Roman Polansky, por Gracchi:
Something worries me about the Roman Polanski case- and it is not his arrest, it is the reaction to it. (...)
[T]he petition: again what injustice are they petitioning about- if Mr Polanski were not guilty of the crime or if he were being prosecuted for something that should not be a crime I could understand it, but the petition is being drafted apparantly because he is Mr Polanski. He is a child rapist full stop- you either believe that child rapists should face punishment and therefore that Mr Polanski should or you do not, can we take it that anyone who signs this petition- Mr Scorsese, Mr Allen, Miss Argento and others- beleive that child rape is acceptable? (...)
The signatories to the petition would not sign the document were this not Mr Polanski- they seem to make the argument that travelling to a film festival gives one diplomatic immunity (...)
Let's keep in mind that Roman Polanski gave a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude and champagne, then raped her, before we start discussing whether the victim looked older than her 13 years, or that she now says she'd rather not see him prosecuted because she can't stand the media attention. Before we discuss how awesome his movies are or what the now-deceased judge did wrong at his trial, let's take a moment to recall that according to the victim's grand jury testimony, Roman Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she said no and asked him to stop; performed cunnilingus on her as she said no and asked him to stop; put his penis in her vagina as she said no and asked him to stop; asked if he could penetrate her anally, to which she replied, "No," then went ahead and did it anyway, until he had an orgasm.
Where morality is present, laws are unnecessary. Without morality, laws are unenforceable. -- Anonymous
Decree:
Article 1. For a period of 45 days beginning with this decree’s publication, the Constitutional rights of Articles 69, 72, 81 and 84, are suspended.
Article 2. The Armed Forces will support, together or separately with the National Police, when the situation requires, to execute the necessary plans to maintain the order and security of the Republic.
Article 3. The following is prohibited:
First: Freedom of transit, which will be restricted according to the parameters established by press releases broadcast on all radio and TV stations by the President of the Republic, which will be in effect in all national territory and during curfews, with the exception of cargo transport, ambulances, and urban traffic in the cities excluded in said communiqués, and medical personell and nurses that in those cities work during curfew hours.
Second: All public meetings not authorized by police or military authorities.
Third: Publication in any media, spoken, written or televised, of information that offends human dignity, public officials, or criticizes the law and the government resolutions, or any style of attack against the public order and peace. CONATEL (the Honduran communications commission), through the National Police and the Armed Forces, is authorized to suspend any radio station, television channel or cable system that does not adjust its programming to the present decree.
Article 4. It is ordered:
First: Detain all persons who are found outside of the established orders of circulation, or that in any manner are suspected by police and military authorities of damaging people or property, those that associate with the goal of committing criminal acts or that place their own lives in danger. All detainees will be read their rights, and at the same time must be brought to be booked in a police station of the country, identifying all persons detained, their motives, the hour of arrest and release from the police station, recording the physical condition of the detainee, to avoid future accusations of supposed crimes of torture.
Second: All persons detained must remain c onfined in the legally established detention centers.
Third: All public offices, national, state and municipal, that have been occupied by demonstrators or have persons inside of them engaging in illegal activities will be cleared.
Fourth: All Secretaries of State, decentralized institutions, municipalities and other state organisms must place themselves at the orders of the National Police and Armed Forces without any equivocation, along with all means at their disposal, for the development of these operations.
Article 5. The present Decree becomes law immediately, being duly published in the Official Daily “La Gaceta” and will be sent to the National Congress to be made law.
Ordered from the Presidential Palace in the City of Tegucigalpa, municipality of the Central District, on the 22nd of September of 2009.
ROBERTO MICHELETTI BAIN
CONSTITUTIONAL PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC
Article 69: Personal liberty is inviolable and only through law can it be restricted or suspended temporarily.
Article 72: The expression of thought by any media, without censorship, is free. Those who interfere with this right or through direct or indirect means restrict or impede the communication and circulation of ideas and opinions will held responsible by the law.
Article 81: Every person has the right to circulate freely, leave, enter and remain in national territory.
No one can be obligated to move from his home or residence except in special cases in accord with the law.
Article 84: No one can be arrested or detained except through written order by competent authorities, executed through legal formalities and for motives established by law.
Notwithstanding, open delinquency can be apprehended by any person only to deliver the delinquent to the authorities.
The arrested or detained person must be informed clearly of his rights and the facts of the accusations against him, and, additionally, authorities must permit him to communicate his detention to a family member or person of his choice.
Usando a mesma legenda, mas apenas para o Algarve:
[fonte: legislativas2009.mj]
O Público (Luís Miguel Queirós na Ipsilon) fala-nos de "Tolkien treinou para ser espião mas recusou a mítica equipa de Bletchley Park":
"Tolkien participou, tendo sobrevivido à sangrenta batalha de Somme, que fez meio milhão de mortos" (...) Os oficiais responsáveis pela escolha dos candidatos mais dotados elogiaram-lhe o talento, mas quando propuseram a Tolkien um lugar como espião, recebendo 500 libras por ano - um ordenado considerável para a época -, o escritor recusou. Ninguém sabe porquê, ainda que a explicação mais lógica pareça ser a de que preferiu prosseguir a carreira literária que já iniciara com a publicação de O Hobbit, em 1937 (...)"
Temos algus indícios:
Secession movement spreads well beyond Texas
(...) When Gov. Rick Perry suggested that some Texans might want to secede from the Union because they are fed up with the federal government, the remarks drew nationwide news coverage and became fodder for late-night comedians.
But to Texas separatists like Miller and Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Kilgore of Mansfield, secession is no laughing matter. Nor is it exclusive to the nation’s second-largest state.
Fanned by angry contempt for Washington, secession movements have sprouted up in perhaps more than a dozen states in recent years. In Vermont, retired economics professor Thomas Naylor leads the Second Vermont Republic, a self-styled citizens network dedicated to extracting the sparsely populated New England state from "the American Empire."
And on the other side of the continent, Northwestern separatists envision a "Republic of Cascadia" carved out of Oregon, Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia.
While most Americans dismiss the breakaway sentiments, sociologists and political experts say they are part of a larger anti-Washington wave that is rapidly spreading across the country.
Challenging Washington
More commonplace are states’ rights movements to directly challenge federal laws, a citizen revolt that one scholar says is unparalleled in modern times. Among the actions in which states are thumbing their nose at Washington:
■ Montana and Tennessee have enacted legislation declaring that firearms made and kept within those states are beyond the authority of the federal government. Similar versions of the law, known as the Firearms Freedom Act, have been introduced in at least four other states.
■ Arizona lawmakers will let voters decide a proposed state constitutional amendment that would opt the state out of federal healthcare mandates under consideration in Congress. The amendment will be placed on the November 2010 ballot. State Rep. Nancy Barto, R-Phoenix, said five other states considered similar versions of the amendment this year and at least nine others are expected to do so next year.
■ Nearly two dozen states have approved resolutions refusing to participate in the Real ID Act of 2005, which requires that driver’s licenses and state ID cards conform to federal standards. A similar resolution was introduced in the 2009 Texas Legislature but died in committee.
■ A campaign called "Bring the Guard Home" is pushing legislation in 23 states that would empower governors to recall state National Guard units from Iraq on the premise that the federal law authorizing such deployments has expired. "It’s gaining momentum, to say the least," said Jim Draeger, program manager for Peace Action Wisconsin. He said the initiative has a respectable chance of passing the Legislature in his state.
"(...) In any case, the lasting legacy of Irving Kristol is that he was instrumental in turning the conservative movement away from its radical anti-statism and toward an almost exclusive concentration on the moral imperative of an aggressively interventionist foreign policy. His followers and epigones, who carry on the work in his wake, are the warmongers at the Weekly Standard and the Limbaugh-Hannity know-nothing Right, which sees every recognition of the limitations of American power – government power – as a "betrayal." This is surely a most unconservative – even anti-conservative – vision, a form of radicalism that resembles nothing so much as Trotskyism-turned-inside-out. One of the big differences between Stalin and Trotsky was the former’s conception of "socialism in one country" – the idea that communism could survive only in the Soviet Union and its satellites, without inciting a world revolution. Trotsky, sticking to the orthodox Marxist-Leninist position, held that a world revolution was imperative, or else the Soviet Union was doomed to fail, encircled as it was by the hostile, capitalist West. What the neocons did was simply switch allegiances from the old Soviet Union to the United States, taking their hotheaded Trotskyist temperament with them – and finally aspiring to lead a world revolution with the United States government at its head. When George W. Bush announced the launching of what he called a "global democratic revolution," he was merely echoing the neo-Trotskyist rhetoric of his closest advisers and the intellectual movement from which they sprang. The prospects of that revolution grow dimmer by the day, but the idea lives on, as does neoconservatism. In the age of Obama, it takes on new forms – as I explained in my last column – but the essence remains the same: war, war, and yet more war, as far as the eye can see. That, in brief, is the program of the neoconservatives, and Kristol’s legacy for the ages." Justin Raimundo
In the end Irving Kristol could rightfully claim to have out-done his bête noire, Stalin, by serving as the gravedigger of not one, but two revolutions.Mas não é exactamente sobre Kristol que quero escrever, mas sim sobre a história de um movimento que começou como uma seita dentro de uma seita e que acabou por ser talvez (por vias indirectas) o mais importante movimento politico dos últimos 50 anos.
First he helped lead America's Trotskyites out of the wilderness of the revolutionary communist left and into the Democratic, and then Republican, parties as the "neoconservative" movement.
Later, that movement plunged an ice axe into the skull of whatever residual revolutionary libertarian impulse may have remained alive in American conservatism by the Age of Nixon.
If they advocate the abolition of some government program from which they personally benefit, call them hypocrites.
If they advocate the abolition of some government program from which they don’t personally benefit, call them selfish.
Se eles são contra algum "privilégio" de que eles próprios beneficiam, chamem-lhes de hipócritas
Se eles são contra algum "privilégio" de que eles próprios não beneficiam, chamem-lhes de invejosos
He answers many popular questions which include auditing/ending the Federal Reserve, the War on Drugs, censorship during the 2008 Presidential Election, and more.
No dia seguinte à publicação do seu livro revolucionário: "END THE FED"
Macro situation notes, por Paul Krugman (creio que o raciocinio não se aplica só aos EUA).
Growing trend?, no Bloggins by boz:
Journalists who claim that there is a "growing trend" of Latin American leaders trying to perpetuate themselves in power simply suggests that those journalists have no sense for Latin American history before this decade.
Just to go back ten years further for a few more examples; similar debates happened in the 1990's with Fujimori, Menem and Cardoso. And of those three, two of them overextended their welcome and tried to stay for a third term.
If there's a pattern across Latin American history, it's that very, very few leaders, given the choice between staying or leaving, have the good sense to leave office while they're still popular.
Congreso dio vía libre a segunda reelección de Uribe
[Via Poliblog - Colombia: Reelection Referendum Passes]Cámara aprobó el referendo reeleccionista con 85 votos a favor y 5 en contra. Ahora, el Presidente deberá sancionar la ley y enviarla a estudio de la Corte Constitucional.
Con abrazos, aplausos y gritos de júbilo, celebraron los 85 representantes a la Camara que anoche votaron el informe de conciliación de la ley que permitirá convocar un referendo en Colombia para preguntarles a los electores si autorizan al presidente Uribe a aspirar a un tercer mandato.
El resultado de la votación se conoció cerca de la medianoche, a las 11:43 pm, después de una larga jornada de discusión en la que la oposición terminó resignada ante las mayorías uribistas. Sólo cinco votos se depositaron en contra del informe de conciliación, pues el Partido Liberal y el Polo Democrático prefirieron retirarse de la votación.
Ahora, la ley del referendo deberá ser sancionada por el presidente de la República, Álvaro Uribe, quien pese a estar enfermo por el virus AH1N1, fue informado en detalle de todos los aspectos de la última y decisiva discusión en la Cámara de Representantes.
