Friday, April 30, 2010

STOP ARIZONA! STOP DISCRIMINATION! ENTER THE 21st CENTURY!

I simply must quote the New York Times Editorial in full. The world cannot affort such parochial close-minded belly-button gazing as Arizona is attempting to do. We are in this together, on one planet, and had better soon stop allowing powerful lobbyists to persuade us that those who do not look like us are the source of danger. The source of danger is from the bigots and the bigotted, from the well-to-do who tell us to envy the down-and-out.
Wake up and stop hating each other!

Editorial - Stopping Arizona’s Anti-Immigration Law - NYTimes.com
Editorial
Stopping Arizona

A fight is brewing over Arizona’s new law that turns all of the state’s Latinos, even legal immigrants and citizens, into criminal suspects. And this is not a local fight. The poison is spreading; there is talk in Texas of passing a version of the Arizona statute.
President Obama has called the law “misguided” and promised to keep an eye on it. But when racial separation finds a foothold in any of the 50 states, the president needs to do more than mildly criticize. He should act. Here’s a partial but urgent to-do list:
DEFEND CIVIL RIGHTS The Justice Department needs to challenge this law forcefully in court. The statute requires police officers to stop and question anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant. Gov. Jan Brewer signed the law but says she doesn’t know what an illegal immigrant looks like, leaving that to others who think they do.
The Justice Department knows what kinds of abuse that invites. It is already investigating the sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, who raids Hispanic neighborhoods in and around Phoenix. His deputies demand people’s papers based on the shirts and boots they wear.
Federal law requires noncitizens to carry documents but does not empower police officers to stop anyone they choose and demand to see papers. Arizona’s attempt to get around that by defining the act of standing on its soil without papers as a criminal act is repellent.
STOP ARIZONA COLD Arizona’s scheme will rely on federal databases to determine immigration status. It will also need the cooperation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, in accepting detainees. ICE says its priorities are dangerous criminals and fugitives, not the peaceful workers and families who are overwhelmingly the targets of the new law. In that case, ICE will deny Arizona authorities data, cooperation and scarce resources.
TAKE BACK IMMIGRATION POLICY The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that states cannot make their own immigration laws. The Arizona debacle gives the Obama administration another chance to make it clear that the nation’s immigration policy cannot be left to a ragged patchwork of state and local laws.
As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama praised a federal court’s decision striking down a law in Hazleton, Pa., that made it illegal to hire or rent housing to undocumented immigrants. To start forcefully asserting the central federal role in immigration, the administration should rescind a once-secret 2002 memo from President George W. Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, that declared that state and local police had “inherent authority” to make immigration arrests. It should have done that long ago. It should also weigh in against another reckless Arizona law, now before the Supreme Court, that revokes the business licenses of employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.
The administration’s actions elsewhere have sent the wrong message. Janet Napolitano once vetoed extremist immigration-enforcement bills as Arizona’s governor, but as the homeland security secretary she defends the use of state and local police as “force multipliers.” Ms. Napolitano needs to end dangerous experiments like the 287(g) program and Secure Communities, which hand over vital federal duties to untrained, unsupervised local deputies, openly enabling racial-profiling and undermining community policing and public safety.
These steps are no substitute for immigration reform, the future of which seems pretty murky after Mr. Obama started gingerly backing away this week. But the federal government must react forcefully to the Arizona statute. Is our core belief still the welcome and assimilation of newcomers? Arizona has given one answer. It’s time for Mr. Obama to give the other.

The New York Times, April 30, 2010

Let's finally start to think and deal with real problems!

Monday, April 26, 2010

Perfect Discourse

New interview with Philippe Sollers, by Guillaume Chérel and Franck-Olivier Laferrère, on April 14. Words more thoughtful are rare indeed!

Entretien Ph. Sollers Partie I
Uploaded by Cid-Errant. - Arts and animation videos.

Philippe Sollers « Pour vivre cachés vivons heureux » The interview as published in full in L'Humanité on April 29.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

It Should Be Done !

Too bad this was only a brainstorm, it should be made reality! Everyone everywhere who comes in contact with Maledictus or receives him as a visitor to their country should confront him with modernity. Is he so narrow-minded that he cannot even be expected to HEAR other views?

Pope 'condom' gaffe: Foreign Office apologises - World news - The Observer

The Foreign Office was last night forced to issue a public apology after an official document suggested Britain should mark the Pope's visit this year by asking him to open an abortion clinic, bless a gay marriage and launch a range of Benedict-branded condoms.

I, for one, do NOT think they should have apologized!

Thursday, April 22, 2010

ASH !


Ash wasn't gray or black or ugly or smelly;

ash was blue-skied azure, immaculate,

ash was fiery sunshine streaming down at you,

ash was the absence of even the slightest vapor trail,

ash was quiet, calm, pristine, restful.



No ash isn't bright or clear or pretty or fragrant;

no ash is dark skies streaked with all sorts of clouds,

no ash is very little daylight penetrating the gloom,

no ash is renewed jet engine exhaust across the sky,

no ash is noisier, more hectic, blemished, restless.



Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,

we must simply await the next eruption.



- In Memoriam of the Ash Crisis, April 17-21, 2010

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Censored in France!

But via the internet, you can watch this interview with Nicolas Sarkozy there and everywhere. Sarkozy successfully precluded broadcast of this report made by Télévision Suisse Romande because they asked to many questions about his pressure on the press and disruption of free reporting.


So, watch and learn that freedom of speech must NOT be curtailed, even by the president of France!
Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:


And finally a link to the original broadcast from June, 2009, on the website of French-speaking Swiss Television.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Here's To Berlin !

Grateful to relish life amidst urban troubles rather than suffer tranquility in the provinces!

[Thanks to Claudia for putting me on to this one!]

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Progress IS Possible !

May Obama prevail over the clouded fears of the manipulated to move the United States ever more out of its self-imposed Dark Ages into the light of thoughtful and compassionate statehood!

Obama extends hospital visitation rights to same-sex partners of gays [The Washington Post, April 16, 2010]

President Obama mandated Thursday that nearly all hospitals extend visitation rights to the partners of gay men and lesbians and respect patients' choices about who may make critical health-care decisions for them, perhaps the most significant step so far in his efforts to expand the rights of gay Americans.


I truly welcome all the enlightened actions of this administration, hope indeed that it can push back the resentments that all too many Americans seem to have made into their new guiding ideology.

-- And a note on deficits, people: Who turned a budget surplus into the BIGGEST deficit ever? The Bushbaby ! And that Paling tea cozy babbling in your ears would like to "reduce" taxes and increase the deficit even more. Have you ever stopped to consider that those who benefit the most from tax cuts are those who have so much money they don't notice the difference, while those with hardly anything might just be able to buy one more loaf of unhealthy squishy white bread per month with the benefits they receive?
Come on, think and stop whining!

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Penance, Endlessly

Yes, Maledictus, do penance! All of you should do penance, endlessly, for all the crimes you have indirectly committed or directly covered up, all the lives you have abuse that were naive enough to grant you and yours tutelage over them or to come to you seeking ministry.
And you can do penance for your Pius Brother Williamson, now finally on trial for denying the Holocaust.
Penance, though, will hardly be enough.
Begin thinking, and tell all who have been satisfied and betrayed by faith to think as well.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Seaside right next door

A wonderful trip yesterday all within easy reach of home: Rheinsberg, Himmelpfort, Müritz

Monday, April 5, 2010

A Memorial for the WTC & Philippe Petit

One of the memories connected with the World Trade Center in my own mind which make it always tower high into the sky... 1974...

Friday, April 2, 2010

My Easter Bunny



This year it hopped into my hands as the latest edition of L'Infini, light and joyful for reading on the way here and there during the four-day weekend.