I’m going to post a few videos, mainly from LiveLeak talking about the escalating conflict in Gaza. Israel has now entered into the Gaza Strip via the ground and according to latest reports, has split the Strip into three isolated zones. The humanitarian part of the crisis is escalating as well.
As usual, some viewer discretion might be needed.
Gaza Divided Into Three:
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour talks about how much support there is for Israel’s offensive into Gaza:
From BBC News, is that clusterbombing at the beginning?:
In response to recent Palestinian (read: Hamas) Qassam rocket attacks, Israel launched a massive aerial assault, killing more than 200 people. According to an article in the L.A. Times:
The midday waves of airstrikes killed at least 205 people, according to a Palestinian Health Ministry official in Gaza, making it the deadliest Israeli assault on Palestinian territory in years. Health Ministry officer Moaiya Hassanain estimated that one-third of the dead were civilian noncombatants and that an additional 350 Palestinians were wounded.
Israel’s response, code-named “Operation Cast Lead,” began shortly before noon with a round of air bombardments. Several more air attacks followed, sowing panic and confusion as thick clouds of smoke billowed over Gaza City, Khan Yunis and Rafah. Mangled and charged corpses littered the pavement around Hamas security structures.
NPR says that a Gaza City police station was among the heaviest of casualties:
Gaza city police stations saw the heaviest casualties, with Israeli air strikes hitting two Hamas police graduation ceremonies. Gaza’s already fragile medical system was overwhelmed by the scale of the casualties. In Gaza, senior Health Ministry official Dr. Moawiya Hasaneen said many of the dead were policemen, but said civilians, women and children were also killed.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told reporters the army was prepared for a wider attack. It’s not clear, however, whether Israel is ready to use ground troops in what would likely be a bloody and hard fight in densely populated Gaza.
Details are still updating, but there are lots of videos coming out.
*Warning, some graphic scenes*
Some clips from the BBC, last one is from an Israeli spokesman:
A huge coal ash spill occured in Tennessee on Monday. 2.6 million cubic yards, equivalent to 525.5 million gallons and almost fifty times more (and worse) than the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.
Here’s some commentary on the event, including talk about the BS that is “clean coal”. Remember Biden yammering on about “clean coal” in the VP debates? Video at the end of the section.
Coal ash contains mercury, lead, and arsenic. Nearly 800 Olympic-size swimming pools of that toxic mix are flowing into the waterways of Tennessee right now. As the Knoxville Sentinel News reported today:
“Viewed from above, the scene looked like the aftermath of a tsunami, with swirls of dirtied water stretching for hundreds of acres on the land, and muddied water in the Emory River.
The Emory leads to the Clinch, which flows into the Tennessee. Workers sampled river water Monday, with results expected back today, but didn’t sample the dunelike drifts of muddy ash.”
For the millions of people downstream in Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky, a spill estimated to be several times bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska is creeping into their waterways and aquifers.
Here are a few videos of the event, some terrible, terrible pictures:
How come this isn’t in the mainstream press and news sites? It happened on Monday and I’m only now hearing about it today, Christmas eve and only because it was posted in a forum I’m a member of.
The problem then becomes, how do we transcend the barter limitation, i.e., the “double coincidence” of wants or needs? While commodity money can be useful in particular circumstances (it was common in early post-war Europe, to pay with cigarettes, Hershey bars, and nylon stockings), I believe that the more evolved form of credit money is more appropriate to the goals of personal freedom, social justice, peace, harmony, and economic equity. I have no gold or silver. What I do have to offer to the market is goods and services. You, likewise, probably have no gold or silver, but offer other goods and services to the market. Ultimately, we each pay for the things we buy with the things we sell. In other words, goods and services buy other goods and services. It is much more efficient to simply sell to one another on credit, and then spend our credits to requisition whatever we may want from others in the market. The supply of any chosen commodity (like gold or silver) is limited and most of the gold and silver is closely held by those who run the system, the central governments and central banks. They decide the price we must pay for those commodities. But credits can be created as needed at minimal cost so all desirable trades can take place.
