making any changes in their voting procedures.
Last year's court decision threw out the formula that had been used to determine which states were subject to pre-clearance, effectively nullifying the provision itself.
Under the proposed amendment, states with at least five voting rights violations in the past 15 years — one of the violations would have to be statewide — would be subject to pre-clearance. Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas would be covered. Alabama, where the Supreme Court court case originated, would not be covered.


Opponents of the amendment, including Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann and Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler, argue that it's not necessary. Hosemann noted that federal officials are still free to challenge jurisdictions that violate the Voting Rights Act by attempting to disenfranchise minority voters.
"That's still in place, just as it was last year and the year before and the year before that,'' Hosemann said.
The amendment's supporters say pre-clearance is as necessary now as when the Voting Rights Act was first approved. They say new election laws passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures attempt to keep minorities from the polls.
One of those laws requires that voters in Mississippi show a photo ID before casting a ballot. Nov. 4 will mark its first test in a general election.
Predictions by the law's opponents that it would keep minority voters from casting ballots have proven "totally false," Hosemann said. He noted that 99.9% of people who voted in this year's primaries showed up with a photo ID.
"In Mississippi, this won't be a campaign issue because we live and work together,'' Hosemann said. "If that's going to be the main campaign argument in this upcoming election, it's not going to have any weight in Mississippi.''
Laura Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said restrictive voting laws adopted by states in 2010 and 2012 helped spur minority-voter turnout.
"It's going to be incumbent upon civil rights leaders to make clear what's at stake," she said of this year's elections. "And if we are successful in doing our job, I think black and minority voters will turn out. We have to inform people that the tools we had to protect something as fundamental as their right to vote have evaporated.''
Earlier this summer, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the legislation to resurrect the pre-clearance provision, but the House Judiciary Committee hasn't acted.
"The Senate's not the problem, it's the House,'' said Richmond of Louisiana. "I don't think any of the Republicans want to force their members to vote on a voting rights bill before these elections. They have a lot of vulnerable members that they don't want to have to take this tough vote."

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Luftwaffe Commander Hermann Goering Describes War As A Ruling Class Scam

September 24, 2014, 9:36 am
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"Why of course the people don't want war... Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought along to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's Deputy Chief and Luftwaffe Commander, at the Nuremberg trials, 1946





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Americans Who Have Not Read a Single Article About Syria Strongly Support Bombing It

September 24, 2014, 11:23 am
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WASHINGTON, D.C. (The Borowitz Report) — In a positive development for the U.S.-led campaign of air strikes in Syria, a new poll indicates strong, broad-based support for the mission among people who have yet to read a news article about Syria.
According to the poll, released on Tuesday, the bombing campaign got a thumbs-up from people who had no information about Syria’s civil war, including its duration, the parties involved, and what a Sunni is.

Additionally, the air strikes garnered enthusiastic support from people who could not correctly identify the President of Syria, tell what the acronym ISISstands for, or locate Syria on a map.
According to pollster Davis Logsdon, who supervised the survey for the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, the poll numbers augur well for the mission going forward.
“People who have not read a single article about Syria are a key constituency because they represent an overwhelming majority of Americans,” he said. “And when you asked the follow-up question of whether they intended to read an article about Syria in the future, their answer was a resounding no.”
According to Logsdon, the bombing campaign also earned high marks from another important group, Americans who think that they maybe read a news headline about Syria but did not click on it.

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"Hitler's Children," Interview With Hermann Goering's Great-Niece

September 24, 2014, 12:08 pm
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Bettina Goering - currently living in Santa Fe, USA
Bettina Goering – currently living in Santa Fe, New Mexico

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What Hermann Goering’s great-niece told me about the Holocaust this week

Hermann Goering, leader of the Nazi Luftwaffe
Hermann Goering, the Deputy Führer
This week, via Skype, I talked to Hermann Goering’s great-niece Bettina Goering in Thailand. She is writing a book.
“Hermann wasn’t really a nasty Nazi, though, was he?” I asked her. “He wasn’t identified with the Holocaust. He was simply head of theLuftwaffe. The image I have of him is an overweight man, who liked art, stamping around in rather flamboyant uniforms.”
“That’s what I thought,” replied Bettina. “That’s the image I had too, until I started digging further and it’s much more complex. The truth is that he was involved in the Holocaust too. I didn’t know that until I started the process of writing this book. He was as involved as any of them. He might have not been as gung-ho in his rhetoric about Jews. He came across as ‘the Luftwaffe guy’. But he was just as involved. I first learned that when I did a documentary called Bloodlines. He was part of the Final Solution. He co-authored it. So he was very involved. He was part of setting up concentration camps. And, when they decided to do the Final Solution, he was part of all that.”
Bettina has no children.
In the documentary Hitler’s Children, she says:
“My brother and I had the sterilisation done in order not to give life to other Goerings… I was feeling responsible for the Holocaust, even though I was born after the War, because of my family, who had an active part in it.”
“You got sterilised,” I asked her this week, “because you didn’t want to pass the genes on?”
“I think that was part of it,” she told me. “I think we had a lot of other intellectual arguments. There are enough children. We don’t want children, blah blah. I think, deep down, that was part of it too. It’s kinda complex.”
“And your relationship to Hermann Goering is…” I asked.
“He is the brother of my grandfather on my father’s side,” Bettina explained.
“You were born in the decade after he died,” I said.
“Her husband – Hermann’s older brother – died very young when she was in her 30s. She had three young boys and Hermann took care of her. I just found out she actually looked after his household at the beginning of the Nazi times – 1932/1933.”“Yes. The only member of that direct family that I knew who was really involved was my grandmother. My book is also largely about her and her relationship to Hermann and her relationship to the whole family. They were a very close-knit family.
“So,” I said, “by the time you’re really aware of anything, it’s the early 1960s, when people are making films about the Nazi era, but it’s not the immediate past…”
“There was a bit of a limbo time in Germany,” said Bettina, “when really not much was mentioned in education or films and it really came home to me when I was about 10 or 11 and documentaries were shown and that’s when I really started to see how bad it was. Before that, I knew bits and pieces, but I didn’t know what it meant, really.”
“Which obviously,” I said, “must have had an effect on you…”
“There have been different stages to it,” replied Bettina. “I came of age around the end of the 1960s and I got into this whole ‘Anti’ movement. I became left wing, hippie and tried to somehow understand this whole dilemma more and create something else.”
“That’s roughly the time of Baader-Meinhof,” I said.
Baader-Meinhof: a troubled generation
Baader-Meinhof – in a troubled generation
“Yeah. They were around and one of my friends became one of the second generation of Baader-Meinhof. I was in a left-leaning organisation but for me to use violence was totally out of the question. But some of my friends were starting… You’d be surprised how many people were sympathetic to them (the Baader-Meinhof activists), including us, for a while. There’s a good movie that came out a couple of years ago…”
“Yes. That was about the time I was growing up and I think they (the Baader-Meinhof activists and supporters) were partly in reaction to the Nazis in some ways, because most of them were born during the War. All that manifested in themselves.”
“A very mixed-up generation,” I said.
“My mother only met my father after the War,” explained Bettina. “My family was the Hermann Goering family on one side, but my mother’s family were the opposite. Very different families who married each other. My grandfather on my mum’s side was an anti-Fascist. He was once arrested. It was well-known he was supporting Jewish people. He had to be really careful.
“So here I have the Fascist side and the anti-Fascist side both in my family and that made it very… crazy. This trouble within myself was always trying to work itself out.”
“So your book is going to give an inside view of a troubled family?”
“Yes. It’s the inside view and trying to find some way to… You can’t really marry those two sides together… Also I was judging them so negatively that I was judging some part of me. Do you get that? That came to a head at some point where I realised I couldn’t really live my fullest potential  because I was really judging part of me so negatively. That is something I have been striving to overcome. Exactly that. To find some forgiveness in myself – of myself. It’s like an impossible thing to do, but just in order to feel healthy, I feel like I need to do that.
“There’s a lot been written about the Nazis on a very intellectual level but my book will be maybe a more emotional way to deal with it, which is hard for the Germans to do. There’s still all this guilt, conscious or unconscious, and I write a lot about this guilt stuff. On an emotional level, it is not resolved.”
“Who do you think would like to read your book?”
“Well, anybody who has any traumas in their closets. So far, we’ve only approached one or two German literary agents. Until now, we’ve really not been that ready.
“Maybe it will be that a British publisher will publish it first and then it will, in a roundabout way, go to the Germans. We are writing it in both languages and I have been living more in English-speaking countries than I have in Germany. I lived even in England for a couple of years.”
“You are in Thailand at the moment, but you and your husband live in Santa Fe in the US?”
“Yes, but we are moving…”
“… to where?” I asked.
“We’re not sure just now. We are sort of in flux. We have a house in Santa Fe that has still not been sold. It’s gonna take some time.”
“Could you live back in Germany happily?”
“No, I don’t think so. It’s not that I don’t like Germany. We go visit a lot. But I’ve never felt drawn to live there again. I feel it’s a bit limiting.”
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At 93,000,000 Miles, The Sun Is Low-Hanging Fruit Waiting To Be Picked

September 24, 2014, 12:31 pm
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Pro-Abortion Spanish Nun-Physician Is A Political Force

September 24, 2014, 1:54 pm
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Sister Teresa Forcades prays over the graves of fellow nuns in a cemetery at her Sant Benet Monastery in Montserrat, Spain.
Audio File: http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/09/24/347660274/the-outspoken-spanish-nun-whos-made-herself-a-political-force

The Outspoken Spanish Nun Who Has Made Herself A Political Force

by Lauren Frayer
September 24, 2014
It's easy to find Teresa Forcades in the crowd at Barcelona's airport. She's wearing a nun's habit.
Sister Forcades is Spain's most famous living nun. She's a medical doctor with a master's degree from Harvard. She's a feminist who's been reprimanded by the Vatican for supporting abortion rights. She's a Benedictine nun in a country where the Catholic Church has historically sided with fascists.
And she's hugely popular.
Forcades has emerged as one of the leaders of Europe's new left wing. At the height of Spain's economic crisis, she started a new political movement, Proces Constituent, which calls on the Spanish government to leave the eurozone, nationalize all banks and grant freedom to Catalonia — the wealthy, northeast region of Spain from which Forcades hails.
With a frenetic schedule of speaking engagements, Forcades was in Spain for just five hours one recent afternoon, on her way home from a left-wing political conference in Croatia and before jetting off to teach feminist theology in Germany. NPR arranged to meet her at the airport, give her a lift and interview her en route to her monastery on the sacred Montserrat mountain north of Barcelona.
Navigating a hilly switchback road, I asked about her lectures in Germany: Isn't feminist Catholic theology an oxymoron?
Sister Teresa Forcades stands in front of an olive tree she planted on Jan. 1, 1997 — the day she took her vows to become a Benedictine nun. Back then, the tree was just a sapling, but it has matured during her 17 years at the monastery and now bears fruit.i
Sister Teresa Forcades stands in front of an olive tree she planted on Jan. 1, 1997 — the day she took her vows to become a Benedictine nun. Back then, the tree was just a sapling, but it has matured during her 17 years at the monastery and now bears fruit.
Lauren Frayer for NPR
"That's what I thought as a teenager!" Forcades exclaims. "Because many of the messages that still today the Catholic Church gives to the world — in terms of rights of women, sexual morality and contraception — conflict directly with the historical achievements of the feminist movement. [The church] is an institution in which patriarchy is rampant. All the decision-making is linked to something called ordination, and ordination is linked to something called gender," she says with an ironic smile. "So it's clear that I did not join the church because I thought as an institution it's wonderful for a feminist!"
Instead, she says, she ended up in the clergy as a fluke. Born in 1966 to an atheist family in Catalonia, Forcades went to medical school in Barcelona and then did her residency at a hospital in Buffalo, N.Y. She eventually went on to get a master's degree from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in public health. But in the summer of 1995, she was just looking for a quiet place to study for her U.S. medical board exams.
"That's how I arrived in July 1995 at what is now my home, not with the intention to become a nun, but the intention to prepare for my medical boards in the United States," she says, laughing.
But she never left. Forcades describes her experience of reading the Bible for the first time as "a commotion."
"It was something that touched me very deeply — one of those experiences that are impossible to explain," she says. Two years after arriving at the Sant Benet Monastery in Monserrat, she took her vows to become a Benedictine nun.
Since then, she has lived at the same monastery, practicing medicine, singing and praying at church services several times a day and combining her passion for God with her passion for social justice.
"I was listening yesterday to a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War. It's so impressive! I can listen to him forever. Because it's so to the point, and it's so respectful and so full of common sense," she says. "You just listen to him, and feel, 'Yeah!' You want to shout like they do in Baptist churches. 'Yeah, sister, brother, yeah! Just go for it!'"
Forcades' latest crusade is for Catalan independence. She has become one of the most prominent faces of the secessionist movement in Catalonia, which seeks to break away from Spain and form its own country in Europe.
"I am in favor of the independence of my country, because I do believe that for true democracy to be real or possible, you need small political units," she says, offering the example of the U.S., in which many powers are devolved to the state rather than federal level.
"I want to avoid what unfortunately has been so prevalent for the Catalans. We complain to our local government, the Catalan government, and the local government says, 'Yeah, you are right, but you know what? It's Madrid's fault.' OK, so we go to Madrid, and Madrid says, 'Yes, you're right, but you know what? It's Brussels' fault,'" she says. "I don't like growing huge empirelike structures that are removed from the people."
Forcades is a frequent commentator on Spanish TV. That's where a few years ago, she voiced her support for abortion rights — on live TV. A letter of reprimand swiftly arrived from the Vatican. And Forcades wrote back, posing a philosophical question to the Vatican in response.
"So let's imagine you have a father and the father has a compatible kidney, and you have a child, an innocent child, who needs the kidney. Is the church ready to force the father to give the kidney, to save the child's life?" she says, recounting her reply to the Vatican. "That the right to life of the child takes precedence over the right to self-determination to his own body, of the father? And that was my question I sent to Rome in 2009."
She received no reply back. So for now, Sister Teresa remains very much part of the church — and proud to sometimes disagree with it.
On a tour of her monastery, perched on a mountain over Barcelona, with the serrated peaks of Monserrat mountain beside it, Forcades points to a special olive tree.
"This is the olive tree that my friends — members of an ecologist group to which I belonged as a teenager — gave me when I did my first vows [to become a nun]. They gave me this little trunk of a tree, barely 6 inches tall, and we planted it here at the monastery," she says wistfully. "And now it's 17 years old. As you can see, it's bearing fruit."
So is Teresa's work. Her home region of Catalonia plans to vote this fall on whether to break away from Spain.
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Needed Re-Definition Of Mid-East Chaos As A Sunni-Shiite Religious War

September 24, 2014, 3:38 pm
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Kurdish Peshmerga fighters observe the front line with Islamic State, in Gwar, northern Iraq September 23, 2014
Alan: Every solution depends on acurate definition of the problem. 
Although Islamic terrorists might get "lucky" and launch a few "successful" attacks on American soil, the cumulative death toll would, in any event, be fewer than the number of traffic fatalities that could be prevented by implementing European legal and regulatory norms. 
We know, as a matter of fact, that the per mile death rate in Europe is half what it is in the United States. 
Notably, there is no interest in implementing any of the known procedures that would prevent 200,000 U.S. traffic fatalities per decade and two million serious injuries in the same span. 
I repeat. 
American citizens have zero interest in taking initiative to limit highway carnage even though doing so would prevent far more slaughter than terrorists might cause.
Americans have absolutely no interest in do-able procedures to save 20,000 lives each and every year.

Zippo. 

Zilch. 

Nada. 

Niente.

The murderous capability of Islamic terrorists is not the issue, but rather our psychological determination to designate an enemy by picking one (or more) among a wide range of competing candidates.

Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney
Wikipedia

We already know the absurdity of this drill from Uncle Sam's recent "designation of enemies" in Iraq... Vietnam... Nicaragua... Panama... Chile... Guatemala... Granada.

Every one of these "foes" became -- at best -- a counterproductive distraction.

Bush-Cheney's bogus designation of Iraq as a "war-worthy enemy" became the linchpin of regional (if not global) destabilization and will go down in history as the most ill-informed political decision since Emperor Augustus.


"For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men. If convicted, they’ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins." 
"Costly Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War" 
by Israeli War Historian Martin van Creveld, 
the only non-U.S. author whose writings are obligatory reading by America's Officer Corps. 

In my lifetime, there have been two essential geopolitical lessons.

In Vietnam, it became pellucidly clear that sensible nations do not intervene in another nation's civil war.

In Iraq, it became equally clear that sensible nations do not start another nation's civil war.

All across "Greater Arabee," Sunnis and Shiites are waging a vicious, self-destructive (and arguably suicidal) Civil War that may require occasional police action to alleviate humanitarian disaster but which should, by public proclamation, be defined as a Civil War in which Islamics are their own worst enemies.

The sooner Uncle Sam makes clear his determination to let competing Islamist thugs duke it out, the sooner they will awaken to the horror they have brought upon themselves.

***

"Shark Attacks Rise Worldwide: Risk Assessment and Aquinas' Criteria For Sin"

***
The Battle Against The Islamic State Is Not Ours To Fight Or Win
By Bernard E. Trainor September 24, 2014

The writer, a retired Marine lieutenant general, is co-author of “The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama.”
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his band of Islamic State zealots received international attention for their brutality and lightning sweep across Iraq, but the United States should know better than to respond with a clarion call to battle. We have already been burned trying to solve the Rubik’s cube of the Middle East. U.S. actions in the region should remain calculating, patient — and detached.
The Islamic State presents a problem to be managed, not a war to be won. Much of what it occupies in Syria and Iraq is useless desert. The situation is stabilizing, largely because of limited U.S. airstrikes, and the immediate crisis is over. The Iraqi Kurds have stiffened their defenses, and Shiites backed by Iran are defending Baghdad. Even Anbar Province’s Sunni tribes pose a problem for the interlopers.
The Islamic State blitzkrieg can be seen as the latest iteration of the struggle for ascendancy by radical Muslims, but at the core it is a local matter, and brutality is unfortunately part of the package. The U.S. role should be limited to helping Kurdish forces and the new Baghdad government better organize to keep the pressure on, with U.S. airstrikes contingent on their progress. The president’s attempt to form an international posse to assist makes sense, and the results have been reasonably encouraging. France and a fistful of Arab states are already actively engaged.
But it is a stalemate in the making. The United States could break the stalemate by introducing ground combat forces, but all that would achieve is the recovery of lost ground. Meanwhile, the Islamic State could dodge and feint, drawing U.S. troops into the Syrian maelstrom. There is no appetite in the United States for that.
The idea of destroying the Islamic State, an expression of a centuries-old goal to establish a caliphate in the Muslim world, and restoring stability is nonsense. Stability, in the peaceful sense of the word, is a chimera. More realistic would be to accept a tolerable level of violence within the region so long as no faction that is a direct U.S. threat achieves dominance. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s view is that the Islamic State poses only a “strategic threat . . . long term.” Terrorism, from myriad Islamist groups, is the more clear and present danger.
The situation in Mesopotamia is a violent game of mistrust and self-interest. The Saudis despise the Iranians but will cut deals with them if doing so is in their interest. Iran will play any card necessary to achieve regional hegemony, while Turkey is coy about its own quest for preeminence. The Gulf States talk out of both sides of their mouths. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad uses the Islamic State to create problems for other rebels. Iraq plays at democracy as long as it can subjugate the Sunnis. Shiites and Sunnis fight each other while carrying on intramural warfare with their kinsmen. The double-dealing is almost endless. It doesn’t make sense to us, but it does to the players.
After more than a decade of frustration and humiliation, the United States should have learned that the Middle East is no place for Wilsonianism on steriods. Obama cut his teeth as a community organizer on the mean streets of Chicago. He should be wary of journeying too far into a bad neighborhood when he sees one.


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Weird Enuf Fer Ya? News From Barbaria #151

September 24, 2014, 4:42 pm
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    Fareed Zakaria Calls Obama's U.N. Address On ISIS "Frankly Brilliant"

    September 24, 2014, 10:10 pm
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    Zakaria: ISIS policy 'remains somewhat troubling'


    September 24, 2014

    Video of Obama's U.N. Speech: 
    CNN speaks with Fareed Zakaria about President Obama’s speech on the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria delivered at the United Nations on Wednesday. This is an edited version of the transcript.
    Many were surprised that the Obama administration did in fact put together a coalition including five Sunni Arab countries to not only express support, but military support against ISIS. They got involved in striking these ISIS targets in Syria. That certainly is going to put enormous pressure on the rest of the world and friends of the United States to at least voice support for what the U.S. is trying to achieve.
    Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing the United States leading a little bit from behind on this one, which is to say having the Sunni Arab states in the front confronting ISIS, rather than having what ISIS would regard as the crusader capitalist Western Christian power do it.
    The issue here, though, is that the strikes are fine, and I think the president will find there's broad support in a campaign against ISIS. There's broad support for the kind of talk about world order. But what's the regional strategy and follow up?
    These addresses before the U.N. General Assembly are usually pretty good speeches, well written, there's a whole laundry list of international issues they want to get through, make some points, but then a few days later, certainly a few weeks later, very few people remember what they said. Will this speech be remembered down the road?
    I think it will because of that very distinctive piece of it, the call on the Muslim world to cleanse itself of extremism. Very unusual. Many presidents have thought about talking in those terms, but have always been deterred – I know this was a conversation that took place within the Bush White House – because [they] always felt it would seem too anti-Muslim.
    But I think it's also important to point out that this was a great speech, the kind Obama gives well. It's Obama as professor. It's a public education speech. It's coherent. It arches over lots of subjects, talks about world order.
    The problem is the policy underneath remains somewhat troubling. We are fighting ISIS, which will have the effect of strengthening the al-Assad regime, strengthening Iran, strengthening Russia, while we are also saying that we are battling the al-Assad regime, Russia, and Iran. That is not simply a problem; that is frankly incoherent. And we haven't figured out how to get around that strategic incoherence at the heart of the policy. That will start unraveling on the ground. The speech was great. President Bush made lots of very strong, determined, fiery speeches. But the problem is the policy on the ground has to keep up.
    Take Iraq. He says we have a new government in Iraq. That's not exactly true. We have a new prime minister. The prime minister has not made any major concessions to the Sunnis. The Sunni tribes remain on strike, as it were – there's an excellent piece in The New York Times a couple of days ago that pointed out 198 airstrikes in Iraq have not been very effective because you don't have the ground troops, which would be the Sunni locals whose hearts and minds you have won over. So that's the kind of stuff that will unravel on the ground despite the eloquence and frankly brilliance of the speech.


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    ISIS’ Harsh Brand of Islam Is Rooted in Austere Saudi Creed

    September 24, 2014, 10:23 pm
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    Saudi-propagated Wahhibism at work

    ***

    "Saudi Support For Wahhabi Radicalism Is Taproot Of Islamic Terrorism" 
    http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/saudi-arabians-support-for-wahhabi.html
    ***
    BAGHDAD — Caliph Ibrahim, the leader of the Islamic State, appeared to come out of nowhere when he matter-of-factly proclaimed himself the ruler of all Muslims in the middle of an otherwise typical Ramadan sermon. Muslim scholars from the most moderate to the most militant all denounced him as a grandiose pretender, and the world gaped at his growing following and its vicious killings.
    His ruthless creed, though, has clear roots in the 18th-century Arabian Peninsula. It was there that the Saud clan formed an alliance with the puritanical scholar Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab. And as they conquered the warring tribes of the desert, his austere interpretation of Islam became the foundation of the Saudi state.
    Much to Saudi Arabia’s embarrassment, the same thought has now been revived by the caliph, better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as the foundation of the Islamic State.




    “It is a kind of untamed Wahhabism,” said Bernard Haykel, a scholar at Princeton. “Wahhabism is the closest religious cognate.”



    GRAPHIC

    How ISIS Works

    With oil revenues, arms and organization, the jihadist group controls vast stretches of Syria and Iraq and aspires to statehood.
     OPEN GRAPHIC

    The Saudis and the rulers of other Persian Gulf states — all monarchies — are now united against the Islamic State, fearful that it might attack them from the outside or win followers within. Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have all participated with Washington in its attacks on the Islamic State’s strongholds in Syria.
    For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement of Sunni Islam. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group’s territory have shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van.
    This approach is at odds with the more mainstream Islamist and jihadist thinking that forms the genealogy of Al Qaeda, and it has led to a fundamentally different view of violence. Al Qaeda grew out of a radical tradition that viewed Muslim states and societies as having fallen into sinful unbelief, and embraced violence as a tool to redeem them. But the Wahhabi tradition embraced the killing of those deemed unbelievers as essential to purifying the community of the faithful.
    “Violence is part of their ideology,” Professor Haykel said. “For Al Qaeda, violence is a means to an ends; for ISIS, it is an end in itself.”
    The distinction is playing out in a battle of fatwas. All of the most influential jihadist theorists are criticizing the Islamic State as deviant, calling its self-proclaimed caliphate null and void and, increasingly, slamming its leaders as bloodthirsty heretics for beheading journalists and aid workers.
    The upstart polemicists of the Islamic State, however, counter that its critics and even the leaders of Al Qaeda are all bad Muslims who have gone soft on the West. Even the officials and fighters of the Palestinian militant group Hamas are deemed to be “unbelievers” who might deserve punishment with beheading for agreeing to a cease-fire with Israel, one Islamic State ideologue recently declared.
    “The duty of a Muslim is to carry out all of God’s orders and rulings immediately on the spot, not softly and gradually,” the scholar, Al Turki Ben-Ali, 30, said in an online forum.
    The Islamic State’s sensational propaganda and videos of beheadings appear to do double duty. In addition to threatening the West, its gory bravado draws applause online and elsewhere from sympathizers, which helps the group in the competition for new recruits.
    That is especially important to the Islamic State because it requires a steady flow of recruits to feed its constant battles and heavy losses against multiple enemies — the governments of Iraq and Syria, Shiite and Kurdish fighters, rival Sunni militants and now the United States Air Force.
    For Al Qaeda, meanwhile, disputes with the Islamic State are an opportunity “to reposition themselves as the more rational jihadists,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.




    Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, seen in an image from a video released by the Islamic State in July.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

    The Islamic State’s founder, Mr. Baghdadi, grafted two elements onto his Wahhabi foundations borrowed from the broader, 20th-century Islamist movements that began with the Muslim Brotherhood and ultimately produced Al Qaeda. Where Wahhabi scholars preach obedience to earthly rulers, Mr. Baghdadi adopted the call to political action against foreign domination of the Arab world that has animated the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and other 20th-century Islamist movements.
    Mr. Baghdadi also borrowed the idea of a restored caliphate. Where Wahhabism first flourished alongside the Ottoman Caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded shortly after that caliphate’s dissolution, in 1924 — an event seen across the world as a marker of Western ascent and Eastern decline. The movement’s founders took up the call for a revived caliphate as a goal of its broader anti-Western project.
    These days, though, even Brotherhood members appear almost embarrassed by the term’s anachronism, emphasizing that they use caliphate as a kind of spiritual idea irrelevant to the modern world of nation-states.
    “Even for Al Qaeda, the caliphate was something that was going to happen in the far distant future, before the end times,” said William McCants, a researcher on militant Islam at the Brookings Institution. The Islamic State “really moved up the timetable,” he said — to June 2014, in fact.
    Adhering to Wahhabi literalism, the Islamic State disdains other Islamists who reason by analogy to adapt to changing context — including the Muslim Brotherhood; its controversial midcentury thinker Sayed Qutb; and the contemporary militants his writing later inspired, like Ayman al-Zawahri of Al Qaeda. Islamic State ideologues often deem anyone, even an Islamist, who supports an elected or secular government to be an unbeliever and subject to beheading.
    “This is ‘you join us, or you are against us and we finish you,’ ” said Prof. Emad Shahin, who teaches Islam and politics at Georgetown University. “It is not Al Qaeda, but far to its right.”
    Some experts note that Saudi clerics lagged long after other Muslim scholars in formally denouncing the Islamic State, and at one point even the king publicly urged them to speak out more clearly. “There is a certain mutedness in the Saudi religious establishment, which indicates it is not a slam dunk to condemn ISIS,” Professor Haykel said.
    Finally, on Aug. 19, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, the Saudi grand mufti, declared that “the ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way, but are the first enemy of Islam, and Muslims are their first victims, as seen in the crimes of the so-called Islamic State and Al Qaeda.”
    Al Qaeda’s ideologues have been more vehement. All insist that the promised caliphate requires a broad consensus, on behalf of Muslim scholars if not all Muslims, and not merely one man’s proclamation after a military victory.
    “Will this caliphate be a sanctuary for all the oppressed and a refuge for every Muslim?” Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, a senior jihadist scholar, recently asked in a statement on the Internet. “Or will this creation take a sword against all the Muslims who oppose it” and “nullify all the groups that do jihad in the name of God?”
    Another prominent Qaeda-linked jihadist scholar, Abu Qatada al-Falistini, echoed that: “They are merciless in dealing with other jihadists. How would they deal with the poor, the weak and other people?”
    Both scholars have recently been released from prison in Jordan, perhaps because the government wants to amplify their criticism of the Islamic State.


    Omar al-Jawoshy and Sarmad Chalabi contributed reporting.

    A medieval onarchy can only survive 
    when supported by medieval institutions.


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    "ISIS Crisis," By Thomas L. Friedman

    September 25, 2014, 6:22 am
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    New Age Dementors

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    "Saudi Support For Wahhabi Radicalism Is Taproot Of Islamic Terrorism"
    http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/saudi-arabians-support-for-wahhabi.html

    ***

    "Needed Re-Definition Of Mid-East Chaos As Sunni-Shiite Religious War"
    http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/necessary-re-definition-of-mid-east.html

    ***

    "ISIS' Harsh Brand Of Islam Is Rooted In Saudi Creed"
    http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/isis-harsh-brand-of-islam-is-rooted-in.html

    ISIS Crisis

    SEPT. 23, 2014

    Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times

    There is a tension at the heart of President Obama’s campaign to confront the Islamic State, and
    it explains a lot about why he has so much trouble articulating and implementing his strategy.

    Quite simply, it is the tension between two vital goals—promoting the “soul-searching” that
    ISIS’s emergence has triggered in the Arab-Muslim world and “searching and destroying” ISIS in
    its strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

    Get used to it. This tension is not going away. Obama will have to lead through it.

    The good news: The rise of the Islamic State, also known and ISIS, is triggering some long
    overdue, brutally honest, soul-searching by Arabs and Muslims about how such a large,
    murderous Sunni death cult could have emerged in their midst. Look at a few samples, starting
    with “The Barbarians Within Our Gates,” written in Politico last week by Hisham Melhem, the
    Washington bureau chief of Al-Arabiya, the Arabic satellite channel.

    “With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President
    Obama ... is stepping once again — and with understandably great reluctance — into the chaos
    of an entire civilization that has broken down. Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but
    gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism —
    the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the
    Ottoman Empire a century ago.”

    “Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed,” Melhem added. “The promise of
    political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the
    season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays—all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian
    and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms.
    ... The jihadists of the Islamic State, in other words, did not emerge from nowhere. They climbed
    out of a rotting, empty hulk —what was left of a broken-down civilization.”

    The liberal Saudi analyst Turki al-Hamad responded in the London-based Al-Arab newspaper to
    King Abdullah’s call for Saudi religious leaders to confront ISIS ideology: How can they? al-
    Hamad asked. They all embrace the same anti-pluralistic, puritanical Wahhabi Sunni ideology
    that Saudi Arabia diffused, at home and abroad, to the mosques that nurtured ISIS.

    “They are unable to face the groups of violence, extremism and beheadings, not out of laziness
    or procrastination, but because all of them share in that same ideology,” al-Hamad wrote. “How
    can they confront an ideology that they themselves carry within them and within their mindset?”

    The Lebanese Shiite writer Hanin Ghaddar in an essay in August on Lebanon’s Now website
    wrote: “To fight the I.S. and other radical groups, and to prevent the rise of new autocratic
    rulers, we need to assume responsibility for the collective failures that have produced all of
    these awful tyrants and fanatics. Our media and education systems are liable for the monster
    we helped create. ... We need to teach our children how to learn from our mistakes instead of
    how to master the art of denial. When our educators and journalists start to understand the
    significance of individual rights, and admit that we have failed to be citizens, then we can start
    hoping for freedom, even if it is achieved slowly.”

    Nurturing this soul-searching is a vital —and smart —part of the Obama strategy. In
    committing America to an air-campaign-only against ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq, Obama has
    declared that the ground war will have to be fought by Arabs and Muslims, not just because this
    is their war and they should take the brunt of the casualties, but because the very act of their
    organizing themselves across Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish lines —the very act of overcoming their
    debilitating sectarian and political differences that would be required to defeat ISIS on the
    ground—is the necessary ingredient for creating any kind of decent, consensual government
    that could replace ISIS in any self-sustaining way.

    The tension arises because ISIS is a killing machine, and it will take another killing machine to
    search it out and destroy it on the ground. There is no way the “moderate” Syrians we’re
    training can alone fight ISIS and the Syrian regime at the same time. Iraqis, Turkey and the
    nearby Arab states will have to also field troops.

    After all, this is a civil war for the future of both Sunni Islam and the Arab world.We can
    degrade ISIS from the air—I’m glad we have hit these ISIS psychopaths in Syria—but only
    Arabs and Turks can destroy ISIS on the ground. Right now, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip
    Erdogan, stands for authoritarianism, press intimidation, crony capitalism and quiet support for
    Islamists, including ISIS. He won’t even let us use our base in Turkey to degrade ISIS from the air.
    What’s in his soul? What’s in the soul of the Arab regimes who are ready to join us in bombing
    ISIS in Syria, but rule out ground troops?

    This is a civilization in distress, and unless it faces the pathologies that have given birth to an ISIS
    monster its belly —any victory we achieve from the air or ground will be temporary.

    Alan: At bedrock, Islamism is a kind of necrophilia in which the perceived Will of God wants infidels not only dead but damned. Since this is so, "true believers" should accelerate God's plans for damnation by killing unbelievers now.

    ***
    Pope Condemns Extremists For "Perverting" Religion

    ***

    Pope Francis Links



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    Capitalism, Depersonalization And The Never-Ending Irresponsibility Of Structural Sin

    September 25, 2014, 7:03 am
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    Alan: The intractable difficulty with "unjust economic structures" is that there is no "personal responsibility" in them.

    Rather, "unjust economic structures" are Capitalism's trump card, keeping people in perpetual oppression by depersonalizing them through systems with no personal component. 

    Capitalist Sin is essentially depersonalized, programmatic, systematic and automatic.

    As Woodrow Wilson observed: "The truth is we are all caught in an economic system which is heartless."

    Capitalist Sin "just happens"... because it was designed to "just happen"... a gift of self-exculpation supplied by early generations of capitalists who established the theo-philosophical template that absolved all subsequent generations of any moral (or political) responsibility.

    Structural Sin authorizes "the Pilate in each of us" to wash our hands, to turn our back on the crucifixion of the poor, and then sleep well at the end of each day's prolonged feasting.

    Currently, Christian Theology -- based on the medieval template of each individual's "personal relationship" with God -- includes no heuristic, no epistemological method for grasping the pervasive nature of overarching and subtending structural sin for which "I am not responsible."

    The automatic structures of sin enable each of us to proclaim -- quite plausibly and with clear conscience -- that "it is out of my hands."

    In Spanish, a common legal rendition of "corporation" is "sociedad anonima" - an "anonymous society." Since "no one" dwells inside the anonymous"corporate shell," there is no one to blame, no one to hold responsible; indeed no personal conscience that might be panged into "changing."

    The structures are what they are - over there, far away, beyond the reach of human responsibility.

    Immutable.


    Perhaps the Supreme Court's recent definition of "corporations as persons" lays the foundation for a new jurisprudence that holds formerly "impersonal" corporate structures personally responsible.

    Where there are "persons," moral and legal responsibility can be assigned to those persons.

    Where there is only clockwork mechanism and anonymous corporate fictions -- set in motion by systematic decisions made in the distant past -- there is no more moral responsibility than my car "experiences" when I leave it running at curbside to load groceries.

    It would be sweet irony if Citizens United blew up in Capitalism's face.

    Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 
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    Search

    S.C. Trooper Of Year Faces 20 Years For Shooting Unarmed, Cooperative Black Man

    September 25, 2014, 8:23 am
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    South Carolina State Trooper, Sean Groubert

    This gunslinger cowboy nonsense does not happen in Europe.

    In one recent year, New York City police fired more bullets in a single gun fight 
    than all of Germany's police officers fired in an entire year.

    "US Cops Use More Ammo Per Man Than All German Cops Use In A Year"

    http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/85-shots-us-cops-use-more-ammo-per-man.html

    The United States of Barbaria

    ***

    "Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right"


    ***

    South Carolina Trooper Of The Year Faces 20 Years 
    For Shooting Unarmed, Cooperative Black Man
    http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/crime/2014/09/25/dnt-trooper-shooting-dash-cam.wis.html

    STORY HIGHLIGHTS
    • South Carolina police release a video of a trooper shooting a man in a traffic stop
    • Police say the man was unarmed, and the trooper is charged with felony assault
    • "Why did you shoot me?" the man asks the trooper
    • "Well, you dove head-first back into your car," the trooper responds
    (CNN) -- One moment, a man reaches into his vehicle after a South Carolina trooper asked for his driver's license.
    Seconds later, the trooper shoots him, and the man asks why. Days later, prosecutors aren't satisfied with the answer.
    Authorities released dash-camera video Wednesday showing what they say is Sean Groubert, then a South Carolina Highway Patrol trooper, shooting Levar Jones, who was unarmed, in the parking lot of a gas station just outside Columbia on September 4.
    Jones, 35, survived the shooting. But Groubert, who was fired because of the incident last week, has been charged with aggravated assault and battery, a felony that could get him up to 20 years in prison if convicted, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division said Wednesday.
    "The force administered in this case was unwarranted, inconsistent with how our troopers are trained, and clearly in violation of department policies," state Public Safety Director Leroy Smith said while announcing Groubert's firing Friday.
    Patrol officer beats woman
    'Why did you shoot me?'
    Police said Groubert, 31, stopped Jones in the parking lot of a Circle K station in daylight, for what police say was an alleged seat belt violation, around 5 p.m.
    Video that authorities say was recorded from Groubert's police car shows the trooper driving up to a vehicle just as its driver -- who authorities say is Jones -- steps out of the vehicle.
    When Groubert asks for Jones' license, Jones pivots toward the vehicle he just exited -- the driver's door is still open -- and leans inside as if to retrieve something, the video shows.
    About two seconds later, the trooper that police identify as Groubert comes into view with a gun drawn and yells "Get out of the car! Get out of the car!" The gun is fired -- at least four shots are heard -- and Jones steps away from the vehicle, raising his hands in the air and eventually moving off camera.
    "I just got my license! You said get my license!" says someone off camera, apparently Jones.
    After being told to put his hands behind his back, Jones asks: "What did I do, sir?"
    "Are you hit?" asks another off-camera voice, apparently Groubert's.
    "I think so," comes the response. "I can't feel my leg. I don't know what happened."
    The conversation continues:
    "Why did you shoot me?"
    "Well, you dove head-first back into your car. Then you (unintelligible), I'm telling you get out of your car."
    Ohio man shot by police in Walmart store
    Shot in the hip
    Jones was shot in the hip, CNN affiliate WACH reported. He was taken to a hospital and later released, authorities said.
    Jones was found not to be armed, Smith said.
    "I believe this case was an isolated incident in which Mr. Groubert reacted to a perceived threat where there was none," Smith said last week.
    In a court hearing Wednesday night, a judge ordered Groubert held with bond set at $75,000, WACH reported.
    In explaining Groubert's firing Friday, Smith said the department's policy on using force says that officers can use "only the level of force necessary to accomplish lawful objectives."
    "That protocol was not followed in this case. Further, this incident occurred in broad daylight. Mr. Groubert had a clear and unobstructed view of Mr. Jones," Smith said.

    The shooting, Smith said, "deviates from SCDPS standards and cannot be tolerated."



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    American Cops Use More Ammo Per Man Than All German Cops Use In A Year

    September 25, 2014, 8:31 am
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    Woman marches with sign during protest march for justice in police shooting death of Sean Bell in New York (Reuters / Mike Segar)
    Woman marches with sign during protest march for justice in police shooting death of Sean Bell in New York (Reuters / Mike Segar)

    85 shots: US cops use more ammo per man than all German cops use per year

    Published time: May 11, 2012 

    Eighty-five shots: That’s the total number of bullets German police used in all of 2011, Der Spiegel reports. But what does it say when US cops use as much ammo to bring down one man as German cops need to keep the peace nationwide?
    The rate at which German police discharged their firearms is further underscored by how rarely they shot with fatal intent.  Of the 85 bullets used in 2011, 49 were warnings shots, 36 were aimed at criminal suspects, 15 people were injured, and 6 were killed, the German daily continues.
    The statistics prove "our police officers are not thugs in uniform,”Christian Democratic insider Lorenz Caffier said.  
    And when comparing Germany with the United States, another story altogether appears. Although police in the United States have to file a report every time they use their firearm in the line of duty, either through sheer volume or disinterest, no statistics are readily available on the amount of ammunition used annually. But though the number of shell casings spent by the boys in blue has not been tallied, there are other indicators that something is amiss when it comes to state-sponsored violence in the US. The US population is almost four times that of Germany's, yet its level of police violence is exponentially higher.
    The trigger-happy nature of US cops was perhaps best epitomized in the controversial 2001 Bruce Springsteen song "American Skin (41 Shots)." The song recounts the 1999 shooting death of an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean immigrant in New York City. The victim, Amadou Diallo, as the song title alludes, was shot 41 times by four plain-clothed police officers outside of his apartment. And Diallo's case is anything but anomalous in today's America.
    Last month, Los Angeles Police killed a 19-year-old man after unloading over 90 shots on him following a high-speed chase down an area freeway. The same month, New York police fired at a suspected murderer 84 times.  While the man was wounded, “the punk incredibly survived,” the New York Post reports.
    Protesters carry a banner as they cross New York′s Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan April 15 to protest 1999 shooting death of Amadou Diallo (REUTERS/Mike Segar)
    Protesters carry a banner as they cross New York′s Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan April 15 to protest 1999 shooting death of Amadou Diallo (REUTERS/Mike Segar)

    Protesters carry a banner as they cross New York's Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan April 15 to protest 1999 shooting death of Amadou Diallo (REUTERS/Mike Segar)
    In 2011, Miami police unloaded their magazines on a reckless Memorial Day driver who had hit several other vehicles. Over 100 rounds later, the driver was killed and seven innocent bystanders were injured in the shooting. Another excessive case occurred in 2006, when a ten-member Florida SWAT team mowed down cop-killer Angilo Freeland in a hail of bullets – 110, to be exact. Polk Country Sheriff Grady Judd nonchalantly told the Orlando Sentinel,
    "That's all the bullets we had."
    In another 2006 six case, plain clothes and undercover New York police shot at Sean Bell more than 50 times a day before his wedding. Bell was killed, and three of his friends were critically injured. The case was widely compared to that of Diallo.
    The phenomenon is so common in America that the term ‘contagious shooting’ – the idea that cops reflexively open fire because others are doing so – has entered the national vocabulary.
    Perhaps one incident that spurred experts to coin the term was a 1995 Bronx robbery where officers fired an incredible 125 shots at a suspect who did not even fire back. “They were shooting to the echo of their own gunfire,” a former police official told The New York Times.
    One officer told the daily in 2006 that “the only reason to be shooting in New York City is that you or someone else is going to be killed and it’s going to be imminent,” and thus you fire as many shots as necessary to “extinguish the threat.” 
    Ironically, one officer even said “until we have some substitute for a firearm, there will always be a situation where more rounds are fired than in other situations.”
    However, even when tasers presented a non-lethal alternative, the bodies kept piling up.  Between 2001 and early 2012, Amnesty International estimated that law enforcement killed 500 people with the device.
    While statistics concerning the total number of cop-inflicted deaths over the last several years are unavailable, a November 2011 US Department of Justice report entitled  ‘Arrest Related Deaths , 2003-2009’ says “a total of 4,813 [arrest-related] deaths were reported to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.” The report further says that “about 6 in 10 deaths (2,931) were classified as homicide by law enforcement personnel, and 4 in 10 (1,882) were attributed to other manners of death.”
    But then, the United States is a violent place. In 2009 alone, the US Center For Disease Control and Prevention says 16,799 people were murdered, with 11,493 of those deaths inflicted by a firearm. A further 1.8 million assault-related emergency room visits were reported in the same year.
    However, despite those figures, violent crime has significantly dropped over the last 20 years, with murder and robbery rates halving from 1991-98.
    But while citizens commit fewer crimes annually, US law enforcement have become increasingly militarized in the post-9/11 world. In fact, instances of excessive force or “other tactics to violate victims civil rights” increased by 25 per cent from 2001 to 2007, USA Today reported.
    With nearly three million US citizens behind bars, cop-related violence on the rise, contagious shooting sprees ever-present and non-lethal weapons being used to deadly effect, 85 is a number that should send shockwaves through the land of the free.

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    Dick Cheney: “No Fair” That Obama Gets to Bomb Syria

    September 25, 2014, 8:36 am
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    NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) — In a Thursday appearance on the Fox News Channel, former Vice-President Dick Cheney said that it was “no fair” that President Obama gets to bomb Syria.
    "People Who Watch Only Fox News 
    Know Less Than People Who Watch No News"


    “I’m envious as hell,” he told Fox’s Sean Hannity. “That was on my bucket list.”

    Asked if he had any advice for the President on bombing Syria, Cheney said, “Just enjoy it. It doesn’t get any better than this.”
    The former Vice-President struck a philosophical note at the conclusion of his interview with Hannity. “Look, I had a good run,” he said. “I got to bomb Afghanistan, and I got to do it to Iraq—twice. But to see someone finally get to bomb Syria and it’s not me? I’d be lying if I said that didn’t hurt like hell.”

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    E.J. Dionne: Newly Appointed Blase Cupich Is Pope Francis’s American Messenger

    September 25, 2014, 8:43 am
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    Bishop Blase Cupich

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    "Pope Francis Links"



    Blase Cupich is Pope Francis’s American messenger

    By E.J. Dionne Jr. September 24, 201
    Leaders can make decisions that signal big changes in the political, religious and ethical landscape. In naming Bishop Blase Cupich the new archbishop of Chicago, Pope Francis did just that.
    Cupich, now the bishop of Spokane, Wash., has been described in media accounts as a “moderate” within the Catholic Church. Temperamentally, this is exactly what he is, an advocate of dialogue and civility. He’s also wise about rejecting labels. Parrying at his first news conference after his appointment was announced Saturday, he offered this response when asked if the moderate tag fit him: “I am going to try to be attentive to what the Lord wants. Maybe if there is moderation in that, then maybe I’m a moderate.”
    E.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog. He is also a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio, ABC’s “This Week” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”View Archive
    Those nicely reticent double “maybes” shouldn’t fool you into believing that Cupich avoids speaking his mind. He has been a courageous voice inside the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops against a culture-war approach to evangelization and politics that pushes so many away from the Gospel.
    He has also been as tough as any prelate in his candor about the church’s profound failures during the sex abuse crisis. “Catholics have been hurt by the moral failings of some priests,” Cupich wrote in 2010, “but they have been hurt and angered even more by bishops who failed to put children first.” He knows the church will never get beyond this scandal until it’s obvious to the faithful that the hierarchy understands how deeply Catholicism was marred by institutional sin, not only by individual crimes.
    His appointment will have an impact beyond the Catholic Church because it tells us a great deal about the role Pope Francis wants the church to play in American life. Cupich played this down, too. “I think he sent a pastor, not a message,” he told reporters.
    But in his case, the pastor is the message. Because of appointments made by Pope John Paul II and, to a lesser degree, Pope Benedict XVI, the bishops’ conference has moved to the right over the past quarter-century. Many conservative bishops have expressed uneasiness or even skepticism about Francis’s leadership — notably his rejection of the idea that issues such as abortion and homosexuality take precedence over economic justice and care for the marginalized. Francis has also caused discomfort by insisting on a church that accompanies people on their journeys rather than expending most of its energy condemning and judging them.
    Of the four most politically potent posts in the American hierarchy — the archbishops of Boston, New York, Chicago and Washington — Chicago was the first to come open since Francis’s election. In naming Cupich, the pope sent the strongest possible hint that he wants the American church to move in his direction.
    Cupich is a Francis Catholic through and through. He was one of the first church leaders I know who immediately and fully understood the meaning of this pope’s election — Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, archbishop emeritus of Washington, was the other — and in an e-mail Wednesday, Cupich embraced the pope’s commission in explaining his priorities.
    “I keep going back to the Holy Father’s call for the kind of serious ongoing conversion that all of us are called to,” he wrote, “on the issues of accompaniment, non-judgmentalism and the throwaway culture of exclusion.”
    Asked which aspects of the American church needed to be preserved and safeguarded, he offered a list that made his priorities clear. Note what he put first: “our outreach to the poor, the participation of laity in the liturgical life of the church, the vitality of the new immigrant groups, the heroism of parents who sacrifice for their children because of their faith, and the continuing witness of priests and religious women.”
    As for American politics, Cupich has emphasized dialogue rather than confrontation with the Obama administration over the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. While many bishops declined to help the uninsured sign up for coverage under the ACA, Cupich asked Catholic Charities in eastern Washington to join in the effort on the basis of a long-standing Catholic principle. “We consider health care a basic human right,” he said.
    The refrain of a popular hymn goes: “They’ll know we are Christian by our love.” Not, it should be noted, by our politics or our dogmatism. That sounds a lot like something Cupich once wrote. “Ultimately,” he said, “it is only the witness who convinces people, not the teacher.” Chicago is the new testing ground for this proposition.
    Read more about this topic:

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    Germany: The One Advanced Economy Whose People Are Happy

    September 25, 2014, 8:50 am
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    Germany’s major export: economic optimism

    Harold Meyerson
    By Harold Meyerson Opinion writer September 24 at 7:49 PM 
    If you live in an advanced economy — in Western Europe, Japan or the United States — odds are you’re in a funk. Unless you live in Germany.
    This month, the Pew Research Center released the results of polling it conducted in 44 nations — 10 of them with what Pew characterized as “advanced” economies (including the United States, France, Japan, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom). The two key questions posed were whether respondents were “satisfied or dissatisfied” with the way things were going in their country and whether they thought the “economic situation in [their] country was good or bad.” Overall, satisfaction with one’s country followed the respondent’s judgment on its economy as the night the day.
    Harold Meyerson writes a weekly political column that appears on Thursdays and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. View Archive
    While the noonday sun was blazing in China (where 89 percent judged their economy good and 87 percent expressed their satisfaction with the way things were going — allowing that some may have feared giving negative answers), night had descended on people in the advanced economies. In nine of those 10, people were more dissatisfied than content with the way things were headed, and in eight of them, they felt their nation’s economic situation was bad. The political composition of their government didn’t seem to matter. In Tory Britain, 55 percent said the economy was bad; in the Obama-led United States, 58 percent said the same. In nationalist-Keynesian Japan, the figure was 63 percent; in Socialist France, 88 percent; in conservative Spain, 93 percent. The gloomiest continent (including both its advanced economies and such emerging economies as Poland and Ukraine) was Europe, where 88 percent said their economies weren’t doing well.
    Except for Germany. Fully 85 percent of Germans said their homeland’s economic situation was good. How do we account for this German exceptionalism?
    Let’s start with manufacturing. Like the only two nations with even higher percentages calling their economies a success (China and Vietnam), Germany is an export dynamo, with a huge trade surplus that bolsters its coffers. It owes part of that surplus to the euro, which makes German goods cheaper than they’d be if Germany had its own currency. But part is due to the strength of the country’s manufacturing sector and the concomitant weakness of its financial sector.
    Many of Germany’s most successful companies are privately owned and not subject to investor pressure to reward large shareholders through practices prevalent in the United States, such as slashing wages, cutting back on worker training and research and development and buying back stock. Publicly traded German companies still retain their earnings to invest in expansions, a practice that was the U.S. norm until the doctrine of rewarding shareholders with nearly all of a company’s profits took hold during the past quarter-century.
    In the United States, major shareholders and the top executives whose pay increasingly is linked to stock price control the corporate boards that approve these kinds of distributions of their companies’ earnings. In Germany, however, the profits that companies rack up are shared more broadly because shareholders don’t dominate corporate boards. By law, any sizable German company must divide the seats on its board equally between management- and worker-selected representatives. Any company with more than 50 employees must have managers meet regularly with workers’ councils to discuss and negotiate issues of working conditions (but not pay). These arrangements have largely ensured that the funding is there for the world’s best worker-training programs and that the most highly skilled and compensated jobs of such globalized German firms as Daimler and Siemens remain in Germany. They have ensured that prosperity is widely shared in Germany — not concentrated at the top, as it is in the United States.
    Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, U.S. financiers and governmental officials repeatedly counseled the Germans to get with the Wall Street program: Offshore your production, they said; build up your equity markets; give shareholders a bigger role. Wisely, the Germans demurred.
    Americans have grown understandably concerned that nearly all income growth here goes to the wealthiest 1 percent. They are enacting minimum-wage increases in a range of cities and states. But the path to a more equitable economy will require more than that. It requires the reshaping of corporate control along German lines. The key to a more equitable economy — and a happier nation — is more equitable control of its economic institutions.
    Just 40 percent of Americans say their nation’s economic situation is good, while 85 percent of Germans feel that way. It’s time to import some of that German exceptionalism.


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