What the Spill Will Kill: Begley runs down the damage to the Gulf ecosystem:
It is increasingly clear that the initial reports of undersea oil were right, that life-giving oxygen in the water column is indeed being depleted, and that unless the laws of chemistry have been repealed, dispersants are likely worsening the tentacles of undersea crude. What might have been just another oil spill—albeit a bad one—has been transformed into something unprecedented. Even if the containment dome lowered into place late last week continues to siphon off some of the leaking crude, the Deepwater Horizon disaster will enter the record books not for how much but for where: an enormous release of crude oil not only onto vulnerable shorelines and fragile marshes but into the largely unexplored depths of the sea. The consequences for the delicate balance of existence in the vulnerable ecosystems of the gulf, and for the vast cycles of nature that sustain life there and beyond, are as incalculable as they are potentially devastating.
a flower, if you bruise it under your feet, rewards you by giving you its perfume”
~Richard Wurmbrand
~Richard Wurmbrand
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The Obama team has its rationale for drone attacks. It stresses that the drone attacks have degraded the capabilities of the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda, without putting U.S. troops in harm’s way on Pakistani soil. What this calculus ignores is the damage drone attacks inflict on America’s reputation in the Muslim world and the “possibilities of blowback,” about which the CIA, which leads the drone war, has rightly warned. The war on the AfPak border has replaced Iraq as the main source of homegrown radicalization. Qaeda’s effort to find and recruit terrorists has been replaced by a bottom-up flow of volunteers, a flow that is currently very weak, and extremely difficult to track. What these individuals had in common was that they were radicalized online, typically by coverage of the AfPak battles.
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| — | Fawaz Gerges, on why drone attacks in Pakistan are having consequences in the U.S. (via newsweek) |
What difference can words even make to a victim? A big one, says Dr. Aaron Lazare, a psychiatrist and author of On Apology. Lazare believes apologies are moral events that have real power to heal. They are built into the human condition. Primates say “I’m sorry” nonverbally by stroking and holding the one they’ve offended. He says that victims of sexual abuse, particularly by a person of authority, such as a priest, are often left wondering why it happened and if it was their fault. A decent apology accepts all the responsibility for what happened, so it can begin to undo the humiliation that comes with thinking you had something to do with the awful thing that happened. “It changes your image of who you are. It can restore your self-esteem.” But in the instance of the church, an apology from the individual abuser can go only so far. Since the church sets, enforces, and covers up policies that harm, the pope has to speak out too, Lazare says, to enable the recovery.
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| — | Susannah Meadows, in a nice piece on the power of apology (via newsweek) |
I’m thinking of… Love. In the pit of my gut and the depths of my soul, I’m talkin’ bout that love that makes you lose control. It’s hot like cayenne, bright like neon, cool like freon. Love, it’s softer than cotton, so sweet it’s rotten.
Love is unconditional, all but traditional. Rhyming…
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