The latest from The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com
- Shannyn Moore: Palin's Last Shot On Wolves & Ashley Judd; Congress Shoots Back
- Noah Levine: THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PATH TO FREEDOM
- Warren Goldstein: Why This White Guy Was Not Arrested While Trying to Break into a House NOT His Own
- Lord Weidenfeld of Chelsea: The Diary: Traveling to Jerusalem
- David Roberts: Gideon Rachman: Inability to Prevent Mass Suffering and Death a "Dilemma for Climate Activists"
| Shannyn Moore: Palin's Last Shot On Wolves & Ashley Judd; Congress Shoots Back | Top |
| Several days have passed since Sarah Palin's final stop on the "Quitstock" Tour. I feel like I've awoken from a strange, surreal dream. I can't yet tell if it was real or not. I listened closely to Palin's final speech as governor. Her classic "word salad" style is no less confusing in print. What Palin was supposed to read off the teleprompter--what was released as the transcript, and what she actually said, are two different things. AKM at The Mudflats blog transcribed the actual speech and deserves the "Golden Comma Award" for her efforts. Palin's politicization of the troops was vulgar. Her right-wing claim to the second amendment was offensive. Her verbal spanking of the "media" was laughable-the same media she was so grateful for covering her "exit strategy" from the governorship of Alaska. With such a large national audience, Palin didn't talk about the plethora of issues facing Alaska. Why would she? She has much bigger fish to fry. She decided to slam Ashley Judd instead. Yes, really. I don't know Ashley Judd, but I like her. I know this must shock the Palinistas; they think I dislike Sarah because she's pretty. According to Palin, she is some sort of Hollywood pixie; a "delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlet." I don't judge Ms. Judd on her stunning appearance; but on the criteria of her politics...just like Palin. "...you're going to see anti-hunting, anti-second amendment circuses from Hollywood and here's how they do it. They use these delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets, they use Alaska as a fundraising tool for their anti-second amendment causes. Stand strong, and remind them patriots will protect our guaranteed, individual right to bear arms, and by the way, Hollywood needs to know, we eat, therefore we hunt." The second amendment doesn't afford citizens the right to shoot wolves and bears out of airplanes. I know. Why the founding fathers didn't think of that is puzzling...oh, wait, the Wright Brothers weren't born yet. I don't remember Palin mentioning that the only president to suspend the right to bear arms was George W. Bush during the aftermath of Hurricaine Katrina. Sarah brought up a fight she lost. Ashley Judd's ads fighting Palin's policy on aerial hunting and the gassing of wolf pups still in their den, were effective. While governor, Palin dedicated $400,000 to fight against the citizen initiative to ban the practice. Her faith based science included bear in the aerial program. As incendiary as the topic is, bringing it up in her final speech was more telling. Mean-girl, high school, vindictive Palin had to get another shot across the bow of the SS Ashley Judd. The late Charlton Heston, president of the NRA, was from Hollywood. The lionized President Reagan was from Hollywood. As an Alaskan who has trapped and hunted, the aerial killing of animals is to hunting what hiring a hooker is to dating. A sure thing, with no work. No wonder it appealed to Governor Palin. Just this week, Congressman George Miller and Senator Dianne Feinstein have introduced the Protect America's Wildlife (PAW) Act, federal legislation to end the controversial practice of using aircraft and gunmen to chase and kill wolves in Alaska. Please contact your legislators and tell them to support the PAW Act . More on Sarah Palin | |
| Noah Levine: THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PATH TO FREEDOM | Top |
| The first teachings the Buddha gave after his enlightenment were the four noble truths. These were first delivered to the same ascetics he had been practicing with in the forest before his awakening. This giving of the truths is often referred to as the setting in motion of the wheel of Dharma. The term wheel is used because the Buddha's teachings explain the cycle or circle of existence. Furthering that imagery, the wheel of Dharma consists of eight trainings, the eightfold path, which are seen as the wheel's spokes. When a wheel is set in motion it revolves. One could say that all of Buddhism revolves around these central teachings, because every Buddhist tradition includes some form of the four noble truths and the eightfold path. So with this turning of the wheel, the Buddha started a revolution that continues to this day. When the Buddha first returned to his old pals, the homeless homeys, they were hesitant to listen to what he had to say. They shunned him as a food-eater and sellout. But the Buddha's newfound freedom and happiness were so apparent and attractive that they couldn't help but listen to what he had to say. Noah currently teaches at his meditation center in Los Angeles. Against The Stream Buddhist Meditation Society is located in a historic building in East Hollywood, one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the city. 4300 Melrose Avenue Los Angeles CA 90029 http://www.againstthestream.org | |
| Warren Goldstein: Why This White Guy Was Not Arrested While Trying to Break into a House NOT His Own | Top |
| Last October I flew to Sarasota, Fla., and arranged to stay at the home of a friend who was traveling at the time. She mailed me keys and an address. I landed late and took a cab. When we pulled up in front of the house, which I'd never seen before, it was very dark, so I asked the cabbie to wait while I let myself in. The keys didn't work in the front door. Or the back door. With rising anxiety -- it was 11 p.m., after all -- I called my friend, but she wasn't answering her cell phone. We tried the keys in both doors again; no luck. Just before heading back to the airport, where I figured I could find a hotel, I tried my friend again. This time she picked up. I explained my problem, describing the front door -- and she started laughing. "You're in the wrong place. You'd better get out of there before someone calls the cops." We were on the wrong street. While the driver was consulting his GPS, sure enough, a cop appeared behind us. We stopped; the cop came over; the cabbie explained; he and the cop had a chuckle; the cop returned to his car; we drove on to the right place, and the keys fit. All was well. I thought of this story when I read about the recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates after entering his own house. The worst thing that happened to me was that I had to feel stupid and frustrated for 15 minutes. It never occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to talk my way out of any problem. That's because my story involves four white people -- the cabbie, my friend, the cop, and me. I think now it's fair to say that there isn't a black man in America who could tell a story like mine. Gates is probably the most famous black professor in the world, and was in his own home in one of the most liberal cities in the entire country. Of course he was furious. Still the white officer arrested him -- even after he knew it was Gates' home. My hope is that lots of white folks will finally get what our African-American brothers and sisters have been trying to get through our thick skulls for about half a century now. It's different being black. No matter whether we think we are racists. And anyway, no person of color believes any white person who says, "I'm not a racist." Every day, we white people benefit from being white, from white ancestry, and from acting as if we deserve the benefits of being white. When we hunt for housing, real estate agents regard us more favorably. We don't get followed by store security. We get better deals from car salesmen, more generous treatment from juries, and -- despite myths of rampant affirmative action -- our kids rarely compete with equally qualified African-American kids because so many urban schools, where most black kids are educated, are flat-out disasters. Racism thrives in many places -- in hospital emergency rooms, in bank loan departments, in country clubs and churches and synagogues and universities. And in police departments. White cops treat black men as criminals all the time -- all the time. And the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) everywhere defends every white officer who gets caught out -- even on video. In Cambridge, the city and police department dropped the charges, calling the incident "regrettable and unfortunate" -- not the PBA, which gave its "full and unqualified support" to the officer's actions. The incident even provoked President Obama, who's stayed pretty far away from race issues since being elected, into saying that the police acted "stupidly." He's since backtracked and invited both Gates and the officer who arrested him, Sgt. James Crowley, to the White House for a beer. It's a great start on what needs to happen. But it's only a start. We need to transform police training top to bottom on the subject of race. The fact that the Cambridge cop taught the class about racial profiling suggests there's a good bit more work to do on the subject. Then we can start on banks, credit card companies, churches, synagogues and universities. Gates has always had flair -- for figuring out new ideas and new trends, and for generating publicity. I don't wish upon him the fear he must have felt in his doorway, treated like a criminal in his own home. But he may have given white Americans one of the best teaching moments about race that we've ever had. If only we pay attention to it. --- This piece originally appeared on the website of Minnesota Public Radio . | |
| Lord Weidenfeld of Chelsea: The Diary: Traveling to Jerusalem | Top |
| Originally posted in the Financial Times Israelis can be great grumblers, yet the global economic crisis engenders fewer moaners there than elsewhere: "Our banks," said one caustic tycoon, "never liked lending anyway." Expensive clubs and restaurants in Tel Aviv are full, tourism is flourishing; one hears Russian and French spoken almost as frequently as American English in the halls of palatial hotels. Jerusalem, however, is increasingly austere, ruled by an Orthodox mayor. Young couples prefer to live outside the city and even senior cabinet ministers commute to Tel Aviv and its garden suburbs. Yet it is still a uniquely dignified setting for ceremonious public occasions. I was there to collect a Lifetime Achievement award in the memory of Teddy Kollek, the legendary mayor of Jewish Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993 who earned the respect of Arabs as well as Jews and who was hailed as the greatest builder of the city since Kings David and Herod. I was overawed at the thought that my forerunners were Helmut Kohl, a great ally of Israel, Isaac Stern, the violin virtuoso and founder of an Israeli music centre, and Professor Bernard Lewis, dean of Middle Eastern history experts. I knew Teddy slightly while I WAS still a schoolboy in Vienna when we were both members of the Zionist Youth Movement. Shortly before the war he ran the underground transports of young Jews in central Europe to Palestine. At that stage of the Nazis' anti-Jewish drive emigration was still allowed, even encouraged. Teddy negotiated with Adolf Eichmann at Gestapo HQ for their release. Blue-eyed and blond, in the middle of the war Teddy was smuggled by Allied Intelligence into Nazi-occupied Europe and made contact with the ghettos in the east. The author Arthur Koestler, an outspoken critic of totalitarian regimes, gave a dinner party for him in London and invited Nye Bevan, his wife Jennie Lee and assorted left-wing intellectuals to hear his first-hand accounts of the earliest stages of the "final solution". The foreign office met the news with grim incredulity; Frank Roberts, a diplomat whom I believe held Neville Chamberlain's fountain pen at the Munich Agreement, dubbed Kollek's tales atrocious propaganda aimed at weakening the British Government's policy of keeping the doors to Palestine barred to Jewish immigrants. There is somewhere a minute in which he expresses his hopes that, after the war, as many Jews as possible would land on the Russian side of the border because the Soviets knew how to deal with Zionists. Koestler, incidentally, had a minor nervous breakdown on hearing Kollek's details and immediately wrote a novel, Arrival & Departure , in which he prophetically described mass killings -- in fact a pale foretaste of the eventual horrific reality. ***** Returning from abroad, the atmosphere in Britain strikes one as bitter and confused and at times morose and elegiac. Body blows against cherished institutions such as Parliament and the financial irregularities of its elected representatives are taking their toll on the universally respected British phlegm. All the more reason to remember with gratitude figures of peerless integrity as well as brilliance. Two events within a week drew attention to the lives of two remarkable establishment figures, Sir Nicholas Henderson and sir Isaiah Berlin. Sir Nicholas Henderson was possibly England's most popular and remarkable postwar diplomat. As a young man he amassed priceless experience as secretary to galleon figures of diplomacy including Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin; later he was ambassador in Warsaw, Bonn, Paris and Washington (twice), a problem solver with an air of effortless mastery of his trade, intellectually alert and socially unrivaled. His career started inauspiciously, working in the shadow of the atom spies Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, but ended triumphantly with his Falklands War role as the link with Washington, where he remains a legend to this day. I also boast of a half century friendship and had a guest bedroom in each of his embassies (except Santiago de Chile, his debut post). In the Paris embassy I slept in the bed of the original owner, Pauline Bonaparte, favoured sister of Napoleon. The memorial was at Sotheby's, where Henderson worked until his death in March. The guest list echoed post-war political history, including Clarissa Avon, niece of Churchill and widow of Anthony Eden, Lord Carrington and the Oxford historian and Lloyd George's granddaughter, Margaret Macmillan, as well as others from the worlds of the London Library and Bloomsbury. ***** At Wolfson College what would have been the 100th birthday of its founder, Isaiah Berlin, was impressively commemorated. James Billington, long standing Librarian of Congress in Washington and distinguished Russian scholar, gave the memorial lecture. New volumes were on sale of Isaiah's vast correspondence with the widest circle of acquaintance of any eminent thinker of our time. An intellectual influence on two generations of Oxford undergraduates, serious scholar and peerless raconteur, he also had a distinctive style of talking and gesticulating -- nervously lifting his shoulders, pursing his lips, clipped, staccato speech and a unique way of chopping the air with one arm while drawing circles in the air with the other. Before meeting him for the first time, shortly after the war, I attended a rather feudal ball at Oxford. My host, a keen huntsman, wore the red jacket of the Bullingdon Club, yet I found his way of speech and gesticulation strangely un-English. He spoke with uninhibited enthusiasm of his tutor, Isaiah Berlin. When I met the famous sage soon after I realised whence the redcoat's manners stemmed and, having a passion for the study of the genealogy of manners and mannerisms, thought I detected the origin of Isaiah's: the movement with his shoulders, changing inclination of his head stemmed from the fastidious man of letters, Lord David Cecil; the clipped language and pursed lips from Wadham's warden, Maurice Bowra, but the complex perpetual motion of his arms came straight from his distinguished forebear, the great Rabbi of Vilna -- a far cry and yet a shortcut from a wunder-Rabbi to a Master of the foxhunt. More on Israel | |
| David Roberts: Gideon Rachman: Inability to Prevent Mass Suffering and Death a "Dilemma for Climate Activists" | Top |
| This column from Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times really pushes my buttons. There’s something beneath the surface that is downright pathological, and not at all unique to Rachman. It besets most political pundits on this issue. I’ll try to dig it out. The premise of Rachman’s column is that while everyone accuses climate change skeptics of being in denial, in fact climate activists are in denial as well. They keep hanging on to the U.N. negotiation process long after it’s become clear that developing countries aren’t going to budge. The politics of an international climate accord are incredibly difficult, possibly insoluble. That’s an arguable point, but a fair one. The U.N. process is open to criticism. And the politics really are difficult. But listen to this conclusion: The state of international negotiations presents a huge dilemma for climate change activists. Most genuinely believe that a failure to achieve an international agreement in Copenhagen would be catastrophic. But they also know that, even if a deal is reached, it is likely to be feeble and ineffective. If they admit this publicly, they risk creating a climate of despair and inaction. But if they press ahead, they are putting all their energy into an approach that they must know is highly unlikely to deliver. It is a horrible dilemma. But, in difficult situations, it is best to start by facing facts. The trouble is that—in different ways—both sides of the climate change debate are in denial. This kind of language is so familiar that you have to step back a moment to recognize that there’s something bizarre about it. Climate science indicates that a business-as-usual path will lead to at least 5 degrees of warming by 2100 , which represents utter catastrophe. Many scientists believe that we are near (or have passed) tipping points after which positive feedbacks become self-reinforcing and climate changes are irreversible. If we want to avoid that, we have very little time to peak and start reducing global emissions. No one has proposed a credible way of doing that aside from international negotiations. All that is either true, or it’s not. The mainstream science and policy communities think it’s true. If it is true, then millions of people, and possibly civilization itself, are threatened by climate shifts, within the lifetime of people alive today. If it is true, then the difficulty of getting an international agreement is not a “dilemma for climate change activists.” It’s a dilemma for human beings. “A climate of despair and inaction” is not a risk to activists. It’s a risk to the lives and welfare of hundreds of millions of people and future generations. So I want to ask Rachman, and all the pundits who address climate politics: Do you believe it’s true? Do you believe the mainstream scientific consensus that climate change poses massive risks for humanity, and that urgent international action is necessary to reduce those risks? If so, it is incoherent, even immoral, to go on treating this issue as though it were merely a clash of interest groups. It’s not like climate policy is for “climate activists” what card check is for unions, or financial regulations are to the banking sector, or subsidies are to farmers. It’s not a parochial issue. Do you believe it’s true? If not, say so, clearly. If so, then it’s your fight too. You cannot stand on the sidelines in the pose of a savvy, above-it-all observer. There are no sidelines. More on Climate Change | |
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