My blood pressure is so high up at this moment. I just read an outrageous article by the AP.

NY priest pleads guilty to raping 3 teenage boys

A Franciscan priest admitted raping 3 boys in the 70s and 80s. BOSTON - A Franciscan priest from New York pleaded guilty to raping three teenage boys during overnight trips to Boston in the 1970s and 1980s and was ordered Tuesday to serve time on probation.

The Rev. Frank Genevieve avoided prison time as a Suffolk Superior Court judge sentenced him to a suspended sentence of eight to 10 years, with five years' probation.

Where is the fucking justice?

I recently read Richard Dawkins :The God Delusion," which has made me rethink some things.

Does Obama have the guts to lead a change in our global military strategy? Are Iraq and Afghanistan merely giant pimples on a much greater obscenity that seems too big to focus on?

Per Al-Jazeera, as part of new defense strategy, the United States is currently spending billions of dollars to turn Guam into the new Okinawa.Two thirds of the estimated cost of $15 billion will be to relocate 8,000 soldiers from Okinawa. But it's the hardware that has the locals worried.

US building up Guam base

On the apron, old but still operational B-52 bombers... were standing by....The US outpost will see a whole array of the latest military hardware including nuclear-powered Trident submarines which can fire Tomahawk cruise missiles and unmanned Global Hawk spy aircraft.....By next year, the base will receive the latest state-of-the-art F-22 fighter jets, reflecting Guam’s strategic defence position in a volatile part of the world.

An attack on a remote US base near the Pakistan border has had deadly consequences for US forces. In the deadliest attack in 3 years, 9 Americans were killed and 15 wounded.

Attack on US base in Afghanistan kills 9 Americans

So much of our talk here at KOS and by politicians has been about Iraq. But meanwhile, back at the ranch:

U.S. officials say militant attacks in Afghanistan are becoming more complex, intense and better coordinated than a year ago. Monthly death tolls of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan surpassed U.S. military deaths in Iraq in May and June. And last Monday, a suicide bomber attacked the Indian Embassy in Kabul, killing 58 people in the deadliest attack in the Afghan capital since 2001.

The US workplace has become a dangerous place for many American workers, a source of abuse.
Desk Rage Spoils American Workplace

Nearly half of U.S. workers in America report yelling and verbal abuse on the job, with roughly a quarter saying it has driven them to tears, research has shown... Other research showed one-sixth of workers reported anger at work has led to property damage, while a tenth reported physical violence and fear their workplace might not be safe

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Paul Spector, a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of South Florida,  also notes another astounding result:

[H]is research has found 2 percent to 3 percent of people admit to pushing, slapping or hitting someone at work. With roughly 100 million people in the U.S. work force, he said, that's as many as 3 million.

Wow.

Just when you thought it was safe to go all gloom 'n doom about the planet, some MIT folks have come up with a coating that lets windows double as solar collectors.

Windows Double as Solar Collectors

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system that turns windows into a solar collector, letting people see clearly while collecting energy.

A coating on the glass channels photons of light to a solar collector around the edge of the window, MIT electrical engineer Marc Baldo and colleagues report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

The  window coating absorbs the light and transmits it to the glass underneath. The glass then transmits the energy to solar cells at the window's edge. The coating comes in various colors or "almost transparent."

Per the AP: Shades of the Nazis. Can you spell scapegoat?

The Italian government plans to fingerprint tens of thousands of "Gypsy" adult women and children.

Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, said last week that fingerprinting was needed to fight crime and identify illegal immigrants for expulsion. Italian officials have been blaming Gypsies for rising crime.

EU lawmakers scold Italy for Gypsy fingerprinting

The European Union is protesting the decision, and is compiling a report. The routine fingerprinting of peoples if against EU rules.

This action is just the latest in a new round of persecution against the people who call themselves Roma.

More below the Fold.

I like the Constitution as much as anybody. But given that the CIA and FBI have always done shit under the table, and that Obama says he intends to try to work against key provisions of FISA in the Senate and as Pres: I have to ask, What the heck are we focusing on here? Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

Per the AP, we've lost half a million jobs since the year's start:
62,000 jobs lost, off nearly half-million for year

In June alone, employers got rid of 62,000 jobs, bringing total losses so far this year close to a staggering half-million -- 438,000, according to the Labor Department's report released Thursday. The economy needs to generate more than 100,000 new jobs a month for employment to remain stable.

And the unemployment rate is moving steadily higher:

The jobless rate held steady at 5.5 percent after jumping in May by the most in two decades. Still, June's jobless rate was considerably higher than the 4.6 percent of a year ago. The unemployment rate is expected to climb through the rest of this year and top 6 percent early next year.

Scientists find monkeys who know how to fish

Groups of long-tailed macaques were observed four times over the past eight years scooping up small fish with their hands and eating them along rivers in East Kalimantan and North Sumatra provinces, according to researchers from The Nature Conservancy and the Great Ape Trust.

The species had been known to eat fruit and forage for crabs and insects, but never before fish from rivers.

New behavior in our cousins? WTF? And who, besides George Allen, cares about macaques anyway?

We do, for what they can tell us about ourselves.  If macaques as a species can learn how to fish, we can learn, as a species, to do something equally pathbreaking in our quest for survival. Such as growing our own vegetables again. Using "new" sources of energy like the sun and wind.

I am not a financial advisor. I don't even play one on TV. But I had to learn about investing when I became the trustee for my mildly retarded older brother. Caveat: I am not Bonddad even remotely. I am self-taught.

(I was raised as a socialist Catholic: money is the root of all evil; talking about it is low-class; one shouldn't want it; one shouldn't need it. I spent much of my life incredibly stressed because I couldn't afford health insurance or care for my kids and me.)

I am writing this because I was reviewing comments from a diary of a few days ago and saw that someone had invested a significant amount of money in a bank savings account at 1%. This caused me pain. One percent isn't even keeping up with inflation. The value of the money stash is being whittled away by time.

I spent a year surfing the Web. Here are a few tools I picked up: They concern how to look for better savings account interest rates and how to research mutual funds.

More below the fold.

HRC in her speech asked her listeners to go to her web site and share their thoughts.

The splash screen says only to sign up to show HRC you support what she stands for.

I gave my info and wrote:

PLEASE DROP OUT.

And a few (polite) reasons why.

Is this a good idea, or will she just add up the names and say x million want me to stay in?

Of course, it's very Kafkaesque. No matter what the "math" says, HRC seems to win.

Urge her to drop out in CAP letters or stay away?

The Chinese join such countries as Bangladesh and South Africa in making the Great Leap Forward:

China Bans Free Plastic Bags

Beginning on June 1, all supermarkets, department stores and shops will be prohibited from giving out free plastic bags, the State Council said. Stores must clearly mark the price of plastic shopping bags and are banned from tacking that price onto products.

It is perhaps odd that in a country where air and water quality have experienced such shocking deterioration in recent years that this is where the Chinese put their efforts. But maybe it helps morale to pass a law that can have such a visible impact so quickly.  

The regulation is part of Beijing's increased efforts to fight the pollution that has accompanied breakneck economic growth. As factories churn out low-cost products for the world's consumers, they have severely fouled the country's air and water.

More below the fold.

Just before the Chinese nation was to start a 3-day period of national mourning for the  estimated 32,000 dead in Sichuan, the latest in a series of aftershocks has shaken the region and killed three more.

New Tremor Hits China on Eve of Three-Day Mourning

This diary is a series of brief impressions about the effect of this tragedy on the Chinese--and its lack of effect in the US?

I remember when the World Trade center was bombed in New York City. I lived there at the time. It was shocking, but what blew my mind more was the response from all over the world--the photographs from almost every country of people gathering in candlelit ceremonies to grieve with the US, to support the US.
What also kind of blew my mind was how long the situation was "milked" in New York and DC for sympathy. Many people may find this offensive, but there will be more after the fold...

With each racial dogwhistle "misstep" of the Clinton Campaign, I have become more and more appalled.
With each new variation on basic math in terms "how to count delegates," I have become more and more puzzled.
With each new justification on why Democratic Party decisions on rules for seating delegates can be ignored (see Florida and Michigan), I have become more and more mystified.

This is not just People Behaving Badly, it's People Behaving Worse and Worse.

1. First outer Satellite Shaheen implied Obama was a drug dealer.

2. Inside the Orbiter Bill Clinton made his Jesse Jackson comments.

3. The Royal Sun herself conflated "hard-working people" with "white people."

The arguments have become more tortured and more outlandish on math and "how to seat delegate" questions. They've lost...so why are Clinton, Lanny Davis, et al they becoming more and more outrageous?

The. Chutzpah. Is. Unbelievable.: In a press conference yesterday, Laura Bush took the Myanmar junta to task for failing to prepare its citizens for the recent cyclone (est. death toll: 10,000) and for spurning foreign aid.

Asked whether she worried that US aid might not reach Myanmar's people, Laura Bush replied: "I'm worried that they won't even accept US aid."...

Gee--it's too bad the junta couldn't learn how to lead from Boy Bush's government:

In one exchange, State Department officials anguished over whether to tell Italy that its shipments of medicine, gauze, and other medical supplies spoiled in the elements for weeks after Katrina's landfall on August 29, 2005, and were destroyed....And while television sets worldwide showed images of New Orleans residents begging to be rescued from rooftops as floodwaters rose, U.S. officials turned down countless offers of allied troops and search-and-rescue teams. The most common responses: "sent letter of thanks" and "will keep offer on hand," the new documents show.

http://www2.nysun.com/article/53433?page_no=2

While we debate endlessly about the race card in the Dem primaries, it's alive and well on other fronts: There is an anti-Semitism already strong in this country that now targets Arabs instead of Jews.  

Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Ms. Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”

Yesterday's New York Times shows how Arab educator Almontaser and the Kahlil Gibran International Academy were sabotaged by the Sun and the Post, and, yes, the Department of Education. The future of our world, and our hopes for peace and understanding, rest with our seeing other people as people, and not as inherently worse than we are. This kind of racism is affecting all of us. read the article, substitute "Jew" for "Arab," and you'll see what I mean.

Critics Cost Muslim Educator Her Dream School

More below the fold.

Per the AP, a study by the Rand Corporation, not a liberal bastion, is documenting the enormity of the mental health crisis that the Iraq War is bringing to our shores:

WASHINGTON - Roughly one in every five U.S. troops who have survived the bombs and other dangers of Iraq and Afghanistan now suffers from major depression or post-traumatic stress, an independent study said Thursday. It estimated the toll at 300,000 or more.

But that's just half the story. Not only are the head problems psychological--many are physical injuries as well:

As many or more report possible brain injuries from explosions or other head wounds, said the study, the first major survey from outside the government.

Per the AP, only half with mental health issues have SOUGHT help (not received all the help they need, only "sought"), and even fewer of those with head injuries.

Hillary Clinton is doing all of us progressives a big favor by staying in the race. I realized this last night as I watched the second amazing debate I have seen. Josh Marshall commented this morning on something I noted too:

But one of my big questions about this debate was Hillary Clinton's lack of aggressiveness toward Barack Obama. I think it spoke very well of her on a number of levels -- personally, as a potential leader, etc. She made her case on her merits and policies.

But there is no mistaking the fact that by every metric and every visible trendline Barack Obama is in the process of winning the nomination. At least conventional political logic would dictate that she had no choice but to go after him just as she has been doing on the campaign trail.

But she didn't.

So why is she still showing up?

Have we all become so jaded that this doesn't get remarked upon? In the last week alone, FOUR public killings:
I just ran across news of another public shoting, this one at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge. A woman shot and killed 2 students and then killed herself.

http://news.yahoo.com/...

Yesterday a man killed 6 at a City Council meeting near St. Louis.

This fellow just killed his current girlfriend and then stabbed and shot his ex-wife in front of her class full of kids:
http://www.wkyc.com/...

On Feb 2, 5 women were killed at a Lane Bryant store outside Chicago.

Where is the outcry?