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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Amnesty International USA - alerts [at] takeaction.amnestyusa.org
Date: Oct 5, 2007 8:30 AM
Subject: You can tear down Guantánamo Bay one pixel at a time
You can make Guantanamo Bay disappear — and help tear down detention camps that have become synonymous with torture, injustice, and an utter betrayal of human rights. Tearitdown.org is a powerful new Amnesty International project dramatically visualizing the commitment of 500,000 people to tear down Guantanamo Bay.
See for yourself. Act right now to tear down a piece of Guantanamo Bay!
Tearitdown.org builds on Amnesty’s long history of showing how one individual can make a difference. You have the power to tear down Guantanamo Bay one pixel at a time. Once 500,000 people have expressed their determination to end this human rights disgrace — our image of Guantanamo-style injustice will disappear.
And, more importantly, we’ll have the power and strength needed to tear down the real Guantanamo Bay.
One person, one pixel is all it takes. Get your pixel and express your power to end this human rights abomination.
From across the political spectrum, across the globe, calls are mounting to shut down Guantanamo Bay and either charge and try those imprisoned or release them.
Join Amnesty International in this powerful display of commitment to human rights. Strike the final blow to the Administration’s failed policies at Guantanamo Bay. Get your pixel today.
Thank you,
Larry Cox
Executive Director
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Tagged: action alerts petition amnesty international Guantánamo Bay terrorism war on terror war on terra george w. bush politics torture
This dog run is named in honor of PAPD K-9 Sirius #17. He was a four year old yellow Labrador Retriever who served as an explosives detector canine for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department. Sirius, along with his partner, Police Officer David Lim, were assigned to the World Trade Center in New York, where their primary duty was to check vehicles entering the Complex, clear unattended bags and sweep areas for VIP safety. Sirius, who began work at the World Trade Center on July 4, 2000, was the only police dog to perish during the Sept. 11 attack on the Twin Towers – he died when Tower Two collapsed. His body was recovered on January 22, 2002. Sirius was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross at the British Embassy in Manhattan.
A memorial statue of Sirius stands in the One Chase Manhattan Plaza lobby.
(Via wallyg)
(more…)
Click here to view hundreds of past and current Hurricane Katrina (and other natural-and/or-man-made-disasters-for-non-human-animals) alerts.
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Kinship Circle - kinshipcircle [at] accessus.net
Date: Aug 29, 2007 1:19 PM
Subject: When 2 Years Equal A Lifetime, AUGUST 2005-2007
Kinship Circle Animal Disaster Relief
Permission to crosspost as written
Hurricane Katrina, 8/29/05 - 8/29/07
When two years equal a lifetime
www.kinshipcircle.org/disasters/
Still Loved
Forever Missed
Never Again
By Our Side, Always
2005 GULF COAST Animal Disaster Aid - In Pictures & Words:
www.kinshipcircle.org/disasters/gulfcoast/newsletters/default05.html
PHOTO: Kinship Circle member Tim Gorski on the water in New Orleans with the Winn Dixie rescue effort in 9/05.
9/13/05, Excerpt From Early Kinship Circle Alert: In our search for Spike (the little Yorkie) we’ve learned about volunteers on the water who could save Spike and others — but they desperately need more boats!
The Jefferson Pet Feed & Garden Center is serving as a drop site for boats and has a triage center with a veterinarian. Please, if you can bring down boats — or know someone who can — call: Jefferson Pet Feed & Garden Center: 504-733-8572 (This number, like all in the area, may be hard to reach. Do not give up. They are there!)
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…and the early battle scenes in Qatar? In poor taste, to say the least. Watching American soldiers and Middle Easterners being blown to smithereens isn’t so much entertaining as it is depressing.
Also depressing was this statement, part of Optimus Prime’s endless moralizing: “All sentient beings deserve freedom”. (Or perhaps it was more along the lines of “All sentient being deserve the right to live”…I forget now.) Really? All sentient beings? Because, like, “sentient” isn’t codeword for “human+”.
Sentience refers to utilization of sensory organs, the ability to feel or perceive subjectively, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness. The possession of sapience is not a necessity. The word sentient is often confused with the word sapient, which can connote knowledge, consciousness, or apperception.
Sadly, and despite the obvious implications of such an animal-friendly statement, Transformers was hardly a pro-AR movie. On the contrary; one of Optimus Prime’s cronies (you know, the “good” “guys”) wanted to kill a dog (which he* saw as evidence of a “rodent infestation”) for pissing on his foot. Uh, yeah, maybe y’all should modify that statement to “All sapient beings…” I hate to break it to the screenwriters, but dogs are sentient, you dumbasses.
The effects were pretty cool, though.
* Though Shane doth protest, the Transformers are all clearly uber-masculine entities. Androgynous they aint.
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Tagged: transformers animals animal rights animal welfare optimus prime ethics moralizing sentience war on terra movies medianimals
Crossposted without commentary…
Note: For similar action alerts and commentary, please visit this site’s Katrina archive (which I’ve obviously expanded to include all large-scale disasters, both “natural” and man-made) or my AR blog, easyVegan.info (hint: start with the Natural Disasters category).
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Kinship Circle - kinshipcircle [at] brick.net
Date: Jun 24, 2007 1:39 AM
Subject: Animals Unseen Collateral Damage
RELIEF GLOBAL / KINSHIP CIRCLE ANIMAL DISASTER RELIEF LIST
KINSHIP CIRCLE COLUMN, 6/24/07
PERMISSION TO CROSS-POST
Columns & Articles: www.kinshipcircle.org/columns_articles/
Animals - War’s Unseen Collateral Damage
By Brenda Shoss, 6/24/07, www.KinshipCircle.org
Kinship Circle’s column runs in The Healthy Planet. Ms. Shoss is also a contributing writer for The Animals Voice, Satya Magazine, VegNews, and other publications. To reprint this column, please request author permission at info [at] kinshipcircle.org
LEFT PHOTO: 8/5/06, network.bestfriends.org/middleeast/news/6547.html
— BETA rescued this little kitten, Louli, from the war zone.
RIGHT PHOTO: 6/4/07, from BETA Team, listmaster [at] betabeirut.com — Car bombs and hand grenades went off in Beirut. The first bomb exploded very close to one of our cat shelters in Ashrafieh area…
War devastates. We grieve for soldiers lost and the involuntary destruction of civilian life. But headlines rarely publicize war’s other collateral damage.
Animals, crimeless and naive, dodge mortars and armored combat vehicles. Their lives explode in a flurry of desertion, starvation, injury and death.
A month into last summer’s Israeli-Hezbollah war, bombs rain over Beirut’s southern suburbs. Israel’s military hopes to defuse Hezbollah’s command post, so Lebanese officials can assert autonomy along the border. Meanwhile, Hezbollah launches rocket strikes inside Haifa and northern Israel.
Helena Hesayne, a Beirut born architect, has little patience for the politics behind battle. Her mission is clear: To rescue animals abandoned in Lebanon’s exodus of one million people. In late July 2006, Hesayne and three others from Beirut For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals (BETA) navigate smoldering rubble in a small convertible. Israeli soldiers eye their car full of dog and cat food.
Hesayne displays BETA’s accreditation papers. She has no fear, only stark resolve to retrieve four cats and one puppy seen locked inside a pet shop. “These animals are banging against the glass door, trying to get out. They are without food and water. I don’t know how long,” Hesayne recounts.
The women persuade another storeowner to unlock the pet shop for them. They are without crates, so they ferry animals toward their car under a downpour of bombs. “The entire time, this tiny puppy just licks our faces. It is the most amazing thing,” Hesayne says.
(more…)
Living Graves
We are the living graves of murdered beasts,
Slaughtered to satisfy our appetites.
We never pause to wonder at our feasts,
If animals, like men, can possibly have rights.
We pray on Sundays that we may have light,
To guide our footsteps on the path we tread.
We’re sick of war, we do not want to fight -
The thought of it now fills our hearts with dread,
And yet - we gorge ourselves upon the dead.
www.peta2.com/livinggraves
Like carrion crows we live and feed on meat,
Regardless of the suffering and the pain
we cause by doing so, if thus we treat
defenceless animals for sport or gain,
how can we hope in this world to attain,
the PEACE we say we are so anxious for.
We pray for it o’er hecatombs of slain,
to God, while outraging the moral law,
thus cruelty begets its offspring - WAR.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
( Crossposted.)
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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare poem Living Graves George Bernard Shaw meat dairy eggs cow bovine pig chicken vegan veganism vegetarian vegetarianism activism flickr peta peta2 ecard people for the ethical treatment of animals critter lit poetry
(Crossposted at easyVeganInfo.)
The following prose isn’t entirely appropriate for the occasion, but all the tributes to military and working dogs I could find were gratuitously speciesist in nature. The only authentic poem in this genre seems to be the oft-repeated Rags, but…that’s not really Memorial Day fare, either.
So, in lieu of a schizophrenically sentimental tribute to working animals, a tribute to companions everywhere - along with a gentle reminder to love, honor, and cherish them today, tomorrow, and the day after…because you never know when the tomorrows will turn to yesterdays.
For our nation’s soldiers… Bring them home. All of them.
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I Am Your Dog
I am your dog, and I have a little something I would like to whisper in your ear.
I know that you humans lead busy lives. Some have to work. Some have children to raise. It always seems like you are running here and there, often much too fast, often never noticing the truly grand things in life.
Look down at me now, while you sit there at your computer. See, the way my dark brown eyes look at yours. They are slightly cloudy now. That comes with age. The gray hairs are beginning to ring my soft muzzle.
You smile at me; I see love in your eyes. What do you see in mine? Do you see a spirit? A soul inside, who loves you as no other could in the world? A spirit that would forgive all trespasses of prior wrongdoing for just a simple moment of your time?
That is all I ask. To slow down, if even for a few minutes to be with me.
So many times, you have been saddened by the words you read on that screen, of other of my kind, passing. Sometimes we die young and oh so quickly, sometimes so suddenly it wrenches your heart out of your throat. Sometimes, we age so slowly before your eyes that you may not even seem to know until the very end, when we look at you with grizzled muzzles and cataract clouded eyes. Still the love is always there, even when we must take that long sleep, to run free in a distant land.
I may not be here next week. Someday you will shed the water from your eyes, that humans have when deep grief fills their souls, and you will be angry at yourself that you did not have just “One more day” with me. Because I love you so, your sorrow touches my spirit and grieves me. We have NOW, together.
So come, sit down here next to me on the floor, and look deep into my eyes. What do you see? If you look hard and deep enough we will talk, you and I, heart to heart. Come to me, not as “alpha” or as “trainer” or even “Mom or Dad,” come to me as a living soul and stroke my fur and let us look deep into another’s eyes, and talk.
I may tell you something about the fun of chasing a tennis ball, or I may tell you something profound about myself or even life in general. You decided to have me in your life because you wanted a soul to share such things with.
Someone very different from you, and here I am.
I am a dog, but I am alive. I feel emotion, I feel physical senses, and I can revel in the differences of our spirits and souls. I do not think of you as a “Dog on two feet” - I know what you are. You are human, in all of your quirkiness, and I love you still.
Now, come sit with me on the floor. Enter my world, and let time slow down if only for 15 minutes. Look deep into my eyes, and whisper to my ears. Speak with your heart, with your joy and I will know your true self.
We may not have tomorrow, and life is oh so very short.
–Love, (on behalf of canines everywhere)
Author Unknown
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Photo via slagheap
Caption:
Lance Cpl. Charles E. Byerly, a 20-year-old dog handler, shows his dog Danny, 10, some love at Camp Habbaniyah, Iraq, Sept. 1. He wanted to care for his four-legged companion before they head back for Danny’s retirement in Camp Lejeune, N.C. Danny has deployed three times in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and one to Djibouti, Africa as a military working dog fighting insurgents with Marines. After the dog’s retirement Byerly will adopt his battle buddy. Byerly is from Mars
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