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T.R. Hummer
Velveteria: The Velvet Painting Museum | Portland, United States | Atlas Obscura
When you think of black velvet paintings, you usually imagine scantily clad, overly-proportioned, exotic women hanging in the back rooms of smokey tiki lounges, or collecting dust in your grandfather's attic; a gift of cousin Larry's from Tahiti. But didn't Andrew Wyeth occasionally paint on velvet in his day? And with-in the post-modern doldrums certainly other artists must be exploring velvet as a medium as well.
Velveteria in Southeast Portland was created to display 170 velvet paintings in the owner's collection of more than 350. There are more permanent exhibits, like the black light room, and the wall of fame (classics like, dogs playing poker, and elvis are housed here.) There are also rotating exhibits like "the story of Jesus and Mary on Velvet" around easter, as well as the "Black is Beautiful" exhibit in honor of African American heros.
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T.R. Hummer
Op-Ed Columnist - Let the Big Dog Run - NYTimes.comMaureen Dowd writes:
Kim Jong-il’s bright smiles were not returned by Bill Clinton. It was strange to see the reclusive Kim so eager and the raffish Clinton so disciplined. Yet the grinning North Korean and stony-faced American were no doubt both savoring their moment of mutual relevance.
The price set by Kim for releasing the two captured American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, was a few hours basking in the presence of the ex-president who most wanted to visit North Korea. Bill Clinton was willing to bow but not scrape.
Hillary sparked an international spat when she said that, as a mother, she understood that the North Koreans were simply unpopular and unruly children misbehaving to get attention.
Now, less than two weeks later, those bad-seed children had managed to command the full attention of her husband.
Maybe it was some clever North Korean revenge plot, giving the limelight to Daddy to punish Mommy. Just as Hillary muscled her way back into the spotlight, moving past her broken elbow and grabbing the focus from her bevy of peacock envoys, she was blown off the radar screen again by an even more powerful envoy: the one she lives with.
It was a moment unique in the annals of diplomacy. Bill was being hailed as a dazzling statesman who might have changed the stormy weather between the U.S. and North Korea, just as Hillary was beginning an 11-day trip to Africa designed to highlight the subjects she most cares about: do-gooder development and women’s issues.
The one in charge of world affairs disappeared from the news all day on Tuesday. The one out of office dominated the news. His plane is rolling down the runway in Pyongyang with the two pardoned women on board? Zowie!
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T.R. Hummer
Council for Secular HumanismJames A. Haught writes:
Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.
Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”
This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”
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T.R. Hummer
Could the Global Meltdown Spark a Great Revolution? | | AlterNetFor the first time in generations, people are challenging the view that a free-market order -- the system that dominates the globe today -- is the destiny of all nations. The free market's uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has pushed inequality to the breaking point.
As a result, we live at an important historical juncture -- one where alternatives to the world's neoliberal capitalism could emerge. Thus, it is a particularly apt time to examine revolutionary movements that have periodically challenged dominant state and imperial power structures over the past 500 years.
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T.R. Hummer
t r u t h o u t | President Carter: Many Children Were Tortured Under Bush President Jimmy Carter wrote that the Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon "have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, confirmed by soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse." In "Our Endangered Values" Carter said that the Red Cross found after visiting six U.S. prisons "107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old." And reporter Hersh, (who broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal,) reported 800-900 Pakistani boys aged 13 to 15 in custody.
Journalist Seymour Hersh's (who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal) bombshell before the ACLU some years ago has been in a temporary slumber, as there is question as to whether the videotapes in possession of the Pentagon were among those claimed to be destroyed. Destroyed or not, there is still the conscience of soldiers and agents who bore witness to contend with, as the reign of political terror against whistleblowers which characterized the Bush administration subsides. Hersh said:
" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said at the time:
"The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."
History is just beginning to sort out the Bush era, with stubborn facts showing a resilience that Fox News talking points cannot, and more emerging.
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T.R. Hummer
BBC NEWS | Americas | Three shot dead by US gym gunmanA man has killed at least three people at a gymnasium in the US state of Pennsylvania.
Another 10 people were injured by gunfire in the town of Bridgeville near Pittsburgh, and there are reports that five are in a critical condition.
An eyewitness told a local TV station that a man entered an all-female dance class, turned off the lights, took a gun out of a bag and began firing.
"People everywhere were screaming. It was horrible," said the witness.
The gunman is also reported to be dead.
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T.R. Hummer
Al Jazeera English - Americas - Haiti protesters clash with policeHaitian police have clashed with protesters calling for an increase in the minimum wage outside the country's parliament.
As politicians prepared to vote on the issue in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, some of the 2,000 protesters threw stones at police officers, who responded by firing tear gas to disperse the crowd.
One person was reported to have been injured in the clashes but no arrests were made.
The demonstrators said the minimum wage was insufficient and that they could not provide adequate food and shelter for their families on less than $2 a day.
"Seventy gourdes, that doesn't do anything for me," said Banel Jeune, a clothing factory worker taking part in the protest, referring to his current minimum-wage salary.
"I can't feed my kids, and I can't send them to school."
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