SFC Toby Nunn: I was updating the schedule for staff duty and showers when an Iraqi asked to speak with me. Alla had already left and there was no interpreter, so I prepared myself for confusion, but hoped I would be able to understand as I was pretty pleased with my progress in Arabic in only a short time. The jundi was talking fast, his arms swinging around…
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. In honor of Ohio’s primary here’s a few right-wing emails From My Dad.
Food blogger Phyllis Entis and her husband are on a food-orientated journey through Myanmar. The photographs are beautiful and the commentary funny. The stories range from village scenes to excursions into kitchens and buffets to the Maymyo meat market. My favorite post is the The Great Myanmar Watermelon Caper.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Midrash and Literature edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick.
Chiasmus: A reversal in the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases as in “He went to the country, to the town went she.” [23]
Today, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: You cannot plan an effective list of goals for today without a clear picture of intermediate goals. You should not start on meaningful intermediate goals until you have your long-range goals written, refined and prioritized, and your long-range goals should not be prepared until your unifying principles are similarly written, refined and prioritized. We call this continuity in goal planning and it is basic to the Time Power System.
The United Nations envoy Ibrahim Gambari is back in Myanmar and this trip may be the crucial one. The military dictators of Myanmar have attempted to put a smiley face on their infamy by staging a mock constitutional referendum to be followed by faux elections. Here’s what I think: Gambari has to call bull shit.
From The Sydney Morning Herald:
The United Nations envoy Ibrahim Gambari arrived in Burma yesterday to push for reforms from the ruling junta, in his third visit since the regime’s deadly crackdown on anti-government protests last year.
On past trips, Mr Gambari has been allowed to meet with detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi as well as senior government officials – although he has been granted only one meeting with the junta leader, Senior General Than Shwe.
Mr Gambari is expected to press the regime to include Suu Kyi in its plans to hold a constitutional referendum in two months’ time and multi-party elections in 2010.
If held, the elections would be the first since Suu Kyi led her National League for Democracy (NLD) party to a landslide victory in 1990 polls.
The junta ignored the result of the election, and has kept the Nobel peace prize winner under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years.
Analysts say the military will likely turn a deaf ear to Mr Gambari’s calls for reform, noting the generals have so far resisted outside pressure.
The ruling junta has already enacted a law that makes it illegal to give speeches and distribute pamphlets about the referendum.
The NLD has warned that the proposed constitution “cannot be accepted by the people” but has stopped short of calling for a boycott or urging a “no” vote.
The NLD said it had failed in a bid to sue the military government for not recognising their victory in 1990.
The party fears the junta will try to formally cancel the result of the earlier election by pushing ahead with its own election plan.
So far, the junta has only been willing to make minor concessions, such as allowing Mr Gambari to visit, despite the international outrage sparked by its deadly crackdown on peaceful marches led by Buddhist monks in September.
This is why the inauguration of President John Adams, the first peaceful transfer of power to an opposing party, on 4 March 1897 is so historically significant. Tyrants don’t let loose of power gladly.
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right,” wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy – the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea.
It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy.
It doesn’t resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do – and what we will do.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will – to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty – no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war.
No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens. Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price and David Simon
I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Open Congress: The Social Network.
SPC Beaird: A few weeks ago we had our monthly “town hall” meeting for our PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team), where our commander usually puts out new information, addresses any problems going on, rumors are put to rest (I swear the rumors that fly around here are worse than among a group of kids in junior high), and awards are often given out. There…
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. In honor of Ohio’s primary here’s a few right-wing emails From My Dad.
Hillary Clinton goes to a primary school in New York to talk about the world. After her talk she offers a question time.
One little boy puts up his hand. The senator asks him what his name is.
“Kenneth.”
“And what is your question, Kenneth?”
“I have three questions: First – whatever happened to the medical health care plan you were paid to develop during your husband’s eight years in the office as President? Second – why would you run for President after your husband shamed the office? Third – whatever happened to all those things you took when you left the White House?”
Just then the bell rings for recess. Hillary Clinton informs the kids that they will continue after recess.
When they resume, Hillary says, “Okay, where were we? Oh, that’s right, question time. Who has a question?”
A different little boy puts his hand up. Hillary point him out and asks him what his name is.
“Larry.”
“And what is your question, Larry?”
“I have five questions: First – whatever happened to the medical health care plan you were paid to develop during your husband’s eight years in the office as President? Second – why would you run for President after your husband shamed the office? Third – whatever happened to all those things you took when you left the White House? Fourth – why did the recess bell go off 20 minutes early? Fifth – what happened to Kenneth?”
My position on firearms is a nuanced one win which almost anyone can find something to not like. I think gun control in the United States is a fairy light to distract people from real issues, yet I’ve grown more enamored with the concept of an International ban on the shipment of firearms across any international boarder. Yeah, I’m inconsistent. Deal.
A Myanmar monk called for a global weapons embargo on his country, telling a human rights conference Thursday that the junta’s military leaders must not be allowed to use guns against his people again.
U Awbata said he struggles to shake memories of Myanmar soldiers opening fire on fellow monks during street protests last September, stomping on their heads and pummeling them with batons.
“It doesn’t matter how many tears I shed,” U Awbata said at the three-day conference in Indonesia. “I cannot erase these images from my mind.”
U Awbata is one of several monks who fled Myanmar after the crackdown and have shared tales of alleged torture and other brutality during last September’s uprising.
The protests were initiated by veteran pro-democracy activists to oppose a huge fuel price hike by the military and reflected long-standing discontent with the repressive military regime. Buddhist monks later joined the protests, which escalated into the biggest anti-government rallies in two decades.
The United Nations estimated at least 31 people were killed and thousands more detained in the military crackdown that followed.
The United States imposed financial sanctions against the country’s military rulers, freezing their assets in U.S. banks and barring American citizens from doing business with the junta.
U Awbata fled across the border to Thailand after witnessing the attack at the famed Shwedagon pagoda and then headed to Sri Lanka, where he continues to support the struggle to bring change to his homeland.
It is not clear how many died in the Shwedagon pagoda attack. U Awbata said he saw three monks killed as they were chanting prayers of love.
“When they fell down, the soldiers used their boots and stamped on the heads of the wounded monks and beat them with batons,” he said, fighting back emotion.
Sure, they could make their own rifles and bullets. But that would be different to me. Would it be different to you?
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Midrash and Literature edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick.
Asyndeton: The omission of conjunctions as in “He provided the poor with jobs, with opportunity, with self-respect.”[14]
Today, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: When you identify your highest priorities of life, what you value most, you anticipate those events. When you bring them under control, you experience a profound self-esteem you cannot get in any other way. It is the greatest surge of of self esteem that anyone can ever have.
I don’t pay attention to celebrity news, but I have a friend who can’t help herself. This morning she told me about the $2,500 per week the father of Britany Spears has been awarded by a judge to manage his daughters affairs. Compare that to the $1,500 per month Sister Donata has to scrape up to care for her orphans.
From The Christian Science Monitor:
In a whitewashed office, a young Burmese mother cradles a sleeping baby. Ni Lar Win is waiting to hear if she can leave her 2-month-old son at the “House on the Hill” in this Thai border town.
Her husband left six months into her pregnancy, she says, and now she wants to move to the city for work, so she can repay some debts and help her sick mother. That means finding someone to take in her newborn. So Ni Lar Win has come to find the foreigner at Baan Unrak (Home of Joy) to ask if there’s room for her son, at least for a while. “I heard it’s good for children here. They can stay here and study. There’s no need to worry.”
Ni Lar Win’s plight is one Dulci Donata hears of often: debt, poverty, illness – and an unwanted child. In 1991, Ms. Donata founded Home of Joy as a sanctuary for destitute kids, mostly ethnic minorities fleeing war and political upheaval in Burma (Myanmar). Now, she has more than 140 children in her care, crowding a three-story building on a hillside above a steep ravine.
But Donata proposes something else: Ni Lar Win should take a job at Home of Joy and bring her mother and baby to live there.
As Ni Lar Win, an ethnic Mon, heads back to her village to consider the offer, Donata explains that by taking in struggling single mothers, she hopes to keep mothers and children together and help the mothers to rebuild their lives. Most children here aren’t strictly orphans, but are born into broken, demoralized families. “To serve mothers is to serve babies,” she says.
Serving others is second nature to Donata, an Italian nun in Ananda Marga (Path of Bliss), a spiritualist movement founded in India. Every morning, she rises at 5 a.m. for meditation and spends the rest of her day taking care of the children and managing the house, which relies on donations to cover its expenses, which exceed $1,500 a month.
At night, Donata, whom everyone calls Didi (“sister”), shares her sparsely furnished bedroom with several children. When it gets too noisy, she rolls out a mat on the floor in her office. Her only breaks are occasional trips to Bangkok, six hours away, to browbeat government officials into untying red tape that thwarts undocumented migrants.
How do suppose James Spears sleeps at night?
I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is What’s your congresscritter doing?
Powered by Wordpress | Design by Ash Haque
XHTML Strict | RSS Entries
