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This Saturday, gay rights activists held a brief protest in central Moscow – and finally managed to not get arrested. Coming on the heels of the Tverskoy's court's decision to uphold the banning of this year's gay pride parade – which is officially deemed a security risk by Moscow authorities – Saturday's peaceful action has been branded a success both by organizers and various observers.
Organizer Nikolai Alexeyev told The Moscow News about the careful planning that went into avoiding the police for this year's event. "We didn't want the same old story to be broadcast everywhere," he said. "We didn't want there to be clashes or arrests, and we succeeded."
"I was asked to meet with city police officials prior to the event, but I didn't go," Alexeyev said. "In previous years, they just wanted information on where to arrest us, and I doubted this year would be any different."
In the Russian media, reactions to Saturday's event have been varied: wisome commentators have argued that banning gay pride in Moscow is blatantly unconstitutional, while others have pointed out that public displays of gay pride serve as an excuse for ridicule. "If [homosexuality] is a genetic characteristic, then it's nothing to be proud of, and sounding your horn about it in the public square (not as a means of protesting discrimination, but out of pure self-love) is stupid," Maya Kucherskaya wrote in Vedomosti. page 15
The argument that homosexuality is purely a personal matter, and therefore does not need to be publicly acknowledged as a legitimate lifestyle, crops up both in mainstream thought and among certain members of the local gay community. "There are gays in Moscow who claim that we don't need a pride parade in this city," Alexeyev said. "But if you ask these same people – would you go to a pride parade in London? Would you go to a pride parade in Sydney? – Most of them would say 'yes'. They see pride parades in other places as fun carnivals, and would love to attend. What they forget is that such carnivals weren't handed to London or Sydney's gay communities on a silver platter. Gay activists in such cities fought for the right to celebrate – they used to be beaten and arrested just like we have been."
Alexeyev pointed out that class divides often play a role in how politically active or inactive Russian gays tend to be. "Rich Russian gays have visas and money – they can hop on a plane and attend pride events anywhere in the world – which is why they don't exactly care what happens to the rest of us in Moscow," he said. "I am not oriented towards these people. In Russia, it's those with low social status who must fight for their rights. A rich gay man can easily bribe hospital officials to, for example, visit his boyfriend in a hospital. But what are ordinary people to do?"
The spirit of Saturday's protest was predicated on the idea that gays and other members of the LGBT community must continue engaging in active social protest on the ground. "Freedom is not free! The LGBT's are ready to fight!" read some of their placards. And though Moscow's gay community is eagerly awaiting a decision of the European Court of Human Rights regarding the bans of previous gay pride events in the city, their main message is geared toward changing local attitudes.
"The object of our appeals should be Russian society, as opposed to the Western establishment and Western institutions," Igor Yasin, a participant of the protest, wrote on Socialistworld.ru. "A decision by the European Court of Human Rights may force Moscow authorities toward some measures of appeasement, but they won't change society's widespread homophobia."
--- On Mon, 5/31/10, Bruce Majors <majors.bruce@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Bruce Majors <majors.bruce@gmail.com>
Subject: [NewJersey_for_Kerry] Atlas Shrugged continues to materialize
To: "whateverreturns" <whateverreturns@yahoogroups.com>, PoliticalForum@googlegroups.com, Politics_CurrentEvents_Group@yahoogroups.com
Cc: NewJersey_for_Kerry@yahoogroups.com, "787 APFN-1" <apfn-1@yahoogroups.com>, "ohio" <ohio_for_kerry@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Monday, May 31, 2010, 4:47 AM
"Plug the damn hole!"
May 27, 2010 by Tom Bowden
Once again, an episode from Ayn Rand'sAtlas Shrugged leaps to life from behind closed doors in Washington, D.C. According to a recent report from The Washington Post,President Obama is angry about the British Petroleum oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico:
Since the oil rig exploded, the White House has tried to project a posture that is unflappable and in command.
But to those tasked with keeping the president apprised of the disaster, Obama's clenched jaw is becoming an increasingly familiar sight. During one of those sessions in the Oval Office the first week after the spill, a president who rarely vents his frustration cut his aides short, according to one who was there.
"Plug the damn hole," Obama told them.
That's the politician's answer to every intractable problem: give orders, issue threats, and wait for obedience. But the creative human mind cannot take orders like that. Notice I didn't say, "refuses to take orders." I said, "cannot take orders."
By that I mean, the task of plugging a leak 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico is an engineering feat. BP's acknowledged role in causing the leak does not alter the fact that careful study, creative thought, and the exacting deployment of technical and mechanical skills over long distances are all necessary in order to fix the leak. No amount of jaw clenching or bug-eyed threats from politicians can bring the solution one inch closer to reality. The human mind does not operate by force from outside. If engineering achievements could be conjured up by barking orders, the Soviet Union would be a thriving nation overflowing with engineering marvels, instead of a dead husk.
Obama's petulant outburst brings to mind a scene from Atlas Shrugged featuring Kip Chalmers, a politician who is traveling by train from Washington, D.C., to California, where he's running for office. When the train's diesel engine is destroyed by accidentally running over a split rail, Chalmers issues furious demands, expecting they will result in instant technical solutions:
"God damn these railroad people!" said Kip Chalmers. "They're doing it on purpose. They want to ruin my campaign. I can't miss that rally! For Christ's sake, Lester, do something!"
"I've tried," said Lester Tuck. At the train's last stop, he had tried, by long-distance telephone, to find air transportation to complete their journey; but there were no commercial flights scheduled for the next two days.
"If they don't get me there on time, I'll have their scalps and their railroad! Can't we tell that damn conductor to hurry?"
"You've told him three times."
"I'll get him fired. He's given me nothing but a lot of alibis about all their messy technical troubles. I expect transportation, not alibis."
To find out how Chalmers' threats finally got that train moving, and what catastrophic results followed, you will have to read the novel. When you do, you'll have a better appreciation for what politicians and engineers are capable of.
__._,_.___MARKETPLACE.
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On May 31, 9:48 am, Bruce Majors <majors.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
> How many American jobs exists only because the companies offering them are
> sustainable ONLY because they are able to import some factor inputs
> (Canadian lumber, Mexican oil, Indian software, etc) from low costs sources
> abroad?
>
> You won't be able to figure out the answer.
>
> No government agency or other entity collects data on this question
>
>
>
> On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 9:41 AM, D S <dhses@m> wrote:
>
> > You claim that outsourcing is no good for America. We often hear how it
> > is lamentable that the huge textile industries that used to exist, are now
> > mostly offshore, which has resulted in the loss of ten of thousands of jobs
> > for the women who worked in those textile mills.
>
> > For those of you out there who take that line, I'd like to ask that if that
> > positon were reversed, whose women would you want to return to the textile
> > mills to make our underwear for us?
>
> > Do you mean your own women, or somebody else's?
>
> > I surveyed my own women and those of my drinking buddies. They report that
> > there women prefer to be things like; molecular biologists, dentists,
> > doctors, bio-chemists, nuclear engineers, college profs.
>
> > col.
--
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On May 31, 12:09 pm, "M. Johnson" <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> Dying for a Lieby Laurence M. Vance
> May 29, 2006"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it." ~ Oscar Wilde
> All Americans know that Memorial Day is a federal holiday. Most Americans know that it commemorates U. S. soldiers who died in military service for their country. Many Americans believe that U. S. soldiers died defending our freedoms. Few Americans believe that they died for a lie.
> Memorial Day was first observed in honor of Union soldiers who died during the War to Prevent Southern Independence. It was initially called Decoration Day because the tombs of the dead soldiers were decorated. Originally celebrated in select localities (to this day several cities claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day, although the federal government recognizes Waterloo, NY, as the official birthplace), the holiday was first widely observed on May 30, 1868, because of an earlier proclamation by General John Logan of theGrand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans:The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.New York, in 1873, was the first state to officially recognize the holiday. After World War I, the holiday was expanded to include U. S. soldiers who died in any war. Until this time, Southern states did not observe the holiday: they preferred to honor their Confederate dead on separate days. Although Congress in 1971 declared Memorial Day to be a national holiday celebrated on the last Monday in May, to this day some Southern states still maintain a day to honor their Confederate dead.
> The focus this Memorial Day will be on those men and women who have died in the current Iraq war, although it is likely that only a small minority of Americans realize that2,464U.S. soldiers have died thus far. The 117,000 U.S. soldiers who died in that war to end all wars, World War I, are ancient history. Few can name even one of the 405,000 U.S. soldiers who died in that "good war," World War II, so that Eastern Europe could be turned over to the mass murderer Stalin. The 54,000 U.S. soldiers who died in what is called America's forgotten war, the Korean War, are certainly long forgotten. The 58,000 U.S. soldiers who died in Vietnam so their names could be inscribed on awallare remembered by very few.
> They died in vain; they died for a lie.
> This does not mean that they were not brave, heroic, well-meaning, or patriotic. They may have fought with the best of intentions; they may have sacrificed themselves for others; they may have been sincere in their belief that they were fighting for a good cause; but they died for a lie.
> The first lie is that war is necessary. After commanding forces that firebombed Tokyo, which killed as many civilians as the atomic bomb dropped a few months later, General Curtis LeMay remarked: "We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town. Had to be done." But regardless of what happened beforehand, or what might have happened in the future, since when does slaughtering 100,000 people at one time ever have to be done? War should not be considered as an alternative; it is always the worst possible solution. As psychologist Alfred Adler has said: "War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man." War is not inevitable; it is never an absolute necessity. As Adler's successor Lydia Sicher once said: "Wars are inevitable... as long as we believe that wars are inevitable. The moment we don't believe it anymore it is not inevitable."
> The second lie is that it is the people in a country that want war. Surprisingly, it was Ronald Reagan who recognized that "governments make wars, not people." It is up to the government to convince its citizens that the citizens of another country are "the enemy." After all, as one columnist remarked: "When people have friends and customers in other lands, they tend to take a dim view of their government dropping bombs on them." Governments abuse the concept of patriotism to convince the populace that "the enemy" should be bombed, maimed, and killed. Hermann Goering recognized that all a government has to do to get the people to support a war is to "denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." Real patriotism is not wanting to see the blood of your country's soldiers shed in some desert or jungle halfway around the world fighting the enemy of the week, month, or year. Patriotism, as Charles de Gaulle explained, "is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first." It is the old men who make wars, and then send the young men to fight them; it is the members of Congress with no children in the military who agitate for war.
> The third lie is that there are winners and losers in a war. No side ever really wins a war. As Jeannette Rankin, the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. entry into both World Wars, said: "You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." Every side loses something in a war. English mystery writer, Agatha Christie, certainly showed more wisdom than most members of Congress when she said: "One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one." The consequences of a war are never as expected. One reason, as recognized by Thomas Jefferson, is that "war is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses."
> The fourth lie is that war can be good for a nation's economy. This myth of war prosperity was exploded by Ludwig von Mises: "War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. The earthquake means good business for construction workers, and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists, and undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest." More recently, Robert Higgs has called this "The Fallacy that Won't Die." But didn't unemployment fall during World War II? Of course it did. How could it not fall when the government conscripted 16 million men into the armed forces? But what about GDP during World War II? Naturally, it increased, but only because of the increased output of military goods and services. Tell the grieving parents of their only son, who never gave them any grandchildren, about how much greater their standard of living will now be because of the war that took their son.
> The fifth lie is that the U.S. military defends our freedoms. The military is too busy policing the world to defend our freedoms. We have U.S. troops in 155 countries or territories of the world. How are the 69,395 U.S. troops in Germany defending our freedoms? How are the 35,307 U.S. troops in Japan defending our freedoms? How are the 32,744 U.S. troops in Korea defending our freedoms? How are the 12,258 U.S. troops in Italy defending our freedoms? How are the 11,093 U.S. troops in the United Kingdom defending our freedoms? How are the ______ U.S. troops in _______________ defending our freedoms? To appease his conservative base on the illegal immigration issue, President Bush recently called for the stationing of some National Guard troops along the border with Mexico. The National Guard units that have been deployed to Iraq should not be assigned to guard the Mexican border. They should be sent home to their jobs and their families, and only used for genuine emergencies on U.S. soil. Stationing U.S. soldiers along the Mexican border would be defending our freedoms a thousand times more than putting them along any German or Italian border.
> Contrary to these lies, the truth about war, in the words of Major General Smedley Butler, is that "war is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious." Ambrose Bierce once made a callous statement about war that nevertheless comes to pass whenever the United States intervenes in another country: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."
> The aphorism that truth is the first casualty of war has often been spoken but rarely learned from. This is because, as Charles Lindbergh said: "In a time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda." This war in particular was started and maintained by more government lies than perhaps any other war in our history.
> What were our objectives in this war? Finding weapons of mass destruction? Finding chemical and biological weapons? Removing Saddam Hussein? Imposing democracy to Iraq? Bringing stability to the Middle East? Forcing Iraq to comply with UN resolutions? Protecting the nation of Israel? Dismantling Al Qaeda? Freeing Muslim women from oppression? Enforcing the no-fly zone imposed on Iraq after the first Persian Gulf War?
> If one stated objective was found to be a lie another could quickly be offered in its place. The number and scope of these objectives shows that there were no legitimate obtainable objectives. So why did we invade and occupy Iraq? I call your attention to two documents. Just two. Both of these documents are readily available online.
> The first document is calledUncovering the Rationales for the War on Iraq: The Words of the Bush Administration, Congress, and the Media from September 12, 2001 to October 11, 2002. It was written by Devon M. Largio in 2004 as a thesis for a bachelor's degree in political science at the University of Illinois. It is a total of 212 pages. Print it out and read it in its entirety. If you don't have time to read it right now then at least read herexecutive summary. Largio documents twenty-seven rationales given for the war by the Bush administration, war hawks in Congress, and the media between the September 11th attacks and the October 2002 congressional resolution to use force in Iraq. It was "the Bush administration, and the President himself" that "established the majority of the rationales for the war and all of those rationales that make up the most prominent reasons for war." The result of this investigation shows that Bush is a bigger liar than Clinton ever was, and, even worse, his lies are more deadly.
> The second document is calledIraq on the Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements on Iraq. It was prepared for Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform – Minority Staff, Special Investigations Division. It is dated March 16, 2004. It is a total of 36 pages. Print it out and read it in its entirety. An executive summary appears on pages i–iv. The report is "a comprehensive examination of the statements made by the five Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on Iraq: President George Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice." Here is the report's conclusion:Because of the gravity of the subject and the President's unique access to classified information, members of Congress and the public expect the President and his senior officials to take special care to be balanced and accurate in describing national security threats. It does not appear, however, that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice met this standard in the case of Iraq. To the contrary, these five officials repeatedly made misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq. In 125 separate appearances, they made 11 misleading statements about the urgency of Iraq's threat, 81 misleading statements about Iraq's nuclear activities, 84 misleading statements about Iraq's chemical and biological capabilities, and 61 misleading statements about Iraq's relationship with al Qaeda.Every U.S. soldier who died in Iraq died for a lie. They may have died for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the U.S. global empire, the U.S. government, the military-industrial complex, or Halliburton, but none of them died for the American people or our freedoms.
> If they died for a lie, then the liars should be held accountable. But don't look for Congress to do anything. How can we expect a Congress that continues to fund this war to hold the Bush administration accountable for its lies? Every member of Congress that continues to vote to fund this war is complicit in these lies. How many more dead American soldiers and billions of dollars will it take before Congress finally says enough is enough? How many American soldiers not currently in Iraq who are enjoying this Memorial Day holiday will be sent to Iraq to die for a lie before the next observance of Memorial Day?
--
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