Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.  

(Truth be told, friends, we’re really not that disorganized; the fact that we’ve managed to put this series together and stick with it disabuses the notion that we’re disorganized, right?  Also, I wish I had a censored night once in awhile, but alas, this is something my producers made me say.)

This Day in History

This bit was posted at Voices on the Square, The Stars Holllow Gazette, Docudharma, and Daily Kos.

“Candy Man, Candy Man, Candy Man”

Feyd, lovely Feyd!

Breakfast News

Crimes Against God & Women

Apostasy woman in Sudan: Meriam Ibrahim’s death sentence condemned

by David Cameron

David Cameron is urging the Sudanese government to reverse the “barbaric” death sentence handed to Meriam Yahya Ibrahim, who was convicted for apostasy after she married a Christian man and refused to renounce her faith.

The Prime Minister joined Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg in condemning the treatment of Ms Ibrahim, who gave birth to her baby daughter Maya this week while shackled in heavy chains in the hospital wing of Omdurman Women’s Prison.

Mr Cameron said he was “absolutely appalled” when he heard about the plight of the 27-year-old doctor, whose father was Muslim but was raised as an Orthodox Christian by her mother. She refused to renounce her Christianity and was sentenced to death by a Sudanese judge when she was eight months pregnant.

Sudan to free woman on death row for apostasy

Khartoum: Authorities in Sudan have agreed to release a woman, sentenced to death for apostasy, after world leaders added their voices to the campaign to free her, the media reported Saturday.

Abdullahi Al Zareg, an under secretary at Sudan’s foreign ministry, said Saturday that Sudan guaranteed religious freedom and was committed to protecting the woman while announcing that she will be released within days from the prison, according to BBC.

 

Husband visits wife condemned to hang

Earlier on Friday, her husband  Daniel Wani he had visited her in jail, where she just gave birth, and said that she and their daughter are well.

Amnesty says Iranian dissident faces imminent execution

REUTERS-LONDON Sat May 31, 2014 5:48pm EDT

(Reuters) – Amnesty International urged Iran on Saturday not to execute a political dissident convicted of “enmity against God” in what it said had been an unfair trial, as his family said they feared he would be hanged within hours.

Gholamreza Khosravi Savajani was sentenced in 2010 in connection to alleged links with the People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran (PMOI) a group that seeks to overthrow the Islamic Republic, Amnesty says.

The PMOI, which has an office in Paris, said Savajani’s family had been summoned to the jail where he was being held and had been told he would be executed on Sunday morning.

“Yet again Iranian authorities are about to execute a man who did not even receive a fair trial in total disregard of both international law and the Iranian law,” said Hassiba Hadj Saharoui, of London-based Amnesty International.

Iran says its judicial system is fair and accuses Western powers of using accusations of human rights abuses as a way to undermine it.

Lahore ‘honour killing’: Farzana Parveen’s family claim husband was behind murder

The sister of the pregnant Pakistani woman stoned to death outside the High Court in Lahore has accused the victim’s husband of killing her.

Police and witnesses said Farzana Parveen, 25, was bludgeoned with bricks by an angry crowd including family members and her own father on Tuesday because she married a man for love.

Her family had arranged for her to marry her cousin and filed an abduction case against her husband, which she was believed to be on her way to contest when she died.

Farzana’s father reportedly surrendered after the incident and called the murder an honour killing, saying she had insulted his family by marrying without their consent and he had “no regret”.

Farzana Parveen’s killing must trigger change for women in Pakistan

by Aisha Sarwari

On 27 May 2014, as Farzana Parveen lay dead on the uneven floor of the Lahore high court, it was not easy to ignore the blood-stained brick next to her. A chador she had worn that morning covered her crushed head. Police investigators said that members of her family had attacked her and her husband with batons and bricks. Farzana was three months pregnant.

This murder stands out among the 900 honour killings committed over the past 12 months in Pakistan because it happened at the very place she had come to seek justice. She was apparently killed for doing something that was her right according to the law – marrying the man she loved. She was there to record her statement against a false allegation from her family that claimed that her husband had kidnapped her. If her husband hadn’t escaped the attack, he too would be dead.

The crowd had looked on. This is what Pakistan is increasingly becoming now – a country of 180 million or so onlookers. The papers reveal one violation of human rights after another, and women are mostly the targets.

Perpetrators of honour crimes mostly try to justify their acts by appealing to religious doctrine. This is ironic. In pre-Islamic days, daughters would be buried alive. Islam put an end to that ghastly tradition. Now, those with the same pre-Islamic thinking just stone women when they are older.

Husband Of Woman Beaten, Shot To Death In Pakistan Killed First Wife

by SCOTT NEUMAN May 29, 2014 5:12 PM ET

A man whose pregnant wife was stoned to death by angry relatives in Pakistan earlier this week has admitted that he killed his first wife so he could remarry.

It’s a disturbing twist to the already disturbing story that we reported on Tuesday of 25-year-old Farzana Parveen, who was bludgeoned to death with bricks by her family after she eloped with Mohammad Iqbal instead of marrying a cousin as her family demanded.

The “honor killing” occurred outside a courtroom in Lahore as Parveen was preparing to testify in defense of Iqbal, whom her father had accused of kidnapping the young woman.

Punjab’s Deputy Inspector General for Police Zulfiqar Hameed tells The Associated Press that Iqbal was arrested in 2009 for killing his first wife, Ayesha Bibi, but that the case was later withdrawn after a family member forgave the culprit.

As the AP notes: “Under Pakistani law, those charged with a slaying can see their criminal case dropped if family members of the deceased forgive them or accept so-called ‘blood money’ offerings over the crime.”

India’s gang rapes – and the failure to stop them

by BY TERRENCE MCCOY

One of the girls wore crimson, the other emerald. They had long black hair. They were barefoot. They were cousins and of a low caste. As shown in gruesome photographs, they were barely more than children.

One was 14 and the other was 15, police said. Without a toilet in their home, they had gone outside to relieve themselves the night before and had now been found dead, hanging from a mango tree framed by a rising sun.

A crowd of villagers swelled underneath the bodies Wednesday morning. Reports said they wouldn’t allow anyone to cut down the girls until arrests were made, so for hours, they waited in near silence. Then came news that four men had been arrested for the crime. Two of the accused were villagers who lived in Katra in Uttar Pradesh state. The other two, the Associated Press reported, were police officers.

Autopsy reports confirmed the children had been raped and strangled. News of the attack splashed across nearly every major publication in India. Even in a country where a rape occurs every 22 minutes, according to Indian government statistics reported by the AP, the gang-rape and killing was shocking.

Islam, Saudi and apostasy – Does Islamic law really proscribe the death penalty for apostasy?

by Mohamed Ghilan

Just when we thought the term “terrorism” could not become more meaningless or manipulated, Saudi Arabia’s government seems to have proved us wrong by recently adding atheism under the charge. Based on polls revealing that self-identified atheists constitute 5 percent of Saudi population, this makes for a staggering number of terrorists in the kingdom, most of whom maintain external religious observance in society while using online anonymity to express their true beliefs.

However, this matter is not so straightforward. Nesrine Malik highlights in a recent article an often-ignored distinction between the private, and public, more political forms of atheism. Indeed, as Malik points out, in an ultraconservative country like Saudi Arabia where religion, tribe, family and politics, are interlinked and of utmost importance, to take an antagonistic stance against Islam necessarily entails an antagonistic stance against the fabric of society.

It is a commonly held belief that Islamic law dictates the death penalty as an absolute punishment for apostasy. However, this reading of the Islamic Tradition relies on restricting the role of the Prophet Muhammad to that of a religious figure issuing timeless decrees. Such a restriction of the Prophet’s role will undoubtedly give rise to numerous paradoxes, as it will decontextualise all his statements and actions in a way that not only makes Islam incoherent as a religion, but also incompatible with certain societal developments.

An Interview with Henry Giroux on Democracy in Crisis

by C.J. POLYCHRONIOU

It is widely believed that the advanced liberal societies are suffering a crisis of democracy, a view you share wholeheartedly, although the empirical research, with its positivists bias, tends to be more cautious. In what ways is there less democracy today in places like the United States than there was, say, 20 or 30 years ago?

What we have seen in the United States and a number of other countries since the 1970s is the emergence of a savage form of free market fundamentalism, often called neoliberalism, in which there is not only a deep distrust of public values, public goods and public institutions but the embrace of a market ideology that accelerates the power of the financial elite and big business while gutting those formative cultures and institutions necessary for a democracy to survive. The commanding institutions of society in many countries, including the United States, are now in the hands of powerful corporate interests, the financial elite and right-wing bigots whose strangulating control over politics renders democracy corrupt and dysfunctional.  More specifically, Americans now live in what the new Pope has condemned as the “tyranny of unfettered capitalism,” where the corporate, financial, and ruling elites shape politics, assault unions, mobilize great extremes of wealth and power, and enforce a brutalizing regime of neoliberalism. This is a period that lacks any sense of social and economic justice, a historical moment in which the existing norms, values, and for that matter language itself legitimate the production of zones of social and civil death, death spheres-driven by a mad violence rooted in a dystopian theater of cruelty.  Some have argued that Americans have entered a new Gilded Age or an oligarchy, but in reality it is more brutal than these terms suggest. This new period of political, social, and economic savagery is more reminiscent of what Hannah Arendt called “dark times,” a historical conjuncture rooted in the reworked attributes of a life-sapping totalitarianism, posing shamelessly as an updated version of democracy. The new authoritarianism  reinforces what conservative politicians, hedge fund managers and pundits refuse to admit, which is that in the United States the social contract and social wage are under sustained assault by right-wing politicians and anti-public intellectuals from both political parties.  Moreover, those public spheres and institutions that support social provisions, the public good and keep public values alive are under sustained attack. Such attacks have not only produced a range of policies that have expanded the misery, suffering, and hardships of millions of people, but have also put into place a growing culture of cruelty in which those who suffer the misfortunes of poverty, unemployment, low skill jobs, homelessness, and other social problems are the object of both humiliation and scorn.

‘Force Protection Alpha’… Coming to a Town Near You

by Brian Terrell

On April 15, 2014, when the story broke on the world that the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert program of assassination by remotely controlled drones is not distinct from the drone program of the U.S. Air Force as we had been told, I was on the “Sacred Peace Walk,” an event sponsored each spring by the Nevada Desert Experience, a 70 mile trek from Las Vegas to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. Creech Air Force Base is along the way and we had already made plans for a protest there the next morning. While the CIA’s drone program is shrouded in secrecy, the Air Force supposedly has been using drones strictly as a weapon for waging war against combatants in recognized areas of conflict such as Afghanistan and formerly in Iraq, under a chain of command that is accountable to elected officials. Some who condemn the CIA’s assassinations by drones as illegal give a pass to or even laud the Air Force use of drones as a more restrained way to fight war.

This distinction has now been exposed as a lie. In a new documentary film released in Europe, “Drone,” former Air Force drone operators, veterans of a super-secret Squadron 17 at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, reveal that “it’s always been the Air Force that flies” the CIA’s missions, “the CIA might be the customer, but the Air Force has always flown it.”

‘No chance of survival’ for 6 missing Mount Rainier climbers

Posted by Coral Garnick Seattle Times staff and Associated Press

Officials say there is no chance that six missing Mount Rainier climbers have survived, after searchers found a debris field spreading hundreds of feet.

Air and ground searches were suspended, four hours before nightfall.

Tents, clothing, and debris were located by helicopter searchers, over Carbon Glacier. The debris field is strewn down the mountain’s steep north side – a pattern that suggests an avalanche or rockslide. Helicopters got low enough to pick up pings from avalanche beacons, buried in the snow, said Fawn Bauer, spokeswoman for the National Park Service.

“They [rescuers] feel there is no chance of survival at this point,” Bauer said.

A National Call to Link Arms for Democracy

By Victoria Collier and Ben-Zion Ptashnik, Truthout | Op-Ed

“When I despair I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall, think of it – always!” – Mahatma Gandhi

For Americans, these are dangerous and momentous times. We have only a small window of opportunity to break the grip of moneyed interests on our government, before an advancing oligarchy consolidates power and locks in tyranny.

This article is an urgent call to organize a mass-based political movement in the coming months and through the 2016 elections. If we rise to the occasion and fight, we can reclaim democracy, regain control of our future, and preserve the dreams of our children, and for the coming generations.

Without a sweeping grassroots movement, loudly pushing and protesting for reforms, populist candidates, or coalitions in Congress will never have the power to defeat the forces of a corrupt ruling class. Robber barons have resurfaced with a vengeance in the past four decades, openly attacking our democratic system, while buying power to extend and protect their privilege in perpetuity.

Google starts taking censorship requests

By Michael Liedtke, The Associated Press  

SAN FRANCISCO – Google is starting to accept requests from Europeans who want to erase unflattering information from the results produced by the world’s dominant search engine. The demands can be submitted on a Web page that Google opened late Thursday in response to a landmark ruling issued two weeks ago by Europe’s highest court. The decision gives Europeans the means to polish their online reputations by petitioning Google and other search engines to remove potentially damaging links to newspaper articles and other websites with embarrassing information about their past activities. Google’s compliance thrusts the company into the prickly position of having to balance privacy concerns and “the right to be forgotten” against the principles of free expression and “the right to know.” It will also create a divide between how Google generates search results about some people in Europe and the rest of the world. For now at least, Google will only scrub personal information spanning a 32-nation swath in Europe. That means Googling the same person in the United States and dozens of other countries could look much different than it does from Europe.

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Get out of my mind!

Daily Wiki:

Dune

Dune is a 1965 epic science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. It won the Hugo Award in 1966,[1] and the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel.[2] Dune is the world’s best-selling science fiction novel[3][4] and is the start of the Dune saga.

Set in the distant future amidst a feudal interstellar society in which noble houses, in control of individual planets, owe allegiance to the Padishah Emperor, Dune tells the story of young Paul Atreides, whose noble family accepts the stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis. As this planet is the only source of the “spice” melange, the most important and valuable substance in the universe, control of Arrakis is a coveted – and dangerous – undertaking. The story explores the multi-layered interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion, as the forces of the empire confront each other in a struggle for the control of Arrakis and its “spice”.[5]

Herbert wrote five sequels to the novel Dune: Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune. The first novel also inspired a 1984 film adaptation by David Lynch, the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune and its 2003 sequel Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune (which combines the events of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune), computer games, at least two board games, songs, and a series of followups, including prequels and sequels, that were co-written by Kevin J. Anderson and the author’s son, Brian Herbert, starting in 1999.[6]

Moods are for cattle and love play!

Did you say “breakfast?”

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a tart for breakfast, goes great with coffee or tea.  I’d include a dollop of whipped cream.  This tart comes from Trader Joe’s.  I have a fraction of this very tart in my fridge right no, so tomorrow’s breakfast is covered!

Happy Birthday Norma Jean!

Meme of the Day

Emperor Shaddam Hussein

Usul, we have worm sign the likes of which even God has never seen!

Something to Think About Over Prozac

e> Coffee:

“I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing….only I will remain”

From the Saving the Best for Last Department:

I am trying to convince DeadHead that he really ought not to take the water of life.  Many men have tried.  Did they try and fail?  No, they tried and DIED.  But, DeadHead reminded me that he is, in fact, a dead head and therefore, the water of life could not hurt him.  Early the next morning, we went out to the desert, and he did drink the water of life – the bile from a new born sandworm – and oh wow, don’t it make his brown eyes blue!

This is DeadHead’s mother — she has the weirding way!

Stupid Quiet, Deep Shit LaEscapee Wrote:

STFU, I Agree.  

“I don’t project my feelings on you all I ask is that you don’t project yours on me. “

LaEscapee is a man of few words.  They say still waters run deep.  He ain’t heavy, man, he’s my brother.

The tooth.  The tooth.

Breakfast Tunes

Confidential to all you lefty pie warriors

We get that you’re frustrated, and feel that the community moderation system does not always appear “fair and balanced,” but pretty please with sugar on top don’t bring your pie wars into The Breakfast Club.  We don’t want to reinforce our already dirtier than a dirty fucking hippie angry, hateful, fringy image.  Your anticipated cooperation is much appreciated, and That Group thanks you in advance.