Palau

Judge Alito – All You Need To Know

Bush picks Alto for Supreme Court- ABC, 31 Oct

A woman’s womb belongs to her husband

It’s legal to strip-search a 10 year old girl

It’s fine to discriminate on race or sex, as long as you say you didn’t mean to

It looks like Judge Scalito thinks women are incapable of rational thought and that we can only use our uteruses when men say we can – property rights taken to their logical furthest extension.

From the comments at Atrios :

“Women are objects to be owned, like cars and tee-vee sets. Since they are “things,” the owners get to say what their “things” can and can’t do. So if you displease your owner he can beat you, cheat on you, or set you on fire in the bathroom. It’s just that the things have forgotten that and have gotten way too upitty in the past 150 years, but the insecure patriarchy is trying to put them back in their place, one reminder at a time. ”

Are we there yet?

Ocean Links of The Day

Thanks to Pharyngula(who’s your source for all matters invertebrate and is also the sccourge of ID-ers everywhere) for this cartoon from Ted Rall:

And an unexpected Guardian plea from Sir Max Hastings, Thatcher war groupie, former Fleet street editor and all-round Tory and pillar of the establishment, on our continuing rape of the oceans:

The world’s oceans are being plundered, and nobody seems willing or able to stop the slaughter. Some fish and crustaceans are successfully farmed: trout and oysters, to name but two. Stocks of others are sustainable, such as herring, sardines, whitebait and mussels. Many species, however, are in desperate trouble, including tuna, plaice, monkfish and cod. Over the past half-century, the world’s annual fish catch has risen from 18m tonnes to 95m. The latest figures from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation suggest that 52% of commercial fish species are fully exploited, 17% overexploited and 8% depleted.

It is striking to contrast the wave of alarm, if not panic, sweeping the world about avian flu with our indifference to the plight of fish. As long as there are fillets in the shops, we buy them.

Unfortunately, his article seems not to take into account the rapacious and bottomless pit that is the global free market but appears to blame quotas, tariffs and protected markets. And it will all be OK if only we pay premium prices to the greedy food retailers who are actually driving the market to catch more and more obscure and threatened species:

All credit to Greenpeace for identifying the simple thing each of us can do, to fight back against the threat to the oceans: buy fish from Marks & Spencer or Waitrose. These stores, according to the new survey, have by far the best record of selling sustainable and legitimately sourced species.

I don’t doubt that they do have the best record, in the UK – but it’s hardly the point. Even if nice middle-class people buy their expensively-sourced fish from these stores it won’t affect the thousands of Russian, Korean, Spanish and Japanese factory ships trawling their way along the sea bottom, destroying everything in their path, including the possibility of future regeneration.

Before and After

“Towing a heavy trawl net through a cold-water coral reef is a bit like driving a bulldozer through a nature reserve.”

David Griffith

International Council for the Exploration of the Sea

Sir Max goes on:

“When species vanish, people shrug and eat something else.”

Let them eat cake then. Or maybe not –

Lobster becoming everyday in Britain

LONDON, Oct. 29 (UPI) — A lobster dinner in Britain has been a luxury for centuries, but today it’s becoming an everyday item.

“Salmon was once considered a luxury that only a few could afford — that is no longer the case,” said Carlos Diaz, the seafood specialist for Marks & Spencer. “In the same way, lobster is more readily available now and it is becoming more and more popular.”

Thanks to rising lobster imports from Canada and U.K. hatcheries that stock baby lobsters, the amount of lobster sold in supermarkets has increased by almost 20 percent in the past year alone, the Daily Telegraph reported Saturday.

One British supermarket chain is offering customers whole lobster this Christmas at about $8, but also popular is “chilled lobster.”

“If you buy chilled lobster …, it’s all been done for you — there’s no preparation, it’s the ultimate convenience food,” said Peter Hunt, the director of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain. “All you have to do is put it on the plate. You are getting restaurant food at home.”

The lobster is not yet an endangered species, but it won’t be long

Despite the fact that lobsters are not endangered, there are still questions about how they are going to fare in the future. Relatives of the American Lobsters, Homarus gammarus, that live on the other side of the Atlantic along the coast of Europe and down into Africa, have been over-harvested in the past. It is only now that they are being restocked by the introduction of young lobsters raised in captivity (Lavalli, Cowan, and Barshaw, 1998). The US Federal Government has labeled the American lobster population as “overfished,” but the general increase in abundance, coupled with the increase in catches over the past twenty years brings into question the posibility that lobsters are being overfished (Fish Research.Org, 2002).

Chimps Fall Down on Friendship

Found at the BBC, via Dependable Renegade:

Captive chimpanzees fail to help others in their social group, even when it causes no inconvenience, a behavioural study in Nature journal has found….more

How Very Co-incidental

Are this

Berlusconi Behind Fake Yellowcake Dossier

Submitted by editor4 on October 26, 2005 – 1:24pm.

Double-Dealers and Dilettantes–the Men Behind Nigergate Were All Italians

By Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo
Source: La Republica via Nur al-Cubicle

The military intervention in Iraq was justified by two revelations: Saddam Hussein attempted to acquire unprocessed uranium (yellowcake) in Niger (1) for enrichment with centrifuges built with aluminum tubes imported from Europe(2). The fabricators of the twin hoaxes (there was never any trace in Iraq of unprocessed uranium or centrifuges) were the Italian government and Italian military intelligence. La Repubblica has attempted to reconstruct the who, where and why of the manufacture and transfer to British and American intelligence of the dodgy dossier for war.

They are the same two hoaxes that Judith Miller, the reporter who betrayed her newspaper, published (together with Michael Gordon) on September 8, 2002. In a lengthy investigative piece for the New York Times, Miller reported that Saddam could have built an atomic weapon with those aluminum tubes. These were the goods that the hawks in the Bush administration were expecting.

The “war dance” which followed Judith Miller?s scoop seemed like “carefully-prepared theater? to an attentive media-watcher, Roberto Reale of Ultime Notizie (The Latest News).

Condoleezza Rice, who was then White House Security Advisor, said on CNN: We don?t want the smoking gun to look like a mushroom cloud. A menacing Dick Cheney told Meet the Press that We know with absolute certainty that Saddam is using his technical and commercial capacities to acquire the material necessary to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon. This was the beginning of an escalation of fear.

And this…

Berlusconi is perhaps the most unexpected of these pivotal friendships, and thereby the most definitive of Blair. It is an apparently curious closeness, between the billionaire mass-media mogul, member of the terrifying P2 masonic lodge, forever skirting the law and changing it to suit his ends … and the Labour leader elected in 1997 not least for his untaintedness. Between the man who made his fortune by building an empire based on trash television and dancing girls, and the devout Christian installed in Downing Street. When Berlusconi first came to power in 1994, we suspected, but could not prove, that the “special secretary” managing his Forza Italia campaign, Marcello Dell’Utri, was mobilising the blood-stained voting clout of the Mafia – for which he was jailed last December. And Dell’Utri’s patron was the man Blair this summer called his closest friend in Europe.

…perhaps related? I think we should be told.

“I Really Don’t Think We Are Going To Make It Out Of Here Alive….”

Americablog points us to Buzzflash for this piece, by the mother of a serving US soldier, that shows what the war actually means to real people every day.

All those PNACers who conspired to illegally invade a sovereign nation, no matter how reprehensible its ruler, should wake up to a call like this each morning and be forced to listen to their child in fear and anguish for their life, every single day, and be helpless to do anything. And I want this to go on forever.

For the poodles and lesser players, let them wake up each day in the mind of a mother whose son is in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or Bhagram – a woman who has seen the pictures. For the media enablers and apologists, may they spend eternity cowering in a ruined building as ‘shock and awe’ explodes endlessly around their heads.

My Son in Iraq: I Know That It Happened Because I Heard It

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Teri Mackey

The day started pretty much like all of the others since my son had left for Iraq. I automatically woke up to surf the major news networks at 3 A.M. to see if anything newsworthy had happened in Baghdad while I had slept. It seemed as if it had been a quiet night and there were no new reports, so I turned off the television and went back to sleep. The phone rang and I woke up in a nanosecond, which was a trait that I had mastered since the first call I had gotten in the middle of the night from a war zone.

“Hey Mom it?s me.” Something my son always said every time he called, but this time his voice sounded unusual. He had a really serious tone in his voice and the automatic gunfire in the background was loud and more constant than usual. My heart began to race and I took a deep breath.

“Hey, I’m trapped on a rooftop and I don’t think we are going to make it out of here, so I just called to tell you that I loved you and that I am thinking of all of you.” The gunfire in the background was so loud that he had to pause, and then he continued. “We were out on patrol and were just getting ready to return to base and a bunch of our guys got overrun and so we went to help them, but when we got close we got overrun as well and had to retreat to this rooftop.”

I could hear yelling in the background and then big explosions. The phone then seemed to be put on the ground and there was more yelling and automatic gunfire, but this time it was my son who was doing the shooting. My son picked up the phone and in an out of breath voice said, “I really don’t think we are going to make it out of here alive. If we wait longer to get off this rooftop there is no way we can make it back because we do not have enough ammo and it is getting dark. We have called in air support and it has not come yet, and if they do not come in a minute we are all going to be dead. Just tell everybody that I love them and if I do not call you back within four hours that means I did not make it.”

“We love you too son and we are proud of you?you are a good man.” About that time, a jet flying over interrupted our conversation and it sounded as if it was right over the earpiece of the phone. I had to move the phone away from my ear, the sound subsided and then I heard loud explosions and a helicopter and massive firepower.

“Hear that! Hear that! There are jets and helicopters flying over.”

There was more automatic gunfire that I could hear coming from his position and I heard the distinctive high pitch of a mortar round coming in and I knew they were getting mortared, but the mortar missed. I had learned to identify the sound of incoming mortars in previous conversations because mortars were a usual event at the camp where my son was located. The jets flew over again and I could hear them in the background roaring and bombs exploding and again we had to abandon our conversation.

“This is kinda cool in a f***** up kind of way. I have to go-love you.”

“I love you too.” And that was it; the phone went dead.

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