The Vidiot's weekly blog:

What pissed me off this week? 4/4/2005

(A day early this week.)

(updated every Monday at some point during the day)

...'cause I'm angry and my friends are sick of listening to me...

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I just read about how some are pondering withdrawal from the WTO. Now, I understand why this might be desirable, at least from a political standpoint. It's a reflex reaction really. Imports are more than exports. Our industries are hurting. Our economy is in trouble. Why not help them out? They're our guys! And I'm not entirely disagreeing. HOWEVER, I'm paying a lot of money to go to grad school at my advanced age to understand these things so I'm going to try to explain what I've learned thus far:

Let's go back to the depression. Why was it so global? (The WHOLE frickin' planet got hit by it.) Well, besides the jobs issue, one of the main reasons it was so global was the fact that as each country started to suffer economically, they pulled out of the global system as a way to protect themselves. What happened however was a sort of 'beggar thy neighbor' sort of thing where when England withdrew, other countries who depended upon England started to hurt, so then they withdrew and other countries that relied upon them started to hurt and so on and so forth in a very nasty domino event. It's a natural reaction to turn to protectionist measures like tariffs and quotas and subsidies when the going gets rough.

But it's this domino effect, and the resulting global economic depression, that led to the eventual creation of the Bretton Woods triad (GATT -- which is now part of the WTO, IMF and World Bank.) By fully integrating the system and by making everyone follow the same set of rules, they hoped they could stave off any future domino type events. So, even though there may be bipartisan support for withdrawal from the WTO, that doesn't make it the right thing to do. The problem is that nobody understands any of this crap so nobody knows they should be worried about it. They just hear "Oh, it's about time we get out of that WTO. It's only hurting our industry." Well, I hate to break it to you, but our economy is the world's economy now. It's globalization, baby, like it or not. The WTO is SO not perfect and it may even be corrupt, but it would be wiser to fix it than destroy it.

This ends your international political economics lesson for the day.

Video of the Week: Cynthia McKinney ripping Rumsfeld a new one.

Cool Embroidery of the Week: Heart

Too Much Free Time Blog of the Week: Blinkorama

Painful Clothing of the Week: Corsets

Mutant of the Week: Two-faced kitten

Porn of the Week: Gay Kitty

Clever Idea of the Week: Transparent Computer Screens

Baby Name of the Week: Aryan Justice

Must-Read of the Week: The Filibuster vs. the Nuclear Option

Another Must-Read of the Week: A short guide to the British constitution and electoral system

RIP: Schiavo, il Papa, and Fred Korematsu

Story update: Wolfowitz was confirmed as head of the World Bank. There will be retaliation.

Things I won't be covering this week because I don't have time: Scary Volcanoes, Oil Prices, Gannon at the Press Club, Al Gore's new TV Station, Bush's paranoia, Schiavo Family's questionable integrity, Huffington's new BlogSpot, and Rev. Moon's latest antics.

Excerpt: Residents in parts of the United States will have a chance to watch the Moon partially eclipse the Sun on Friday, April 8. Within a very narrow corridor that extends for about 8,800 miles, the disks of the Sun and the Moon will appear to exactly coincide, setting up the most unusual type of eclipse known as a hybrid.

Excerpt:St. Malachy, the Irish Catholic saint of twelfth century, gave the following mottos to the last two popes who will succeed John Paul II. To the penultimate pope he gave the motto "of the glory of the olive." An olive branch stands for peace and there is presently only one Catholic spiritual figure who merits that branch. He is Cardinal Roger Etchegaray.

Excerpt:A cardinal considered a candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II delivered a strong message in favor of Jewish settlement in the Holy Land on Wednesday night, rejecting the claim that European Christians' support for the State of Israel is based on Holocaust guilt and saying that all Christians should affirm Zionism as a biblical imperative for the Jewish people.

Excerpt:Roman Catholics and others began to speak out Sunday about their hopes — and expectations — for a new pope, as the intense guessing game began over who would succeed John Paul II in leading the Church.

Excerpt: Since there's a lot of speculation these days about who will succeed Pope John Paul II, it seems a good time to recall the circumstances of the last papal succession. Because Luciani Albini, Pope John Paul I, was almost certainly murdered, by an international network of fascists and money launderers, with ties to far-right elements within military and intelligence agencies. (And isn't it just amazing, how often we find that convergence?)

Excerpt: Officially, President Bush won November’s election by 2.5%, yet exit polls showed Kerry winning by 3% [1] . According to a report to be released today by a group of university statisticians, the odds of a discrepancy this large between the national exit poll and election results happening by accident are close to 1 in a million.

Excerpt: "The Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 - Amends the Federal judicial code to prohibit the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal district courts from exercising jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

Excerpt: The final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein’s political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report’s executive summary.

Excerpt: U.S. intelligence experts are preparing a list of 25 countries deemed unstable and, thus, candidates for intervention.

Excerpt: When a Senate panel released a report last year on the disastrously bad intelligence on Iraq, it included an intriguing e-mail that showed how intensely the administration was looking for damning evidence against Saddam. The e-mail, written by a senior CIA official, addressed a debate that the agency's analysts were having about Curveball, an erratic Iraqi emigre who claimed to have seen Saddam's supposed mobile biological-weapons labs. The CIA had evidence that Curveball was a shameless fabricator months before Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the Iraqi's reports before the United Nations. But in the Feb. 4, 2003, e-mail—written a day before Powell's U.N. appearance—the senior CIA official sharply rebuked one of those skeptical analysts. "Keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," the CIA official wrote.

Excerpt; Iraq's attempt to fill the first posts in a national-unity government erupted in shouting and factional strife Tuesday, as what politicians described as last-minute power plays overran a Shiite- and Kurd-led effort to form a coalition with Sunnis.

Excerpt:The top U.S. commander in Iraq authorized prisoner interrogation tactics more harsh than accepted Army practice, including using guard dogs to exploit "Arab fear of dogs," a memo made public on Tuesday showed.

Excerpt: The American Civil Liberties Union today sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asking him to open an investigation into possible perjury by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the theater commander at the outset of the Iraq War. The ACLU said that a memo sent by Lt. Gen Sanchez flatly contradicts sworn testimony given by him before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which he denied authorizing highly coercive interrogation methods.

Excerpt; House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on Thursday blamed Terri Schiavo's death on what he contended was a failed legal system and he raised the possibility of trying to impeach some of the federal judges in the case."The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," said DeLay, R-Texas.

Excerpt; U.S. delegates to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights say that body's country membership must be reformed to prevent those who abuse human rights from using their positions on the committee to prevent criticism of their records.

Excerpt: It cited documents as indicating that while al-Qaeda's primary interest was Agent X, the group had "considered acquiring a variety of other biological agents".

Excerpt: President Bush signed an executive order on Friday authorizing the government to impose a quarantine to deal with any outbreak of a particularly lethal variation of influenza now found in Southeast Asia.

Excerpt: The case fatality rate for Marburg appears to be 100%.  Although media coverage has increased in recent weeks, along with the record number of Marburg deaths in Angola, there has been no mention of any discharged patients.  An accurate case fatality rate is based on known outcomes, and would be the ratio of the deaths relative to the number of deaths plus discharges. 

Excerpt: The six-member Gulf Cooperation Council countries are committed to issue the GCC common currency in the year 2010, Finance Minister Dr. Ibrahim Al-Assaf stated yesterday. He denied press reports that the new currency has been named Gulf dinar. “We have not yet finalized the name of the currency as to whether it be Gulf dinar or riyal or any other name,” Al-Hayat Arabic daily quoted the minister as saying.

Excerpt: The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure.

Excerpt: resident Viktor Yushchenko confirmed Thursday that nuclear-capable cruise missiles were illegally sold to Iran and China under Ukraine’s previous government. In an interview with NBC News, Yushchenko offered the highest-level acknowledgement that the sales, which have alarmed the U.S. intelligence community, indeed took place.

Except: President Bush has nominated the vice president's son-in-law, Philip J. Perry, as general counsel of the Homeland Security Department, where he would oversee 1,500 lawyers who work on legal matters like Coast Guard maritime laws and immigration.
Mr. Perry, who is married to Elizabeth Cheney, is leaving the Washington office of the Latham & Watkins law firm, where he was a partner, as well as a lobbyist for Lockheed Martin, one of the top 10 contractors for the Homeland Security Department.

Excerpt: American International Group Inc., the world's largest insurer, said an array of accounting errors over 14 years may have inflated its net worth by as much as $1.7 billion.

Excerpt; Freddie Mac, the second-largest U.S. home financing company that is pushing to emerge from a scandal-marked era, on Thursday posted a more than 40 percent drop in 2004 net income as the value of contracts used to hedge against interest rate changes fell.

Excerpt Iran allocated $2.5 billion to obtain three nuclear warheads last year, an exiled opposition group said Thursday, without saying whether Iran had secured any of the warheads. The group, which has given accurate information in the past on some of Iran's nuclear facilities, also said Iran was speeding up work on a reactor south of Tehran which could produce enough plutonium for an atomic bomb by 2007.

Excerpt: Scented candles are available in just about any fragrance imaginable. But a South Dakota couple claims to taken the imagination a step further, saying they have harnessed the scent of Jesus.

Excerpt; Tickling rats to make them chirp with joy may seem frivolous as a scientific pursuit, yet understanding laughter in animals may lead to revolutionary treatments for emotional illness, researchers suggest.

Previous rants

At the very least, point your CNN-loving friends to my links page. Just getting started in reading alternate news sites gets people thinking. I have one friend who was very happy-go-lucky, thinking ol' Greta was telling the whole truth until I opened up his eyes a bit. Now, he's all depressed. He'll get over it. You gotta' get depressed before you get angry and you gotta' get angry before you can accomplish anything. We're all in mourning. We have to move through the steps. But we gotta' hurry it up.

Read. Inform. Spread the word. Even if it means your friends avoid you for awhile. If they really love you, they'll start to listen.

"POSSE COMITATUS ACT" (18 USC 1385): A Reconstruction Era criminal law proscribing use of Army (later, Air Force) to "execute the laws" except where expressly authorized by Constitution or Congress. Limit on use of military for civilian law enforcement also applies to Navy by regulation. Dec '81 additional laws were enacted (codified 10 USC 371-78) clarifying permissible military assistance to civilian law enforcement agencies--including the Coast Guard--especially in combating drug smuggling into the United States. Posse Comitatus clarifications emphasize supportive and technical assistance (e.g., use of facilities, vessels, aircraft, intelligence, tech aid, surveillance, etc.) while generally prohibiting direct participation of DoD personnel in law enforcement (e.g., search, seizure, and arrests). For example, Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachments (LEDETS) serve aboard Navy vessels and perform the actual boardings of interdicted suspect drug smuggling vessels and, if needed, arrest their crews). Positive results have been realized especially from Navy ship/aircraft involvement.

(Tom Ridge has practically said he'd do away with this act.)

{back}

Who am I?:

I am a biker chick who lives in NYC. This blog is about current events and my left-leaning, ascerbic spin on those events. Nobody pays me anything to do this. Nobody tells me what to write. I will NEVER tout anything for anybody's money! EVER!

These sites are good at culling stories from a multitude of media sites:

buzzflash.com
unknownnews.net
rawstory.com
daou report

Here are some excellant blogs:

Bartcop
Daily Kos
Atrios
Tacitus
Josh Marshall
DNC: Kicking Ass
Two Glasses
Brad DeLong
The Wonkette
Urban Survival
Greg Palast

Link exchange:

Ilia Dreams Blog
Iraq War Blog
BushVote.com

These blogs will be covering the primaries and elections:

Salon.com's War Room
The Campaign Desk
FactCheck.org

media-bias exposed:

dailyhowler.com

these are good left-wing journalism sites:

onlinejournal.com
thenation.com
inthesetimes.com
tompaine.com
commondreams.org
truthout.com
guerrillanews.com

a little more to the left:

wsws.org
indymedia.org

conspiratorial:

whatreallyhappened.com
almartinraw.com

HIGHLY entertaining:

surfingtheapocalypse.com

really good "Alternate Thinking" site:

goroadachi.com/etemenanki/

and for godsakes, stay away
from FOX NEWS,  MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC.
It's ALL CRAP!!!
watch the BBC news
or ITN news instead.

if you must succumb to reading a newspaper: 

www.guardian.co.uk 

or any other paper in another fucking country. All of our newspapers are owned by the same idiots that own the TV stations so all of the news is all the same CRAP.