Tag Archives: international

Poped Out

by johnsmithwindows Posted on March 13, 2013

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Watching the cheering crowds and the usual fawning secular media reporting on a new pope without the slightest bit of knowledge, I am, quite simply, poped out. A non-European! A Jesuit! Doesn’t he look warm and friendly!

The truth is, we don’t know much. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is described as a doctrinal conservative and a man of social justice. He gave up his limo and takes the bus. He’s said to be fan of Comunione e Liberazione, a conservative Catholic lay group.

He was ordained a priest in 1969 and by 1973 he was a bureaucrat—almost no history of serving ordinary people in parish life. He was a midlevel Jesuit functionary and then worked for many years in the Curia in Rome. His profile fits those of many bishops and cardinals appointed by the last two popes—youngish when appointed, little pastoral experience. Working as a Jesuit provincial doesn’t tell you much about the lives of women or children, of working and starving families.

Vamos a ver; we will see. The job of Pope can turn the most humble man into a elitist. After all, you are infallible.

I expected little; I think my expectations have been met.

Mother Jones
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Poped Out

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Smash patriarchy, save the planet

by Michalak876 Posted on March 9, 2013

Smash patriarchy, save the planet

By Susie Cagle

Women might make up more than half the Earth’s human population, but we often bear the brunt of the same sorts of policies and destructive ways of thinking that are responsible for global climate change.

Do those things seem unrelated? Well, they’re not, which is why International Women’s Day is a perfect time to remember that the systems that degrade the planet are also the ones that oppress women.

Eve Ensler, the artist and activist behind The Vagina Monologues, connected the dots between abusing the planet and abusing women last month in this interview with Grist, where she called out the global economy’s destructive “pressing rape mentality, which has to do with the powerful getting what they want at the expense of the person they’re taking it from, without an awareness of reciprocity or mutuality.”

From former Prime Minister of Norway and Director-General of the World Health Organization, Gro Harlem Brundtland, writing at Fast Co.Exist:

Conflict and environmental degradation compound the problem in many contexts, leaving women even more vulnerable to violence. Soldiers and militias commonly use rape as a weapon of war. As climate change affects the availability of water, food and firewood, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, women have to travel longer distances to fetch supplies, putting them at greater risk of molestation, harassment, rape and beatings.

We cannot treat these issues in isolation; they are part of a bigger picture of systemic discrimination against women.

Policies that help the planet — such as family planning and flexible and remote work – also stand to help ladies maybe even more than guys (don’t whine too much, dudes, they’re good for you too). And this time, a lot of women are pushing back and vowing not to be left behind yet again. They’re taking the bike lanes, remaking cities, and leading the Idle No More movement (march tomorrow, Toronto!) all in the name of sustainability and equality.

I’d like to end this on a special IWD shout-out to the Ovarian Psycos women of color bike brigade in Los Angeles. “This is our own way of protesting,” says one member. “We think our bicycles are a revolutionary concept.”

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Smash patriarchy, save the planet

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Covering Hugo Chávez: "If Only He Ruled As Well As He Campaigned"

by sreg2 Posted on March 8, 2013

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With the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Latin America—and the world—lost one of its most polarizing leaders. Responses from the international community have ranged from devastated to celebratory, while the barrage of political postmortems in the United States has tended toward ambivalence (see here and here).

This isn’t surprising. Chávez was a contradictory figure: a champion of the poor who globe-trotted in a $65 million Airbus; a folk hero who feted Hollywood royalty and retained one of Caracas’ top fashion designers; an irrepressible showman whose recent private life remained a mystery. If at times he seemed like a throwback to an earlier generation of caudillos (most notably Fidel Castro, with whom Chávez shared an intense bond), he was nonetheless a populist, genuinely and rapturously loved by Venezuela’s poor.

His political legacy is decidedly murky. While chavistas are quick to praise the regime’s accomplishments—free education, free health care, reduced poverty, massive food and agricultural subsidies, a 93 percent literacy rate—the reality of day-to-day life in Venezuela tells a more troubling story. Caracas claims one of the world’s highest murder rates and a steady drumbeat of kidnapping, carjacking, and home invasion. One of its most notorious landmarks, the unfinished 45-story Tower of David, is now home to 2,500 squatters, a monument to the bungled economy.

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Covering Hugo Chávez: "If Only He Ruled As Well As He Campaigned"

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10 MoJo Profiles of Fierce Women

by DenaeTina858 Posted on March 8, 2013

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In the early ’90s, a guy at Sony told a female singer that she was “too black, too fat, too short, and too old.” Lucky for us, she stuck with music, and twenty years later America finally discovered singer Sharon Jones. Now known as the “Queen of Funk,” Jones recently played with Prince in Madison Square Garden. (We interviewed her in 2011). In honor of International Women’s Day, we’re taking a moment to highlight ladies like Jones, who, whether in politics, show biz, or coding, have managed to defy or ignore expectations. Below, a sampling from Mother Jones‘ archives of smart, fearless, and “sassy” women.

Jack Hitt takes on the Rorschach-blot-like figure of Hillary Clinton, in which Americans see many things. “More than any other public figure,” writes Hitt, “Hillary forces us to acknowledge that the path to power for American women is not all that clear, more an odyssey than a march.”

New Yorker writer George Trow once described Jamaica Kincaid as “our sassy black friend,” a moniker Kincaid seemed to delight in when she talked to Mother Jones about her beloved Obama T-shirt, juggling motherhood and writing, and her newest semi-autobiographical novel.

Jen Pahlka left behind rock-star status in the computer-gaming world to launch Code for America, which places fellows in broke cities so they can build apps to conquer civic problems. We caught up with Pahlka last year to talk about breaking down barriers between the public and private sectors and solving Silicon Valley’s sexism problem.

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10 MoJo Profiles of Fierce Women

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Republican Senator Filibusters Obama’s CIA Nominee Over Drones

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on March 6, 2013

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UPDATE: Senator Paul ended his filibuster after midnight on Thursday after nearly 13 hours. As Paul ended his filibuster, he said “I would go for another 12 hours to try to break Strom Thurmond’s record, but I’ve discovered that there are some limits to filibustering and I’m going to have to go take care of one of those in a few minutes here.” In order to hold the Senate floor, Paul was not permitted to even sit down, let alone leave to go to the bathroom.

On Wednesday, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) engaged in a marathon filibuster of John Brennan, Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, protesting the administration’s policy on the use of drones in lethal operations. Paul began speaking at noon and was still filibustering six hours later.

“I will speak until I can no longer speak,” Paul said. “I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.” Paul also criticized the administration’s rationale for targeting American terror suspects overseas, as laid out in a recently leaked white paper.

Paul has been pressing the Obama administration for weeks to answer if it believes the president has the authority to order a drone strike on American soil. On Tuesday, Paul received a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder stating that, in certain “extraordinary circumstances,” such as the attack on Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attacks, military force could be used domestically. Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Jon Cornyn (R-Texas), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) joined Paul’s filibuster, although Wyden reiterated his intention to vote for Brennan’s confirmation. The administration recently agreed to allow senators on the intelligence committee access to the legal memos justifying the use of lethal force against American terror suspects.

“That Americans could be killed in a café in San Francisco, or in a restaurant in Houston, or at their home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, is an abomination,” Paul said. “It is something that should not and can not be tolerated in our country…Has America the beautiful become Alice’s Wonderland?” Paul also criticized the use of signature strikes—lethal operations targeted at anonymous individuals abroad who are believed to be terrorists based on a “pattern of behavior.”

During a Senate judiciary committee hearing held earlier Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked Holder whether he believed that it would be constitutional for the president to order a drone strike on an American citizen suspected of terrorism in the United States who was “sitting quietly at a café.” After a lengthy back and forth, during which Holder said that he did not think it would be “appropriate” to use lethal force in such a circumstance, and Cruz pressed him on whether that meant “unconstitutional,” Holder acknowledged that he did not think it would be constitutional. “Translate my ‘appropriate’ to ‘no,'” Holder said. “No.” Holder said he didn’t believe the letter he had sent to Paul was inconsistent with that answer.

Later on during the oversight hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked Holder if it would be constitutional for the US military to fire on a hijacked civilian plane that was aimed at the White House. Holder said yes. “When we say Congress gave every administration the authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda, we didn’t exempt the homeland, did we?” Graham asked.

“No I don’t think we did,” Holder said. “In the letter that I sent to Sen. Paul, that’s one of the reasons I mentioned September the 11th,” Holder said, referring to an order given by then-Vice President Dick Cheney to shoot down passenger planes that were reportedly headed for the Capitol. The order was never carried out because it was received too late.

“What I worry about are the people who say America is a battlefield,” Paul said during his filibuster. “They’re saying they want the laws of war to apply here.”

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Republican Senator Filibusters Obama’s CIA Nominee Over Drones

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Hugo Chávez Dead at 58

by johnsmithwindows Posted on March 5, 2013

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Hugo Chávez, the firebrand president of Venezuela who has battled cancer since 2011, died Tuesday in Caracas. He was 58 years old.

Vice President Nicolás Maduro announced Chávez’s passing in a radio and television address, saying that the 14-year president died at 4:25 p.m. local time. Just hours earlier, Maduro had told the media that the socialist president was entering “his most difficult hours” due to a new, severe respiratory infection.

Chávez was last seen in public on December 10, when he traveled to Cuba two months after his latest reelection for his fourth cancer surgery in 18 months. Rumors about his health—indeed, whether he was still alive—persisted. His Twitter account, @chavezcandanga, sent a trio of tweets on February 18, after several months of silence. His last tweet read:

(Loosely translated: “I’m still holding on to Christ and trust in my doctors and nurses. Until victory forever!! We will live and we will triumph!!!”)

A former paratrooper who spent two years in prison after a failed coup in 1992, Chávez took office in 1999, fought off a coup attempt in 2002 and a recall referendum in 2004, and was reelected three times, including in October, when he claimed himself healthy enough for another term. He gained fame for using Venezuela’s vast oil revenues to fund his anti-poverty social programs—and for his fiery, anti-imperial rhetoric. He also rubbed plenty of people the wrong way—on both ends of the political spectrum—with his strongman tendencies, his rewriting of the country’s constitution, and his alliances with the likes of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Maduro will take power until an election takes place within 30 days. He is likely to face Henrique Capriles Radomski, the Miranda state governor whom Chávez beat just months ago.

UPDATE, March 5, 3:33 PT: The New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson, who first profiled Chávez in 2001 and long had great access to him, just posted an obituary. Read it.

This story has been updated.

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Hugo Chávez Dead at 58

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England’s War on Terror Is a War on Women

by ansonsten Posted on March 5, 2013

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Once, as a reporter, I covered wars, conflicts, civil wars, and even a genocide in places like Vietnam, Angola, Eritrea, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, keeping away from official briefings and listening to the people who were living the war. In the years since the Bush administration launched its Global War on Terror, I’ve done the same thing without ever leaving home.

In the last decade, I didn’t travel to distant refugee camps in Pakistan or destroyed villages in Afghanistan, nor did I spend time in besieged cities like Iraq’s Fallujah or Libya’s Misrata. I stayed in Great Britain. There, my government, in close conjunction with Washington, was pursuing its own version of what, whether anyone cared to say it or not, was essentially a war against Islam. Somehow, by a series of chance events, I found myself inside it, spending time with families transformed into enemies.

I hadn’t planned to write about the war on terror, but driven by curiosity about lives most of us never see and a few lucky coincidences, I stumbled into a world of Muslim women in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Some of them were British, others from Arab and African countries, but their husbands or sons had been swept up in Washington’s war. Some were in Guantanamo, some were among the dozen Muslim foreigners who did not know each other, and who were surprised to find themselves imprisoned together in Britain on suspicion of links to al-Qaeda. Later, some of these families would find themselves under house arrest.

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England’s War on Terror Is a War on Women

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Drones: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Always Afraid to Ask

by Edbre23ne Posted on March 5, 2013

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If you’ve checked out the news these past few (or many) months, you’ve probably noticed some news about drones: Drones used by the CIA to vaporize suspected terrorists. Drones used by the United States military. Drones that deliver food. Drones used by cops. Drones possibly violating the US Constitution. Drones protecting wildlife. Drones in pop culture. Maybe this has left you with some burning questions about these increasingly prominent flying robots. Here’s an easy-to-read, non-wonky guide to them—we’ll call it Drones For Dummies.

When was the drone invented?
Assuming you’re talking about the scary kinds of drones that bomb America’s suspected enemies, you’re probably thinking of the MQ-1 Predator, developed by military contractor General Atomics. This Predator drone was first introduced in 1995 as a surveillance and intelligence gathering tool, and was then tricked-out to launch weapons like hellfire missiles.


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The MQ-1 Predator—used mainly by the CIA and the US Air Force—has seen action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Bosnia and Serbia. The subsequent (and larger) incarnation of the Predator is the MQ-9 Reaper.

But hasn’t this idea been around a lot longer?
Indeed, the modern military drone can be traced back to the early 20th century: ­In the­ 1930s, the British Royal Navy developed the Queen Bee, a rudimentary radio-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that was used for aerial target practice for British pilots. The Queen Bee could fly as fast as 100 mph; the top speed for your average modern day Predator is 135 mph.

There is even a rough historical blueprint for modern-day UAVs from the American Civil War, in which both the North and South floated balloons packed with explosives and time-sensitive triggers. The idea was for the balloons to drop into enemy depots and blow up enemy supplies and ammo. (Things didn’t go as planned: “It wasn’t terribly effective,” according to Dyke Weatherington, the man responsible for acquisition oversight of Department of Defense unmanned aircraft systems.)

Besides General Atomics, who else is in the drone business today?
The usual suspects: major defense contractors including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Raytheon, plus a number of smaller companies.

Who besides the US has drones for national security purposes?
The following 11 governments are known to possess armed UAVs:

China
France
Germany
India
Italy
Iran
Israel
Russia
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States

And according to a July 2012 report by the US Government Accountability Office, 76 countries have UAVs of some kind, up from 41 countries in 2005. Here’s a map and list from the 58-page document:

Via GAO

Do all military drones look like this one I’ve seen in the news?

An Honorable German/Flickr

Nope. Drones used by militaries around the world come in a variety of shapes and sizes. For instance:

US Navy photo by Photographers Mate 2nd Class Daniel J. McLain

Here is another chart from the 2012 GAO report detailing the three major categories used by the US military—Mini, Tactical, and Strategic:

Via GAO

How much do drones cost?
Depends on the type and level of sophistication, of course. $12,548,710.60 will get you one MQ-9 Reaper. Roughly $5 million will get you a Predator.

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Drones: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Always Afraid to Ask

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WATCH: Investigating Major League Baseball’s Second-Class System in the Dominican Republic

by 2KeaheySchoeffler461 Posted on March 4, 2013

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Read the full story, “Inside Major League Baseball’s Dominican Sweatshop System,” here.

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WATCH: Investigating Major League Baseball’s Second-Class System in the Dominican Republic

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Inside Major League Baseball’s Dominican Sweatshop System

by hanhuogekennog Posted on March 4, 2013

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Yewri Guillén, in an undated family photo

THE BASEBALL MEN started coming around when Yewri Guillén was 15. Like thousands of other boys in the Dominican Republic, he had been waiting for them for years, training on the sparse patch of grass and dirt across the road from the small concrete-and-wood house he shared with his mother, father, and two sisters in La Canela, a hamlet 45 minutes southwest of Santo Domingo. By the time the American scouts took notice, he had grown into a 5-foot-10, 165-pound, switch-hitting shortstop with quick hands and a laser arm. In 2009, at the age of 16, he signed for $30,000 with the Washington Nationals. The first thing he’d do with his bonus, he told his parents, was buy them a car and build them a new house.

But soon after Guillén’s signing, Major League Baseball put his plans on hold. The league, having grown more vigilant about identity fraud, suspended him for a year, alleging that he’d lied about his date of birth on paperwork to boost his potential value to scouts. Guillén’s family got a lawyer to fight the suspension, and in the meantime he lived and trained without pay at the Nationals’ academy in Boca Chica, the epicenter of MLB’s training facilities in the country. There, he was notoriously hard on himself. Johnny DiPuglia, the Nationals’ international scouting director, said Guillén would even take himself out of games after making small mistakes like missing a sign from the third-base coach. “He had no education, none at all,” DiPuglia told me. “I didn’t think he had any teeth because he never smiled. And he always had watery eyes—there was always sadness in his eyes.”

DiPuglia made it his mission to cheer up the teenager, “to open up his heart.” He wouldn’t let Guillén pass without giving him a hug and a smile, and little by little, DiPuglia said, Guillén started to loosen up, becoming a better teammate and a happier kid. Later, when other talent brokers approached Guillén claiming that they could get him a better deal with a different team, Guillén turned them away because he felt that he owed it to the Nationals for sticking with him. After MLB finally authorized his contract at the beginning of 2011, the Nationals told him they’d be sending him to play for their rookie league team in Florida. He was to leave in mid-April.

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Inside Major League Baseball’s Dominican Sweatshop System

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