It is often difficult to describe to those who live in a free society what life is like in an authoritarian regime. You don’t know who to trust. You worry that you, your family, or your friends will be arrested and jailed without due process. The fear of political violence or death, whether through direct assassinations or targeted “accidents”, is constant. Such was the case in Kenya, especially during the 1990s. —Wangari Muta Maathai – Unbowed p. 206.
I GUESS WE NEED TO SAY IT AGAIN: GEORGE W. BUSH WAS THE WORST 
By: Harry Cheadle, Vice
Americans get stereotyped as stupid, but I think it’s unfair to call us ignorant, exactly—the problem is that we, as a nation, have a short memory. Sometimes this constant state of collective amnesia serves us well, allowing the country to move on from tragedy and put out of our minds the failures and injustices of the past, but sometimes it results in 47 percent of Americans saying that they approve of George W. Bush. That’s according to a poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC in advance of the opening of his new presidential library, which opened today and seems devoted to telling visitors, “Sure, Dubya started wars, condoned torture, dug the country deeper into debt, and watched as terrorists launched the most successful attack on US soil ever, but it was really, really hard to be president, you guys. Would you have done any better? Thought not, asshole.” Even if that 47 percent number is too high, it’s clear that a majority of Republicans still think he did a pretty good job.
Did you vote yet?
Here he is. Matches in one hand, petrol bottle in the other. He removes the bottle cap, drops it to the ground and douses himself in liquid. He does everything slowly, methodically, as if it were part of a routine he has practiced for years. Then he stops, looks around, and strikes a match.
At this moment nothing in the world can bridge the gap that separates the self-immolator from the others. His total defiance of the survival and self-preservation instincts, his determination to trample on what everybody else finds precious, the ease with which he seems to dispose of his own life, all these place him not only beyond our capacity of understanding, but also outside of human society. He now inhabits a place that most of us find inhabitable. Yet, from there he does not cease to dominate us.
“As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.”
Journalist David Halberstam describes the death of Thích Quàng Đúc, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in Saigon in 1963. The quieter the self-immolator the more agitated those around him. The former may slip into nothingness, but his performance changes the latter’s lives forever. They experience repulsion and attraction, terror and boundless reverence, awe and fear, all at once. Over them he now has the uncanniest form of power.
The experience is so powerful because it is so deeply seated in the human psyche. In front of self-immolation, even the most secularized of us have a glimpse into a primordial experience of the sacred. Originally, the sacred is defined as something set apart, cut off from the rest, which remains profane; what we feel towards such a radically different other is precisely a mix of terror and fascination. Self-immolation is a unique event precisely because it awakens deep layers of our ultimate make-up. In a striking, if disguised fashion, self-immolation occasions the experience of the sacred even in a God-forsaken world like ours. (via)
Statement of Mike Bloomberg on President Obama's Support for Marriage Equality
This is a major turning point in the history of American civil rights. No American president has ever supported a major expansion of civil rights that has not ultimately been adopted by the American people – and I have no doubt that this will be no exception. The march of freedom that has sustained our country since the Revolution of 1776 continues, and no matter what setbacks may occur in a given state, freedom will triumph over fear and equality will prevail over exclusion. Today’s announcement is a testament to the President’s convictions, and it builds on the courageous stands that so many Americans have taken over the years on behalf of equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, stretching back to the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.
I cosign on Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic People’s party — who would be the first female president of Taiwan if elected.
A ‘Diversity Bake Sale’ Backfires on Campus
Shawn Lewis, president of the Berkeley College Republicans, said the sale was meant as a satire of affirmative action. Stoops.
By MALIA WOLLAN
NY Times: September 26, 2011
BERKELEY, Calif. — A bake sale sponsored by a Republican student group at the University of California, Berkeley, has incited anger and renewed the debate over affirmative action by asking students to pay different prices for pastry, depending on their race and sex.
Last week, the Berkeley College Republicans announced its “Increase Diversity Bake Sale,” scheduled for Tuesday. On Facebook, the group listed the price for a pastry at $2 for white students, $1.50 for Asian students, $1 for Latinos, 75 cents for African-Americans and 25 cents for Native Americans. Women of all races were promised a 25-cent discount.
“Hope to see you all there! If you don’t come, you’re a racist!” the Facebook event page said. (It has since been taken down and replaced with milder text.)
“We expected people to be upset,” the group’s president, Shawn Lewis, 20, a third-year political science major, said Monday in a telephone interview. “Treating people differently based on the color of their skin is wrong, and we wanted people to be upset about that.”
The bake sale was scheduled to protest a phone bank organized by the Associated Students of the University of California, the campus student government group, where students planned to call Gov. Jerry Brown and urge him to sign a Senate bill that would allow public universities to consider race, gender and ethnicity in admissions decisions. In 1996, voters in the state passed a ballot initiative, known as Proposition 209, prohibiting affirmative action in admissions.
“The bake sale is a misguided attempt by the Berkeley College Republicans to make a political point about their opposition to a particular bill,” said Gibor Basri, the university’s vice chancellor for equity and inclusion and a professor of astronomy. “A lot of students, especially students of color, read it as placing a higher value on white students.”
In response to the bake sale, the Associated Students, which provides money to the Berkeley College Republicans and other political groups for events on campus, called an emergency meeting on Sunday, leaders said. It passed a resolution condemning discriminatory events on campus whether or not they are meant to be satirical.
Not long after the bake sale page went up on Facebook, hundreds of people posted comments expressing outrage over or support for the sale and affirmative action in general.
“Perhaps you should be charging women and Latinas double to better reflect the fact that we’re being paid 78 cents and 59 cents to the white man’s dollar,” wrote Ally Wong.
Others worried more about the pastries. “The educational value of this exercise will be lost when Pocahontas walks away with a truckload of free cupcakes,” wrote Mike Creamer.
The bake sale idea is not original, said Mr. Lewis, the Republican group’s president, noting that the same tactic had been used on other college campuses in the last decade to protest affirmative action.
Event organizers received numerous threats on Facebook, and some of the group’s members changed their names and profile pictures. “This event was not organized by a bunch of white guys,” Mr. Lewis said. “We’re not racists.” The group’s 10-member board of directors includes several Asians and a Latino, he said, and more than half the board members are women.
Student leaders worried that the bake sale would make students uncomfortable and aggravate tensions on campus.
“A number of students have come to me very concerned,” said the student body president, Vishalli Loomba, 20, a fourth-year molecular and cell biology major. “Many feel the differential pricing is offensive and that it makes them feel unwelcome.”
Despite the outcry, organizers said the sale would go forward unless they were threatened with physical violence. Mr. Lewis said Republican groups from nearby colleges — including the University of California, Davis; California State University, Sacramento; and Saint Mary’s College of California — had called to say they were sending carloads of supporters to the bake sale.
The race-based prices will be posted on signs, but organizers said they would not enforce them and would instead allow students to pay whatever they wanted.
