You are welcome to share anything you find on this site. Please link back to jimrigby.org.
Have you ever seen birds fly in formation, or observed a group of fish turn on a dime? These animals have some tie that binds them together, some greater life they hold in common.
Is it then irrational to believe there is also a tie that binds together humankind? Is it superstitious to believe we are part of a larger life, and to consider those bonds to be sacred?
Sister Kathy Sherman is a nun. She is also a songwriter whose roots go back to the protest movements of the Vietnam era. When the Vatican issued a harsh criticism of American nuns for speaking up for justice and not being obedient to church hierarchy, Sister Sherman did what she does best, she wrote a song. The link below will take you to a youtube version of the song that has become the anthem for the movement of nuns seeking to bring the church back to a message of compassion and justice.
Thanks to Eliza Gilkyson for the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OzLhTV6pkQ
Paul Buchheit has written a nice summary on income inequality. I will do a summary of his summary and provide a link to his article.
Overall wealth in the world has doubled in the last ten years but is being hoarded by paying unfair wages and unfair tax rates.
93% of all income in the US now goes to the richest 1% of the population.
Among large nations, only Russia, Ukraine and Lebanon have a more unequal distribution of wealth.
Consumer debt has actually disguised how bad things are. The middle class has kept up appearances by taking out loans.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/12/03
The New York Time reports today that officials decided to leave nursing homes and other health facilities to ride out Hurricane Sandy. It is not yet clear why Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo advised against evacuation.
The recommendation that thousands of elderly, disabled and mentally ill residents remain in more than 40 nursing homes and adult homes in flood-prone areas of New York City had calamitous consequences.
At least 29 facilities in Queens and Brooklyn were severely flooded. Generators failed or were absent. Buildings were plunged into a cold, wet darkness, with no access to power, water, heat and food.
Looking back, the failure of government leaders to move New York’s most vulnerable people to safety is a mystery. The nursing homes had not been required to even have backup generators. Were these cost cutting moves? Hopefully the newpaper article will force an investigation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/nyregion/call-that-kept-nursing-home-patients-in-sandys-path.html
I promised to post my Christmas sermon series. This first one looks at the predictions of a savior called “Immanel.” In this first lesson we will look at how waiting for a savior has sometimes kept nations in bondage and kept individuals from taking responsibility for their lives. We will look at the prophecy of Immanuel not as a prediction of a future leader, but as a vision of how the world will look and feel to those who answer its call to live courageously today.
http://staopen.com/podcast/2012/rigby12_2_2012.mp3
Busted! was a sleazy Austin newsletter that published mugshots of people arrested for things like DWI or shoplifting. The tabloid could be found in convenience stores near the counter. According to the American Statesman, the print version is no more.
While the actual newsletter was only a dollar, the paper also made money by charging to take the pictures down from their website. To completely remove links would cost $178. According to the Statesman, the newpaper announced it demise with an insult filled message to its readers:
Busted!’s farewell note — addressed to “crack-addled CapMetro riding miscreants, stoned hipsters, dude bros with three-plus DWIs” and others — offered little details about their fate.
“We have some sad news for you, our beloved hideous readers,” it reads. “Our backers are moving on to bigger and more lucrative things, and the rest of us poor schmoes on staff just ain’t got the cash to put out the print version ourselves.”
In other words, the staff had the same contempt for their readers as for the people it ridiculed in print. Unfortunately the website will be new and expanded, but at least this hideous practice of making money off the misery of others will be out of print.
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/mughsot-filled-tabloid-ceases-print-but-an-elusive/nTLWN/
If you missed it this week, this clip from Bill O’Reilly is worth watching. In his annual efforts to maintain there is a war on Christmas whenever religious symbols are taken out of publicly funded spaces, O’Reilly invited an atheist to discuss the issue. O’Reilly agrees that a Methodist or Jewish message would be sectarian, but he claims that Christianity itself is not a religion, but a philosophy.
We human beings are endlessly tricky about having our own truth or ethical claims weighed by the same measure we use on others. One dead giveaway that someone has a mental thumb on the scale is when they maintain their politics aren’t really political, their religion isn’t really religious, or their nationalism isn’t really nationalistic.
Tim Church, a spokesman for the Washington health department, told Fox News they will likely be removing the words “bride” and “groom” from state wedding certificates when their same-sex marriage law goes into effect next week. Those words will be replaced with gender-neutral terms.
“We’ve been quickly moving ahead to change our marriage certificate to make sure it fits for everyone who is going to be using it.”-Tim Church
Unfortunately, the words “bride” and “groom” may be replaced with awkward terms like “Spouse A” and “Spouse B” or “Person A” and “Person B.” Such wooded phrases are sure to stoke the fires of resistance. But, eventually the state will realize that neither partner needs to be ranked. Whereas patriarchal unions have often hidden a hierarchical mindset, egalitarian relations need no such ranking. So the state can just leave two places for the “spouses” or “partners” to sign. As Church noted:
“We want our form to work for everyone who is getting married,”
One of the biggest stories of the week may have been based on a forgery. The Associated Press published a chart that they said suggested Iran was working on a nuclear weapon. They claimed that the graph depicted “computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.”
An article in the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists claimed that the chart was “unlikely to have been made by research scientists working at a national level.” They said the graph“does nothing more than indicate either slipshod analysis or an amateurish hoax.”
The title of the article was, “Graph suggests Iran working on bomb.” And what was their source for the graph? It was an unnamed country “critical of Iran’s atomic program.” If that wasn’t fishy enough, the supposedly secret Iranian plan includes English subtext.
The moral of the story? Anytime we pick up a newspaper, we should always remember that it is probably owned by the same people who profit from wars upon which they claim to be objectively reporting.
http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/diy-graphic-design
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was signed into law late last year allowing for infinite detention of terror suspects without trial or even charges being brought against them. Senator Dianne Feinstein waged unrelenting war on the practice of arresting and imprisoning suspects without trial. After failing to get a due process clause into the NDAA, she finally settled on a compromise amendment.
Feinstein’s amendment, which is supported by a coalition of Democrat and Republican senators, seeks to protect citizens and lawful permanent residents of the United States from certain indefinite military detention — but only them. It would require Congress to expressly authorize any military detention of these categories of people in any future authorizations for military force or declarations of war. But it remains silent as to all others, implying that the executive branch is free to detain others inside the U.S. at will. – Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel and advocate
The 5th Amendment to the Constitution reads, “No person shall be… deprived of… liberty… without due process of law.” Note the word “person” not “citizen.” Even if our nation never really put the amendment into practice, it reminds us that we once believed that for a nation to be great it must protect universal human rights, not just the rights of its own citizens.
It is possible I am self-deceived. It is possible our nation never cared about anyone unfortunate to be born outside our boundaries, but I seem to remember a time when obeying international law was what distinguished civilized nations from rouge states. I seem to remember a day when my nation claimed to be a champion of human rights.
It is easy to say we are safer if we treat terror suspects as non-humans, but the test of ethics is how we would feel if the same principle were used on us. To illustrate the point, imagine the following scene:
It is 1929. Al Capone has been difficult to bring to justice so the President sends planes over Chicago suburbs to bomb suspected hideouts. Every day innocent civilians killed, hospitals bombed or children injured, but they are considered collateral damage in the pursuit of justice. Possible suspects are rounded up and imprisoned without trial, again in the pursuit of justice.
My point is, we would never treat Americans that way. So, what principle allows us to wave due process for others? How can we call “justice” for others, what we would call “injustice” for ourselves?
http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/11/29/indefinite-detention-already-bad-dont-add-discrimination