The Kwanzaa Song – Billy Paul Williams

So on this Boxing Day, not really even a holiday in America, please remember the victims of that disaster and think about what steps you’ve taken since then to prepare for a similar kind of disaster if it struck your own community. We need to be ready; the earth is full of surprises, and we aren’t being very nice to her lately.

Find all those little bits and pieces of paper, the lists, etc. Throw those all in the recycling. And think of one thing, one simple thing, that you can do – heck, you can start it right NOW! And continue it.

Israel continues expansion of settlements while Israeli business press worries about lower interest earnings on massive US aid payments.

Iran has one of the highest per capita consumptions of fuel in the world, and constitutes the tenth largest polluter among all countries. This results in excessive waste and pollution, and renders the country’s industrial production inefficient, expensive and uncompetitive. Moreover, Iran’s ecology suffers from this pollution, and the health of its citizens is at serious risk from the emissions.

The first suspicious moment in the chats between Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning occurred at 12:54 on May 22–ostensibly the second day of chat communication between them (though Manning had sent Lamo encrypted emails for an unspecified period of time before that point).

The eastern provinces of Afghanistan abutting the Pakistani tribal areas provide cross-border access to the Taliban-led insurgent coalition. Whatever else you think about the Afghanistan war, the Obama administration decided in 2009 to deemphasize security operations in the east at the expense of a wide-ranging effort to reverse Taliban momentum in the south. The best that can be said of that effort so far is that Taliban momentum, by the administration’s account, is stalled.

From today’s Washington Post: “Earlier this month, the chairman of the Senate committee overseeing tax policy, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), gave himself a birthday-party fundraiser – on the same day that the chamber took its first vote on an $858 billion tax package that would provide breaks to wealthy citizens and business interests.”

As long as discontent resides only in the educated class, the tendency towards meliorism will be the only countervailing pressure against the usurpation of existing institutions that control the worst depredations of the rich.

Christmas is a funny holiday. Pegged to the old pagan winter solstice celebrations, it’s on the calendar now as the time Jesus was born. For the record, if I’d been a Wise Man I’d of brought the baby Jesus a Howlin’ Wolf record.