Ever since the execution of Saddam Hussein on December 30, 2006, I've been thinking about the basic assumptions that most people make about how to fight evil in the world.  We can not have any doubt that there is evil in the world.  Mass murder and enslavement, subjecting human beings to poverty and squalor, torture of prisoners, crushing those daring to demand the freedom to make their own decisions; these are all obviously going on in the world, and these are obviously evil acts.

These aren't the acts of individuals.   These are the acts of entire organized movements of huge numbers of people.  Whether it is an army conquering territory, or a government grinding its citizens under an iron heel, no individual person can be accused of carrying out a massacre of thousands, or forcing millions to think only the officially permitted thoughts and to speak only the officially permitted words.  The most prolific serial killer in human history couldn't even begin to approach the pure evil of what the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin's leadership did to Russians, what the Khmer Rouge inflicted on Cambodia under the direction of Pol Pot, or any other example you could name.

What people seem to forget is that evil leaders are not the problem.  You can't lay the blame for true systematic large scale evil on the fact that there is a Saddam Hussein in the world, or even an Adolph Hitler.  Without thousands of people willing to carry out their orders, a Saddam Hussein or a Mao Zedong would just be the neighborhood cranky guy, shouting "Hey you kids, get off of my lawn."

Without followers willing to carry out horrific acts of murder, torture and theft, there are no evil leaders.  The way to take away an evil leader's power is to take away their followers.  

The approach taken by the United States when a foreign government is run by an "evil regime" has been to use military force, taking away the followers of the "evil leader" by  destroying their armies, blowing up their industrial resources and by slaughtering innocent bystanders and dismissing their deaths as "collateral damage."  Thus, the followers eliminated, we capture and execute their leaders.  

That was the plan in Iraq, and that will be the plan for the next country that our leaders think takes one step out of line.   However, it is a flawed way to take away the followers of a leader that you don't like.  By killing, maiming, torturing and starving the followers of a leader you don't like, all you do is drive them to find another leader, preferably one who will save them from being killed, maimed, tortured and starved.

As a Christian, I happen to think there is a better way to take away the followers of evil leaders.  For that matter, any human being with an ounce of compassion for fellow humans would say there has to be a better way to turn a dictator out of power.

At the time Jesus preached, the Romans had conquered Israel completely.    The Roman emperors instituted a fairly typical occupation as these things go.  According to most accounts many of the Jews of the time were hoping for a new Judah Maccabee, a military leader who would inspire them to rise up, slaughter the Romans and drive them out.  After all, that's how things were expected to be done at the time.  Many others were content to go along with the Roman occupiers, and hope for the best

The crowds that gathered to hear Jesus were probably expecting to hear "death to the Romans" but instead were told ""If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even 'sinners' love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even 'sinners' do that. 34And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even 'sinners' lend to 'sinners,' expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful."


They were expecting to be told that their religious leaders were completely right and that Rome's Emperor-worship was completely wrong.  Instead they were told "The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them."

Christ's message served many purposes, but the one most people miss is that he was taking followers away from leaders who either were evil or were content to ignore evil being done.  If enough followers are taken away by Christ's message, the leaders become powerless.

As Christ showed when He arose after the crucifixion, even death of the body can't stop the idea that people can simply choose to not follow evil people.  I see Christ's most vital message is that the best way to make the Earth into God's Kingdom is to convince people of this.

For additional proof that simply trying to slaughter the followers of evil leaders to take away their power doesn't work, I'd like to point out that in 66 AD the Jews tried an armed rebellion against the Roman Empire. They simply managed to get Jerusalem destroyed, Herod's Temple burned, and the Jewish people were enslaved, massacred and scattered for thousands of years.

With all of this in mind, I'd like to say that I feel the Republican Party since 1980 has shown itself to be an organization led by evil people.  They have been attempting to lead the United States as far from Christ's message of building God's Kingdom on Earth as it is possible to go.  In doing so, the Republican Party leaders, their financial backers and media cheerleaders have shown themselves to be in the service of Satan himself.

I encourage all of you reading this to do all you can to take away the power from these evil people, by persuading their followers to stop following them.  In 2007, I'll be building the Matthew 23 Ministries web site, http://www.godhatesrepublicans.org into the best source for information to help Christians see that the self proclaimed "God's Own Party" are nothing of the sort.  God loves all of His creations, but those who do evil and claim it to be His will can not expect to be forgiven.

The Book of Proverbs chapter 6, verses 16 to 19;
These six things the LORD hates,
Yes, seven are an abomination to Him:
A proud look A lying tongue,
Hands that shed innocent blood,
A heart that devises wicked plans,
Feet that are swift in running to evil,
A false witness who speaks lies,
And one who sows discord among brethren.

These seven qualities embody the campaign strategy and methods once in office of Republican political candidates since 1980.

I don't hold the Democrats, or the Green s or the Libertarians or the people who never vote to be blameless either.  Our entire modern society has been grossly mismanaged, every person who has power, and every powerless person who just went along with the rest of the crowd has been a part of making the mess the world has become.

Don't compromise with evil leaders.  Don't give them your consent by not challenging their authority.  Hold those who claim power accountable.

Let the George Bushes and Rupert Murdocks and Antonin Scalias of the world be reduced to becoming the neighborhood crackpots they so richly deserve to be.   Do not follow them, do not respect them, and do not honor them in any way.  Let them dry up and blow away with the wind.  

http://www.ctnow.com/custom/nmm/newhavenadvocate/hce-nha-1123-nh48bushbash48.artnov23,0,1695911.story

Bush Nuts
Are George W. Bush lovers certifiable?
November 23, 2006
By Andy Bromage
 
A collective "I told you so" will ripple through the world of Bush-bashers once news of Christopher Lohse's study gets out.

Lohse, a social work master's student at Southern Connecticut State University, says he has proven what many progressives have probably suspected for years: a direct link between mental illness and support for President Bush.

Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse's study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person's psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.

But before you go thinking all your conservative friends are psychotic, listen to Lohse's explanation.

"Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader," Lohse says. "If your world is very mixed up, there's something very comforting about someone telling you, 'This is how it's going to be.'"

The study was an advocacy project of sorts, designed to register mentally ill voters and encourage them to go to the polls, Lohse explains. The Bush trend was revealed later on.

The study used Modified General Assessment Functioning, or MGAF, a 100-point scale that measures the functioning of disabled patients. A second scale, developed by Rakfeldt, was also used. Knowledge of current issues, government and politics were assessed on a 12-item scale devised by the study authors.

"Bush supporters had significantly less knowledge about current issues, government and politics than those who supported Kerry," the study says.

Lohse says the trend isn't unique to Bush: A 1977 study by Frumkin & Ibrahim found psychiatric patients preferred Nixon over McGovern in the 1972 election.

Rakfeldt says the study was legitimate, though not intended to show what it did.

"Yes it was a legitimate study but these data were mined after the fact," Rakfeldt says. "You can ask new questions of the data. I haven't looked at" Lohse's conclusions regarding Bush, Rakfeldt says.

"That doesn't make it illegitimate, it just wasn't part of the original project."

For his part, Lohse is a self-described "Reagan revolution fanatic" but said that W. is just "beyond the pale." ?

abromage@newhavenadvocate.com

Do a quick google of the word dominionist and you'll find tons of information on people who want to make the American legal system conform to religious law, just like our buddies in Saudi Arabia.

By the way, I bet this news story doesn't make the top of the news cycle for many minutes here in the US.

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/DirectoryRiseOfDominionismInAmerica.html


Rape case roils Saudi legal system

By DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer Tue Nov 21, 4:49 PM ET

AL-AWWAMIYA, Saudi Arabia - When the teenager went to the police a few months ago to report she was gang-raped by seven men, she never imagined the judge would punish her — and that she would be sentenced to more lashes than one of her alleged rapists received.
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The story of the Girl of Qatif, as the alleged rape victim has been called by the media here, has triggered a rare debate about Saudi Arabia's legal system, in which judges have wide discretion in punishing a criminal, rules of evidence are shaky and sometimes no defense lawyers are present.

The result, critics say, are sentences left to the whim of judges. These include one in which a group of men got heavier sentences for harassing women than the men in the Girl of Qatif rape case or three men who were convicted of raping a boy. In another, a woman was ordered to divorce her husband against her will based on a demand by her relatives.

In the case of the Girl of Qatif, she was sentenced to 90 lashes for being alone in a car with a man to whom she was not married — a crime in this strictly segregated country — at the time that she was allegedly attacked and raped by a group of other men.

In the sleepy, Shiite village of al-Awwamiya on the outskirts of the eastern city of Qatif, the 19-year-old is struggling to forget the spring night that changed her life. An Associated Press reporter met her in a face-to-face interview. She spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her privacy; the AP does not identify rape victims unless they ask to be named.

Her hands tremble, her dark brown eyes are lifeless. Her sleep is interrupted by a replay of the events, which she describes in a barely audible whisper.

That night, she said, she had left home to retrieve her picture from a male high school student she used to know. She had just been married — but had not moved in with her husband — and did not want her picture to remain with the student.

While the woman was in the car with the student, she said, two men intercepted them, got into the vehicle and drove the couple to a secluded area where the two were separated. She said she was raped by seven men, three of whom also allegedly raped her friend.

In a trial that ended in November — in which the prosecutor asked for the death penalty for the seven men — four of the men received between one and five years in prison plus 80 to 1,000 lashes, said the woman. Three others are awaiting sentencing. Neither the defendants nor the plaintiffs retained lawyers, as is common here.

"The big shock came when the judge sentenced me and the man to 90 lashes each," said the woman. The sentence was handed down as part of the rape trial. Lashes are usually spread over several days, dealt around 50 at a time.

The sentences have yet to be carried out, but the punishments ordered have caused an uproar.

"Because I could make no sense (of the sentence) and became in dire need of patience, I muttered after I read the verdict against the Girl of Qatif: 'My heart is with you,'" wrote Fatima al-Faqeeh in a column in Al-Watan newspaper.

Justice in Saudi Arabia is administered by a system of religious courts according to the kingdom's strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia law. Judges — appointed by the king on the recommendation of the Supreme Judicial Council — have complete discretion to set sentences, except in cases where Sharia outlines a punishment, such as capital crimes.

That means no two judges would likely hand down the same verdict for similar crimes. A rapist, for instance, could receive anywhere from a light or no sentence to death, depending on the judge.

Saudis are urging the Justice Ministry to clarify the logic behind some rulings. In one recent case, three men convicted of raping a 12-year-old boy received sentences of between one and two years in prison and 300 lashes each. In contrast, another judge sentenced at least four men to between six and 12 years imprisonment for fondling women in a tunnel in Riyadh.

Saleh al-Shehy, a columnist for Al-Watan, asked Justice Minister Abdullah Al-Sheik to explain why the boy's rapists got a lighter sentence than the men in last year's sexual harassment case.

"I won't ask you my brother, the minister, if you find the ruling satisfactory or not," wrote al-Shehy. "I will ask you, 'Do you think it satisfies God?"

"Please explain to us how one judge ruled and how the other ruled? What evidence did the one rely on and what proof did the other use?" he added.

The broad discretion judges enjoy have been a disaster for Fatima, another Saudi woman. She suddenly found herself divorced from her husband, Mansour al-Timani, after her half-brothers went to a judge and told him their sister had married beneath her.

Fatima, whose full name has not been given in media reports, had been married for over three years and was pregnant with her second child when the judge declared the marriage void in July 2005.

Today, Fatima sits in jail with her 11-month-old son — her 4-year-old daughter was recently freed — rather than return to the custody of her family as the judge decreed.

The problems over sentencing are exacerbated by loose trial rules, in which physical evidence sometimes is not presented.

The Girl of Qatif said her trial had two sessions. The three trial judges asked for her statement, then heard the statement from the seven defendants in the first court session, according to the woman. In the second, about a month later, the judges pronounced their verdict. It was not known if there were other sessions she did not attend.

Judges in the case referred The Associated Press to the Justice Ministry when asked about the sentencing. The ministry, in a statement Tuesday, said rape could not be proved. There were no witnesses and the men had recanted confessions they made during interrogation, the statement said. It said the verdict cannot be appealed.

Sharia allows defendants to deny signed confessions, according to Abdul-Aziz al-Gassem, a lawyer who was not involved in the case. They still get punished if convicted, but the verdict is lighter.

"The lack of transparency in the investigation, the trial and the sentencing, plus the difficulties that journalists have to get access lead to deep a darkness where everything is possible," said al-Gassem.

My state just elected a senator based on his being able to show up as a congressman for 20 years.  I'd rather have voted for someone who had an opinion I agreed with and who was willing to say it in public...

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009246

Class Struggle
American workers have a chance to be heard.

BY JIM WEBB
Wednesday, November 15, 2006 12:01 a.m.

The most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.

Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic's range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.

In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn't happen. Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone. Half of that increase comes from wage-earners' pockets rather than from insurance, and 47 million Americans have no medical insurance at all.

Manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Many earned pension programs have collapsed in the wake of corporate "reorganization." And workers' ability to negotiate their futures has been eviscerated by the twin threats of modern corporate America: If they complain too loudly, their jobs might either be outsourced overseas or given to illegal immigrants.

This ever-widening divide is too often ignored or downplayed by its beneficiaries. A sense of entitlement has set in among elites, bordering on hubris. When I raised this issue with corporate leaders during the recent political campaign, I was met repeatedly with denials, and, from some, an overt lack of concern for those who are falling behind. A troubling arrogance is in the air among the nation's most fortunate. Some shrug off large-scale economic and social dislocations as the inevitable byproducts of the "rough road of capitalism." Others claim that it's the fault of the worker or the public education system, that the average American is simply not up to the international challenge, that our education system fails us, or that our workers have become spoiled by old notions of corporate paternalism.

Still others have gone so far as to argue that these divisions are the natural results of a competitive society. Furthermore, an unspoken insinuation seems to be inundating our national debate: Certain immigrant groups have the "right genetics" and thus are natural entrants to the "overclass," while others, as well as those who come from stock that has been here for 200 years and have not made it to the top, simply don't possess the necessary attributes.

Most Americans reject such notions. But the true challenge is for everyone to understand that the current economic divisions in society are harmful to our future. It should be the first order of business for the new Congress to begin addressing these divisions, and to work to bring true fairness back to economic life. Workers already understand this, as they see stagnant wages and disappearing jobs.

America's elites need to understand this reality in terms of their own self-interest. A recent survey in the Economist warned that globalization was affecting the U.S. differently than other "First World" nations, and that white-collar jobs were in as much danger as the blue-collar positions which have thus far been ravaged by outsourcing and illegal immigration. That survey then warned that "unless a solution is found to sluggish real wages and rising inequality, there is a serious risk of a protectionist backlash" in America that would take us away from what they view to be the "biggest economic stimulus in world history."

More troubling is this: If it remains unchecked, this bifurcation of opportunities and advantages along class lines has the potential to bring a period of political unrest. Up to now, most American workers have simply been worried about their job prospects. Once they understand that there are (and were) clear alternatives to the policies that have dislocated careers and altered futures, they will demand more accountability from the leaders who have failed to protect their interests. The "Wal-Marting" of cheap consumer products brought in from places like China, and the easy money from low-interest home mortgage refinancing, have softened the blows in recent years. But the balance point is tipping in both cases, away from the consumer and away from our national interest.

The politics of the Karl Rove era were designed to distract and divide the very people who would ordinarily be rebelling against the deterioration of their way of life. Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of "God, guns, gays, abortion and the flag" while their way of life shifted ineluctably beneath their feet. But this election cycle showed an electorate that intends to hold government leaders accountable for allowing every American a fair opportunity to succeed.

With this new Congress, and heading into an important presidential election in 2008, American workers have a chance to be heard in ways that have eluded them for more than a decade. Nothing is more important for the health of our society than to grant them the validity of their concerns. And our government leaders have no greater duty than to confront the growing unfairness in this age of globalization.

Mr. Webb is the Democratic senator-elect from Virginia.

I'm seriously thinking of chucking everything and working on ways to insure a minimal acceptable quality of life for all.  Politics and the business world can bite  me, people are hungry and homeless.

Google mini house and Algaculture for a hint of what I'm thinking of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algaculture

 

 

Published on Friday, November 3, 2006 by McClatchy Newspapers
The Rich Are Getting Much Richer, Much Faster Than Everyone Else
by Kevin G. Hall
 
WASHINGTON - Over the past quarter-century, and especially in the last 10 years, America's very rich have grown much richer. No one else fared as well.

In 2004, the richest 1 percent of households - 719,910 of them, with an average annual income of $326,720 - had 19.8 percent of the entire nation's pretax income. That's up from 17.8 percent a year earlier, according to a study by University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez.

The study, titled "The Evolution of Top Incomes," also found that the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans - 129,584 households in 2004 - reported income equal to 9.5 percent of national pretax income.

However, median, or midpoint, family income rose only 1.6 percent between 2001 and 2004, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Federal Reserve. Median family real net worth - a family's gross assets minus liabilities - rose only 1.5 percent during those four years.

Those are very sluggish income-growth rates compared with the four years between 1998 and 2001, when median family income grew by 9.5 percent and median family real net worth grew by 10.3 percent.

Experts disagree on the causes, but they're in near agreement that this trend threatens to erode a fundamental American belief about fairness.

"It's not the actual getting ahead in America that's so important - it's been Americans' deep belief that they have the opportunity to get ahead. And if you lose that, there's damage to our society," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who until last year was the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and before that was chief economist for President Bush.

In coming years, income inequality is sure to be a rallying cry in political debates over everything from raising the minimum wage to federal spending on education to overhauling the tax code.

Most theories on why the rich are getting richer focus on why everyone else isn't. Some explanations include the declining power of labor, the influx of illegal immigrants, the offshoring of jobs and global competition that holds down wage growth.

Education has widened income inequality, too. Americans with college degrees earn nearly twice as much as those without them.

But education hasn't been a ticket to income growth lately.

Between 2000 and 2005, workers with four-year college degrees saw their wages fall 3.1 percent, adjusted for inflation. Only two groups, who together make up just 3.4 percent of the workforce, saw inflation-adjusted wages rise. They were workers with doctoral degrees or specialty degrees, such as medicine or law, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The soaring pay enjoyed by top CEOs, athletes and entertainers also has added to the widening income divide.

"I'm thinking Tiger Woods causes some income inequality," said Holtz-Eakin. "All of that seems to be part of this, but it still leaves you with a sense of not knowing exactly what it is."

There's a simpler explanation. The very wealthy simply own more assets than the rest of us. That means they benefit more from the booming stock market, which is reaching record highs.

Since 1926, stocks have given investors an average annual return of about 10 percent (with large fluctuations, depending on the years). In 2004, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans were almost three times more likely to own stock than the broad universe of U.S. families, according to the Federal Reserve.

The median value of stock holdings for the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans was $110,000 per household in 2004, according to Morgan Stanley, the banking giant. The value of stocks held by the other 90 percent of Americans averaged $8,350.

Those numbers lead some to question the fairness of Bush's 2003 tax cuts, which lowered the top rate at which capital gains and dividends are taxed. Individual income tax rates in the top four income brackets were also lowered to 25, 28, 33 and 35 percent.

"We've had a 30-year trend of income inequality. What's new in the last five years is the degree to which tax policy has made that worse, rather than leaned against that trend," said Jason Furman, a senior fellow for the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and an economist at New York University.

If Democrats capture the House of Representatives on Tuesday, they won't immediately set about trying to reverse the Bush-era tax cuts. Rep. Charles Rangel of New York would head the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, and he's said he won't seek a rollback but will vigorously oppose extending the cuts beyond 2010, the year they're set to expire.

Some conservatives fear that Democrats will seek to redistribute wealth by revamping the tax code to address income inequality. They defend the status quo by pointing to tax data showing that the rich contribute the greatest share of taxes.

In 2003, the wealthiest 10 percent held 37.2 percent of national income, a 50.2 percent share of all federal tax liabilities and a 69.6 percent share of individual income tax liabilities, according to a Congressional Budget Office tax study.

"We've redistributed income about as much as we can," said James Glassman, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

© 2006 McClatchy Washington Bureau and wire service sources

###

With this article in mind, it would be interesting to use photoshop to show a "whole version" of the left half of GWB's face in a variety of circumstances.  Any visual arts types got the time?

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonard-shlain/why-bush-smirks_b_32784.html

Why Bush Smirks (64 comments )
READ MORE: George W. Bush
In observing our president's expressions over the years, I became aware of a feature of George Bush's face that revealed more about his inner self than anything issuing forth from his mouth. President Bush has a disconnect between the right side and the left side of his face. While the right side of his mouth and the corner of his right eyes portray a smile, the left side of his mouth and the corners of his left eye convey a scowl.

The result is a twisted smirk that has become his trademark expression.

As a vascular surgeon who has operated on carotid arteries to the brain, I have long been interested in the opposing functions performed by the two hemispheres of the human brain. All vertebrates, from fish to fowl have a bi-lobed brain. Each half, with few exceptions, is a mirror image of the other both in appearance and function.

The organization of the human brain when compared to other vertebrate brains occupies the extreme edge of the bell shaped curve. Although the halves of our brain appear identical, each hemisphere is functionally different. The left-brain in right-handed people (and the majority of left- handers, too,) is the seat of language, logic, and one-at-a-time mental faculties that require a sense of linearity, sequence, and time.

In contrast, the right hemisphere excels at holistic thinking and the all-at-once recognition of gestalts and patterns, especially faces; all primarily spatial functions.

Also, there exists a marked contrast between the distribution of emotions to the right and left of the brain's great divide. The majority of emotions have their seat in the right hemisphere but a few reside in the left. Optimism, cheerfulness, and happiness hold sway in the left frontal lobe. Anger, fear, terror, disgust, and sadness, are far more prominently represented in the right. The emotions in the right hemisphere are more primal and are highly attuned to instinctual "fight or flight" mechanisms necessary for a creature to stay alive in a dangerous environment.

The muscles controlling the left side of the face take their orders from the motor neurons in the right brain; the converse holds true for the left brain/ right side of face. Artists, actors, and astute poker players have long known that the left side of a person's face is far more revealing of their inner emotions than is their right side. In the most famous painting in the world, Leonardo placed the shadows around the corner of Mona Lisa's left side of her mouth and eye more than the right because it added to her mystery. Most portraiture lights up the right side and casts the left in shadow. Half hidden in darkness, the left side is a truer portal to the inner emotional state of the subject than is the more prominently displayed, better lit, right side of the face.

Most individual can coordinate both of their hemispheres to produce a symmetrical smile or frown. George Bush seems unable to accomplish this feat in his unguarded moments or when he becomes agitated. His lopsided smirk reveals an inner disconnectedness between the two sides of his brain. And the left sided scowl, and glaring left eye provides a more accurate window into his soul and psyche than does his smiling right. I would further speculate that this disconnect evident in his facial expression might have something to do with the president's unprecedented syntactical mangling of the English language. Sentences inarticulately constructed often belie a disordering of thought processes.

Psychologists have studied the phenomenon of the split face for many years and have accumulated a reservoir of studies that conclusively indicate that the expression of the left side of an individual's face is far more revealing concerning their emotional state than is their whole face.

The next time George Bush appears on television observe the left side of his face only and you will obtain a truer picture of what is in his heart than can be garnered by taking in the gestalt of his entire face. It would appear that not only has George Bush polarized the electorate as no other president in recent history has, but he also has polarized brain hemispheres.

Send to a friendPost a CommentPrint PostRead all posts by Leonard Shlain

I think the only thing that'd get the U.S. back on track is to have a few hundred of the current crop of politicians, political appointees, CIA torture experts and assorted flunkies put on trial for war crimes, and some military contractors put on trial for war profiteering.  We can get a jury of back door drafted National Guardsmen, war widows and orphans, and let the chips fall where they may. 

When they are convicted for destroying the world's image of America once and for all as the last best hope for humanity, we can use them for medical experiments.  Spending the rest of their lives as lab rats for flu vaccines might be fitting.


http://www.sptimes.com/2006/10/22/Columns/We_sentenced_Japanese.shtml
We sentenced Japanese for this

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective Columnist
Published October 22, 2006


Flanked by the panjandrums of shame and the dirty hands gang, including the current attorney general and the vice president, President Bush on Tuesday signed into law the Military Commissions Act, a law that will go down in history as an obscenity against liberty and decency.

No presidential signing statement accompanies this bill. Bush got the despotic powers he wanted, or as White House spokesman Tony Snow explained it: "They did a really good job this time," meaning that you don't have to confiscate power by rewriting a law when Congress hands it to you.

In touting the measure, Bush declared that the "CIA program" would now be allowed to continue and interrogators could return to performing "their duties to the fullest extent of the law." He presumably means that the CIA will once again be free to use reported techniques such as water-boarding - in which a prisoner is made to feel like he's drowning - or forcing shackled prisoners to stand in one place for 40 hours or more, or exposing naked prisoners to 50-degree temperatures and drenching them with cold water.

Bush was strident in asserting that the CIA chamber of horrors or "program" could be open for business again. But at the same time, the president gravely assured us: "The United States does not torture."

Interestingly, we weren't nearly as blithe about waterboarding when it happened to our own guys during World War II. Then, we considered it a war crime and a form of torture.

In "Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts," Judge Evan Wallach of the U.S. Court of International Trade has documented the trials in which the United States used evidence of water-boarding as a basis for prosecutions. The article, still in draft form, will be published soon by the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

Among the numerous examples, Wallach cites one involving four Japanese defendants who were tried before a U.S. military commission at Yokohama, Japan, in 1947 for their treatment of American and Allied prisoners. Wallach writes, in the case of United States of America vs. Hideji Nakamura, Yukio Asano, Seitara Hata and Takeo Kita, "water torture was among the acts alleged in the specifications ... and it loomed large in the evidence presented against them."

Hata, the camp doctor, was charged with war crimes stemming from the brutal mistreatment and torture of Morris Killough "by beating and kicking him (and) by fastening him on a stretcher and pouring water up his nostrils." Other American prisoners, including Thomas Armitage, received similar treatment, according to the allegations.

Armitage described his ordeal: "They would lash me to a stretcher then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about 2 gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness."

Hata was sentenced to 25 years at hard labor, and the other defendants were convicted and given long stints at hard labor as well.

Wallach also found a 1983 case out of San Jacinto County, Texas, in which James Parker, the county sheriff, and three deputies were criminally charged for handcuffing suspects to chairs, draping towels over their faces and pouring water over the towel until a confession was elicited. One victim described the experience this way: "I thought I was going to be strangled to death. ... I couldn't breath."

The sheriff pleaded guilty and his deputies went to trial where they were convicted of civil rights violations. All received long prison sentences. U.S. District Judge James DeAnda told the former sheriff at sentencing, "The operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country."

But not our president. He's just about as proud as can be of the "program," boasting about all the fine intelligence we've extracted from the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, while conveniently ignoring all the bad information that spilled out of him that sent our law enforcement on wild goose chases.

A former CIA insider suggests that the president has got it all wrong if he thinks CIA interrogators are looking for license to mistreat prisoners.

According to Fred Hitz, former CIA inspector general and veteran CIA operations officer: "There's nobody out there in the CIA that I can imagine who wants to be governed by a set of standards that is different from those in the Army Field Manual." Under that manual, abusive techniques are strictly barred.

So it's really the president and vice president and their minions who are pushing for interrogation techniques that Dr. Allen Keller, who directs a program for torture survivors in New York, calls "torture" and the infliction of "serious physical or mental pain and suffering."

Our leaders think the Military Commissions Act gives them the thumbs-up. But morality, common decency and history surely won't.

[Last modified October 22, 2006, 01:51:23]

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/170044/

Will real conservatives please stand up?

Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006

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Almost from the first, President

Bush has acted as if there would

never be another election. That's the main thing adepts of the cult of personality surrounding this arrogant, befuddled little man love about him. "As his supporters saw him," Sidney Blumenthal writes in his bracing new book, "How Bush Rules," " his simplistic rhetoric was straight talk, his dogmatism fortitude, his swagger reassuring, his stubbornness... a bulwark against danger, and his rough edges proof that he was a man of the people. " What most Americans have appeared reluctant to grasp, Blumenthal thinks, is the radical extremism behind the administration's concept of the "unitary executive" —seizing upon the metaphorical war on terror to declare the commander-inchief above the strictures of the U. S. Constitution and unfettered by whatever limitations a timorous Congress might seek to impose. By and large, the rubber-stamp Republican House and Senate have imposed none. On critical issues, the so-called GOP moderates and mavericks have feigned resistance, then gone along for the ride. Last month's shameless capitulation allowing Bush to strip "enemy combatants" —American citizens included—of the right to challenge their imprisonment in court was a dramatic example.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., for example, opined that the White House's bill permitting indefinite detention by presidential fiat set American law back 900 years. It's blatantly unconstitutional. The Constitution specifically forbids suspending habeas corpus "unless... in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion." Lest he be branded soft on terrorism, Specter then voted for it with the rest, including alleged maverick Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

There's long been an undercurrent of authoritarianism in American politics, particularly across the South and agrarian Midwest. Some of Bush's warmest supporters are direct descendants of the 19 th century nativist Know-Nothing Party. Many seem morally outraged by anybody who can count higher than two. I get frequent e-mails telling me that being anti-torture makes me pro-terrorist or that it's un-American to oppose life imprisonment without a trial. Some take grim pleasure in identifying the enemy as Islam itself, making the conflict religious and racial—just how they like it.

There are many ways to characterize such views, but conservative isn't one of them. There's nothing conservative about a lynch mob. To his credit, Bush stresses that "Islamic" and "terrorist" aren't synonyms. But he also tells thunderous falsehoods casting Democrats as enemy sympathizers. At a GOP fund-raiser recently, he charged that "177 of the opposition party said, 'You know, we don't think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.'"

Challenged, the White House press office was unable to identify a single Democrat who'd said anything so absurd. Nobody's against spying on terrorists. What they objected to was the president's refusal to obtain warrants from the FISA court specifically set up for that purpose—a statute Congress would surely have amended had the White House requested it. Instead, Bush chose to defy the law, seemingly to prove himself above it.

Has terrorism succeeded ? Have Americans become too gutless for democracy ? Blumenthal cites a trenchant passage by Theodore Roosevelt. Writing about Oliver Cromwell, the selfappointed "Lord Protector" of 17 th century England, Roosevelt wrote that "when the people will not or cannot work together; when they permit groups of extremists to decline to accept anything that does not coincide with their own extreme views, or when they let power slip from their hands through sheer supine indifference; then they have themselves chiefly to blame if the power is grasped by stronger hands."

Dudes, we're there. Most Americans are more pragmatic than ideological. They want a government that works. By any reasonable measure, one-party Republican government has been a disaster. On almost every issue, from stem-cell research to runaway budget deficits to the ongoing disaster in Iraq, Bush has substituted dogma for reality, party loyalty for competence. The results range from comical to catastrophic. Imperfect as Democrats are, the only remedy available to engaged citizens is to vote them into power. Imperfect as he is, that's what Bill Clinton was getting at in a recent Nevada speech. "For six years," he said, "this country has been totally dominated—not by the Republican Party, this is not fair to the Republican Party—by a narrow sliver of the Republican Party, its more rightwing and its most ideological element.... [T ] his country has been jammed... into an ideological corner, alienated from its allies, and we're in a lot of trouble." He added: "The Democratic Party has become the liberal and conservative party in America. If you want to be fiscally conservative, you've got to be for us. If you want to conserve natural resources, you've got to be for us. If you want a change of course in Iraq... you've got to be for us." This strikes me as cogent and politically shrewd. What remains unclear is how many Americans are listening.

—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award. 

Just remember folks, nothing is forever.  Rome eventually fell, the Dark Ages ended.  Sooner or later things improve.

Stay focused on that thought, work for improvement, and have faith.

B

After Pat's Birthday
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601019_after_pats_birthday/
Posted on Oct 19, 2006

By Kevin Tillman

Editor's note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.



It is Pat's birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after.  It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military.  He spoke about the risks with signing the papers.  How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people.  How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition.  How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is.  Something like that.



Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them.  Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few "bad apples" in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet.  It's interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people.  So don't be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity.  Most likely, they will come to know that "somehow" was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy.  People still have a voice.  People still can take action.  It can start after Pat's birthday.



Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,

Kevin Tillman