[What follows is a pair of articles recently posted by a New York City public school social worker over at Fire on the Mountain, articles we hope will be of interest to educators and parents, and perhaps more broadly.]

Teen Breakthrough, Part 1: "I'm Not Racist Against Gays"

by Napolitana-Piemontese

In my workaday world in the NYC public school system, this year's big news was the growing acceptance of and sympathy for gay guys. And because male homosexuality has been, in my experience, so deeply stigmatized among youth, I think this is a tremendous breakthrough. I still don't hear many guys in high school saying flat out, "I am gay," but there's definitely less attempt to deny or repudiate or hide attributes that might brand a young man as gay.

Fellow Kossacks, you could do me a quick favor here. I've been thinking lately about what I called, in a post at another blog,

a new "digital divide" I sense arising. (The first and still pre-eminent one, of course, is economic--the haves online, the have-nots cut out). The one I will be commenting on is more along generational and net-savviness lines, with many folks I know shying away, for a variety of reasons, from a lot of the interactive developments collectively called "Web 2.0".

Of all the facets of Web 2.0 (including the debate over whether or not there is such a thing), far and away the best known and most widely used is Wikipedia. I've not figured out how to frame an easy-to-click multiple choice poll with two or more initial states, so I'll ask your indulgence here, and if you have anything to add on your personal use of (relationship to?) Wikipedia, I'd appreciate your throwing in a comment below.

No, not the global-warming-fueled temperature in NYC today, though it kinda feels like it.

102 is the number of Iraq Moratorium events scheduled around the country tomorrow, the Third Friday of July. Or, to be more precise, 102 is the number of events around the country listed at the IM website. Every month a few more surface that folks on the national committee had no clue about.

I had planned to diary a sample of cool events from the listed 102, but instead I'll make a wish--right here in public. I wish that tomorrow someone attending Netroots Nation, whether luminary or rank and filer, takes a moment to mention that it is the 11th monthly observation of the Iraq Moratorium. It was, after all, on Daily Kos that the idea of such a grassroots, locally-based protest was first floated, a year and a half ago.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Dennis O'Neil
[reposted with authors' permission from Znet]

Once again, there's a lot of serious attack-on-Iran talk going around. We've both been following this, admittedly with no deep expertise, for several years now. During that time a number of media/blogosphere storms declaring such an attack imminent have whirled up and then blown away. (Of course, we oughtn't to forget that in the old children's story, the wolf eventually does come and eat the shepherd boy who produced the false alarms.) So we decided to sketch out these few points.

1  No matter how much Bush and his coterie may want it, we give no more than 10% odds on an attack actually taking place, and that's mainly just covering ourselves.

2  The furor is not a calculated bluff by the administration to put pressure on Iran. Neither is it a planned distraction to weaken opposition to the continued occupation of Iraq. It's the public face of a tense struggle within US ruling circles, concentrated in the state apparatus.

Two days ago the Washington Post broke a story on a deadly new weapon that Shi'ite resistance forces in Iraq are using against US troops there.

U.S. military officials call the devices Improvised Rocket Assisted Munitions, or IRAMs. They are propane tanks packed with hundreds of pounds of explosives and powered by 107mm rockets.

Then again, you might have already known about it, that is, if you follow the YouTube videos being posted by Casey J. Porter, a soldier based near Baghdad who is an active-duty member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Yesterday, as Meteor Blades reminded us, is the fifth anniversary of a George Bush quote so spectacularly dumb that it will make any greatest hits collection--no need to buy the box set.

"There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush told reporters at the White House. "My answer is bring them on."

When Bush's interview was carried on the news, a retired Special Forces non-com named Stan Goff in Raleigh, NC went into a white-hot rage. He sat down at his keyboard and ripped out a response entitled "Bring 'Em On?" You may well remember it, although it was five years ago today. Within hours it swept across the Internet like a prairie fire.

[Once again Jeri Reed has forwarded me an important article, like the one she wrote here a few months ago. Once again she has pulled my coattail to something by Casey J. Porter, the Iraq Veteran Against the War member who has been vlogging from outside of Baghdad. This time it's just words, but what powerful words!]

By Casey J. Porter

I feel pretty lousy as a human being today.

I had to turn away this Iraqi man at our gate here at the outpost. At some point the army took over this factory in the industrial part of Baghdad and we've been here ever since. He was an older man, diabetic, with multiple folders of paper work to show. He didn't speak any English and wished to talk to an interpreter. I was guarding the gate and was the one to call it in. So they send out the "Terp" as we call them.

This older man was not looking for a handout. He was the former owner of a paint shop that is built right up the building we now occupy. He was asking for compensation for his workers because they are no longer able to work now that we are here.

Unlike, say, the network television news programs, the print media still makes sporadic bids at covering the Iraq war. (All praise be unto the McClatchy chain, of course).

Last week the Christian Science Monitor carried an interesting piece by Sam Dagher, about a married couple who works as interpreters for the US occupation. They are, unsurprisingly, desperate to get out of the country and into the US. The two, whom Darger calls Chris and Sarah, have completed their paperwork, which requires, inter alia, a written recommendation from a US general (!), but nothing much seems to be happening.

It's the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, a light-filled time to cherish how much nature still gives us despite our species' best efforts to ravage her.

By me, this is not a happy solstice, though. It's the day after the House of Representatives put together and passed a bill to pony up $165 billion more to keep Bush's war in Iraq going for another year.

I don't have to remind anyone here that the the Democratic-dominated House of Representatives just voted to appropriate every dollar of that $165 billion, that that's $70 billion more than Bush requested, and that the bill contains nothing, zero, nada, which might bring the war a single day closer to an end.

I saw something rather startling in Northwest Connecticut on the weekend. Each pump at the local gas station had a handlettered sign taped to it, informing customers that all purchases must be paid for in advance. I asked Michael, behind the counter, if he had a lot of customers drive off without paying. "Not anymore," he deadpanned.

Mind you, this is an area where many people don't lock their houses; hell, some locals don't even have locks. But these "drive-offs" have become a national problem as soaring gas prices in this car-dependent society have more and more people desperate. Up 60% this year in the Lynchberg, VA area. 10% in Pell City, AL. Almost doubled in Bismarck, ND.

This hits gas station owners pretty hard. As a rule they make a profit of 1.5 to 3 cents per gallon -- at best -- on gasoline sales. So if somebody guns it out of the station after topping off the tank with $60 on the pump, they have sell an extra 2-4,000 gallons to make up for it.

I know, I know, the last thing you need is another reason to hate Wal-Mart. But check this out.

Last month Wal-Mart management filed with the patent office to scarf up the rights to a neologism (one they had nothing to do with coining, incidentally): "staycation."

The idea is pretty clear--what with layoffs, inflation, a recession and $4 a gallon gas, many of us aren't going to be doing much vacation traveling this summer, so let's hang around the crib and Have Fun! It's a Staycation!

Actually, that title is shorthand, or maybe just cheating. Both expressions might more accurately be identified as older concepts updated or amended.

1. From your keyboard to God’s inbox.

An update of "From your lips to God’s ear," the English variant of the old Yiddish: "Fun dayn moyl, in Gots oyer." Think "May it be so."

Outrage piles on outrage. This is really jimstaro's turf, more than mine, but it needs highlighting.

The story (as reported by the Washington Post) in a nutshell: over the last seven years more than 200 US troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq were processed by a Delaware company billboarding itself as the Friends Forever Pet Cremation Service.

When an officer escorted the body of a comrade to this outside contractor and became upset, the whole thing blew open. Now the Air Force, which flies the bodies into Dover AFB, promises to "use only crematory facilities that are co-located with licensed funeral homes."

I'm in a minority here.

I care more about what my government is doing to the people of Iraq than I do about which Democrat wins the nomination. A lot more.

Many of us, I know, tell ourselves that making sure the candidate we support gets elected is the single most important step we can take to end the war.

If that's you, please read the following brief excerpts from a piece by the estimable Thomas Powers in the current issue of The NY Review of Books. If it shakes you at all, kindly consider the two recommendations I make at the end of the article.

David Swanson of Democrats.com has a fabulous counterproposal for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Representative John Murtha and the other leading Congressional Dems preparing to vote on Bush’s latest $110 billion "emergency supplemental" appropriation later this week.  As you know, their plan is see Bush and raise him $70 billion!

Yep, they've decided to go for $180 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan not only past election day but far enough into Obama’s term that it’s not the first thing he has to deal with upon taking office. Pelosi justifies this continued funding of a murderous, a disastrous, a criminal war by saying she doesn’t want to be portrayed as "weak."  

Meanwhile, House minority leader John Boehner stands there with his face hanging out and says, "This is about funding the troops and nothing else."

just young human beings.

In my first ever photo diary.

On Friday, I covered the Two War Criminals For The Price Of One protest in Kent, Connecticut. When Glenn Koetzer of the Iraq Moratorium: Cornwall Edition sent me some photographs of the demonstration, I was surprised--to say nothing of delighted--at how many young people had showed up during a weekday to stand against the war-mongering tagteam of Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush.

Saturday's diary continued in the same celebratory vein, only younger still. I shared the discovery I had just made that some fifth grade students at the Fratney School in Milwaukee, who've been regulars at the Third Friday Iraq Moratorium actions there, have their own website as Kids Against the War.

I sure hope this youth trend in the anti-war movement accelerates--check out the pix and you will too.

The best part of this diary is going beneath the fold, because this time it's all about the pictures . Yesterday I posted a report on the demonstration against Bush and Henry Kissinger in rural Connecticut. In reviewing the fabulous photo album posted by Cornwall CT Iraq Moratorium stalwart Glenn Koetzer, I was struck and I was heartened by how many young folks were at the protest.

Then today, I found the Kids Against the War website and that really did my aging heart good. They're a crew from the fifth grade class at the Fratney School in Milwaukee, WI. They've been participating in the Milwaukee protests observing the Iraq Moratorium on the Third Friday of every month all year, and now they've posted some photos and explanations of why they got involved.

I just got a phone report from my friend Dody about today's demonstration in moneyed Kent, CT, where war criminal Henry Kissinger and his wife Nancy were hosting a Republican fundraising lunch (actually at the $1000 a plate level, it's probably a "luncheon"). The bash starred another Nuremberg Trial prospect, George W. Bush himself, as diaried here on Sunday.

Folks who've been working on the Iraq Moratorium in Cornwall, CT, the somewhat less posh rural town to Kent's immediate north, were part of a demonstration that they estimated at 60 or 70 at the start, when they tried to get close to the Kissinger residence. An arranged system of shuttles was to take folks inside the State Trooper blockade to protest, but when passengers on the first shuttle were bumrushed by the law when they tried to get out, plans were quickly adjusted.