Through watching Bill Moyers & Company, I learned about a website for a film project titled Reckoning With Torture. As part of the project, the filmmaker is inviting people to pick a section of government documents relating to our alleged mistreatment of detainees and combatants accused of terrorism, and reading these accounts in front of a camera — so as to give these “tortured” people a voice, as it were. On the website are videos of famous personages (actors, activists, politicians, etc.) as well as ordinary folks reading these transcripts and documents.

While I cannot countenance barbarity, what constitutes torture is a matter of some debate. I do not deny that torture has occurred, I do not endorse everything the US government has done, and in the spirit of free speech, I have no problem with this project raising awareness of practices they are concerned about.

Here is my problem. What about equal time?

On this Memorial Day, I am wondering where the voices of the honored dead are being heard and publicized? What about those who died in the War on Terror? Shouldn’t Americans consider the soldiers who were blown to bits by terrorist IEDs? What were their last thoughts? What suffering and pain did they endure before they died — the ones who lingered and eventually succumbed to their injuries? What about those crushed to death, suffocated, burned in the Twin Towers, those who chose to leap off those towers before facing an excruciating death in those flames? Where are their voices? Where are their last thoughts, perhaps phoned out to loved ones before they jumped, being videod and reproduced on the internet? What about the letters of the fallen soldiers, dashed off in the days before they met their end from a terrorist’s bullet, mortar shell, RPG, or IED? What of the pain of the survivors, in first person testimony? Is there a website, is there a movement, a project, to remember and consider the torture that these victims endured?

In the grand scheme of things, this is where I would like to see emphasis placed. Today and every day. The suffering of those detained, their discomforts, their mistreatment concerns me somewhat. This pales in comparison to the hurt that those detained in Guantanamo or elsewhere have inflicted on others. Sympathy for the devil? No, I haven’t got much.

So YouTube has exposed its intention to bully and censor conservative and/or Christian views?

Agree or disagree with the content, do we believe in free speech? in an open exchange of ideas, especially those with which we disagree?

By banning the video, YouTube has ensured that it will receive a wider audience via reblogging on Facebook and elsewhere — and of course Breitbart. Long live Breitbart.

New York Times reports New Home Sales Climbed in April, Building Optimism. 

↑↑↑↑ Chart from Mish’s page shows the historical picture. Wow, don’t those sales just zooming upward restore your confidence in a housing recovery? Howls of derisive laughter are heard. 

This is what we call SPIN masquerading as news in the mainstream media. 

I’m sorry — this looks like a long-term depression. 

dshort.com surveys durable goods orders data, correcting for inflation and the increase in population. 

Following the bursting of the stock market bubble in 2000, durable goods dropped approximately 20% — per person, adjusted for inflation. 

After the financial crisis, durable goods took another major swan dive. This category recovered somewhat, but is still 42% below the old peak (in 2000). 

If we exclude transportation and defense items, durable goods orders are still 38% below the previous peak. Durable goods have fallen, and they can’t get up.

My interpretation of this data is that we are seeing the destruction of the middle class. They simply cannot afford the kind of consumption they used to be able to afford. The debt burden that households are straining under, massive unemployment, wages that do not keep up with inflation in taxes and necessities —  these factors are weighing down consumption. 

In a sense, that might be a good thing. We were consuming beyond our means to pay for the consumption. However this is not good news for those producing or distributing or retailing durable goods. 

In one picture we can see what a farce the “recovery” in gross domestic product was during the past decade. The mainstream media dutifully and mindlessly reported the growth numbers, ignoring the rising debt, and ignoring the fact that a rising percentage of that GDP growth (in the pre-crisis years) came from  shenanigans in the financial sector. 

The Recession Never Ended

When the NBER [National Bureau of Economic Research] called the end of the recession in June 2009, the unemployment rate was 9.5%. The NBER waited until Sept. 20, 2010 to make the call that the recession is over. So the U.S. came out of recession with a 9.5% unemployment rate after entering recession with a rate at 5.0%. This has always made no sense to me. Look at the trend in the unemployment rate and you can see why you could say that the recession that began at the end of 2007 has not ended yet. Clearly, we need to see a trend below an unemployment rate of 6% to say that a jobs recession is over.

From We Never Left The Great Recession, by Rich Suttmeier on TheStreet.com, 5/4/2012.

As I have been reading through This Is My God (subtitled “The Jewish Way Of Life”), certain passages stand out, and I feel compelled to share them. These two paragraphs come from a section about the Jewish Passover festival season, during which unleavened bread (matzo) is eaten for seven days, according to the commandment in Leviticus 23:5-6. For Jews, this festival is a memorial of God’s deliverance of their people from the slavery of Egypt, how they went out with a high hand, but in haste, having no time to raise dough for leavened bread. I thought that these comments about the nature of freedom and slavery had a universal application, instructive for all times. 

The bread of freedom is a hard bread. The contrast between bread and matzo possibly points the contrast between the lush Nile civilization that the Jews left behind them on the first Passover and the gray rubbled desert in which they came into their identity. The Bible tells how they complained to Moses that they could not forget the meat, the cucumbers, the onions that their taskmasters had fed them on the ramparts of Ramses. The whiplash from time to time had been unpleasant, of course. But that memory had faded rapidly as the scars healed in the dry desert air. The memory of the lost security remained.

Economists know that, contrary to the popular impression, slaves do not work hard. A slave civilization is slow moving and easygoing; we still have traces of one in the American South. Take away a man’s rights in himself, and he becomes dull and sluggish, wily and evasive, a master of the arts of avoiding responsibility and expending little energy. The whip is no answer to this universal human reaction. There is no answer to it. The lash stings a slave who has halted dumbly, out of indifference and inertia, into resuming the slothful pace of his fellow slaves. It can do no more. The slave’s life is a dog’s life, degraded, but not wearying, and — for a broken spirit — not unpleasant. The generation of Jews that Moses led into the desert collapsed into despair and panic over and over in moments of crisis. Broken by slavery, they could not shake free of improvidence, cowardice, and idol-worship. All the men who had been slaves in Egypt had to die in the desert, and a new generation had to take up their arms and their religion, before the Jews could cross the Jordan. 

— This Is My God, Herman Wouk ©1959, renewed 1987

What Wouk writes about the economics of slavery matches what I have read about George Washington and some of our other founding fathers, many of whom owned slaves — though they professed to be against the institution. Their slaves were not very productive, and the more responsible slave-owners found that the upkeep of slave families, many of whose members were too young or too old to work, was a burden. 

We face alternatives of a similar character in the Western world today. Do we choose security, dependency, the meat and onions of slavery in a socialist system? 22% of Americans’ individual disposable income now comes from government transfer payments — taxed or borrowed from the useful work of other people. Or will we take the hard bread of freedom, which leads to the abundance of the promised land, a land that flows with milk and honey? Can we change course without a crisis (like the plagues of Egypt) and a generation or two literally dying out? 

Despite the Democratic Party’s pledge to fight voter ID laws, they themselves use them as a tool to prevent fraud.  Michigan Democrats require photo identification at their caucus. 

According to an e-mail this month from Democratic Michigan Field Director Erin McCann about the Michigan caucus to nominate Obama for president, caucus-goers must “Bring proof that you live in the area served by the caucus location — photo ID is required.”

Source

American Thinker has an interesting piece that explores the history of the “born in Kenya” meme.

We’ve always known that the original birthers were Democrats. Phillip Berg, a disgruntled Hillary supporter, filed the first lawsuit demanding that Obama produce his mysterious birth certificate. And now with the blockbuster news from breitbart.com, we learn that Obama himself was the very first Obama birther. It turns out that Obama claimed he was Kenya-born before he claimed he was Hawaii-born. 

Click the link to read the rest.

Obama’s literary agent, in a mini-biography of Obama, claimed in a 1991 booklet that Obama was Kenya-born. Either Obama saw this bio and approved it (standard procedure), or somehow he slipped up and this was published without his approval. If we assume the latter, where did the literary agency come up with the notion that he was born in Kenya? These questions remain unanswered. If Obama did see and approve the bio, it means he was willing to present a false front for some unknown reason — perhaps he thought it added a certain cachet to his books, as a true African-American author? 

Big Fat Mama - McNeely-Levin-Skinner Band

One man’s song about his very special mother. 

Happy Mother’s Day!