Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, news, etc.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Good Morning!
Trees
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
~Joyce Kilmer~
Adrienne Rich 1929-2012
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.
News
Italy Hit By Another Deadly Earthquake
A magnitude 5.8 earthquake rattled northern Italy on Tuesday, leaving at least ten people dead, according to local Italian media and officials.
The United States Geological Survey said the quake, which struck at 9:00 a.m. local time (0300 Eastern) Tuesday, was centered 25 miles northwest of the central city of Bologna. The quake was felt from Piedmont in northwestern Italy to Venice in the northeast, and as far north as Austria.
West Point Col. Questions Counter-Insurgecy Doctrine
Broadly, the question is what the United States gained after a decade in two wars.
“Not much,” Col. Gian P. Gentile, the director of West Point’s military history program and the commander of a combat battalion in Baghdad in 2006, said flatly in an interview last week. “Certainly not worth the effort. In my view.”
At West Point the arguments are more public than those in the upper reaches of the Pentagon, in large part because the military officers on the West Point faculty pride themselves on academic freedom and challenging orthodoxy. Colonel Gentile, who is working on a book titled “Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace With Counterinsurgency,” is chief among them.
Brennan To Pakistan: Drone Strikes Will Continue Until Morale Improves
There is now ample evidence to believe that politics are indeed behind the recent strikes and, as Marcy and I have been noting on Twitter, they likely will continue on a virtually daily basis to make the political points that the US is stressing. Recall that after the first strike in the series, I quoted a Guardian article that also came to the conclusion the strike was politically motivated:
"The attack came as Washington runs out of patience with Islamabad’s refusal to reopen supply routes for Nato troops in Afghanistan.
US drone strikes have complicated negotiations over the routes, which Pakistan closed six months ago in retaliation for US air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border. Pakistan’s parliament demanded the strikes stop after the attack, but the US refused."
Rahm Emanuel's Thugs Break And Enter Homes
In the apartment across the hall from the arrested activists, around 11:30 that night, Ben (not his real name) was coming out of his bathroom when his door crashed in and 25 to 30 armed police burst into his living room. One of them approached him, pointing a gun at his face and yelling at him to get down. When he didn’t get down quickly enough, the man shoved him to the ground and cuffed him.
$55 Million For Conservative Campaigns--But Where Did It Come From?
The financial firepower that fueled the rise of a network of conservative advocacy groups now pummeling Democrats with television ads can be traced, in part, to Box 72465 in the Boulder Hills post office, on a desert road on the northern outskirts of Phoenix.
That's the address for the Center to Protect Patient Rights, an organization with ties to Charles and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankroll a number of conservative organizations.
Rachel Carson And The Legacy Of Silent Spring
Serialised in the New Yorker during the summer of 1962, Silent Spring was published that September. It remains one of the most effective denunciations of industrial malpractice ever written and is widely credited with triggering popular ecological awareness in the US and Europe. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace trace their origins directly to Silent Spring.
Six Million People Have No Income Other Than Food Stamps
“Six million people have no income other than food stamps, which means they are living on $6,000 per year. These are people and single mothers with children who really are in extreme trouble.
Many will get out of extreme poverty fairly quickly, which makes it more inexcusable not to have a basic safety for them when their income dips so low…how do they survive? we don’t really know…” — excerpted from an interview with Peter Edelman and Economic Hardship Reporting Project’s Policy Director, Karen Dolan, May 24, 2012.
Egypt Protesters Storm Shafiq's Cairo Office
An annex in Shafiq's headquarters in Cairo went up in flames late on Monday, hours after election officials announced that the former premier, a symbol of Hosni Mubarak's ousted regime, would square off against Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi.
There were no immediate reports of injuries and firefighters said the blaze was quickly put under control.
Earth Took 10 Million Years To Recover From Its Greatest Mass Extinction
Professor Benton added: “We often see mass extinctions as entirely negative but in this most devastating case, life did recover, after many millions of years, and new groups emerged. The event had re-set evolution. However, the causes of the killing — global warming, acid rain, ocean acidification — sound eerily familiar to us today. Perhaps we can learn something from these ancient events.”
UN Envoy Kofi Annan Set To Meet Syrian President
Mr Annan's plan to end the country's conflict has been overshadowed by international revulsion at Friday's massacre in the Houla region.
Mr Annan called the massacre "an appalling moment with profound consequences".
Survivors have told the BBC of their shock and fear as regime forces entered their homes and killed their families.
Mr Annan said the Syrian government has to take "bold steps" to show it is serious about peace.
Pipeline Would Displace Hundreds Of Families
A proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion through Burnaby may displace hundreds of families from their homes if it goes ahead, says Burnaby-Douglas NDP MP Kennedy Stewart.
When Stewart asked the oil giant for a map of the existing pipeline - and didn't receive it - he hired a private company to do map it themselves
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Blog Posts Of Interest
Johnson: Europeans will soon realize that the euro as we know it is gone...chaos awaits them at Daily Kos by bobswern
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