Bloggence, Cunning, Exile

The Archive is Open.

2006-09-07T12:00:00.000+08:00

I've left the building, but the two years of information, opinion, and photos are still here for your delectation, edification, and outragification. Meanwhile, my slower and longer projects are available at:

http://www.efn.org/~heroux/home.html

I'm still encouraged by the fact that you were curious enough to read this, and that some of you wrote to me. Take care, don't fall while surfing, and do keep in touch!

--E. Heroux

Final Zen Paradox

2006-07-20T07:45:00.000+08:00

"The most profound reality in Buddhism is that there is no final, ultimate reality." --Master Sheng-yen, in Dharma Drum

Poverty-striken witty drunkard friend

2006-07-13T11:23:00.000+08:00


DULLNESS IN FEBRUARY:  JAPAN

The high-class families
Teach their virgin daughters
English, flowers, and Tea;
Culture of the East -- poor girls
Ride boys' bikes balancing noodles.

Brutal sergeants, vicious aesthetes, 
       the meeting
Of the worst of East and West,
Silly priests in temples
Far too fine for now.
Discipline for what end?
We gave up wisdom long ago,
Enlightenment is kicks
       --but there is better.
Cold smooth wood floors
And doves, stone pools, moss
Under maples, silent frosty rooftiles
Slanting high --  what sense
The old boys made -- 
Confucius, Lao-tzu, Tu Fu, Sesshu
       and the rest,
Through the centuries, peed off
By politicians in their robes.
Perhaps some flame remains.
       I hope
Again some day
To hit the night road in America
Hitchhiking through dark towns
Rucksack on my back,
To the home of a 
Poverty-stricken witty
Drunkard friend.

--Gary Snyder from Left Out in the Rain

The Mother of All Peoples

2006-07-01T06:50:00.000+08:00

{excerpt...}

Roots of Human Family Tree are Shallow
By MATT CRENSON, AP

Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia — Taiwan, [!?] Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He — or she — did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die.

Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth — the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today. . . .

"It's a mathematical certainty that that person existed," said Steve Olson, whose 2002 book Mapping Human History traces the history of the species since its origins in Africa more than 100,000 years ago. . . .

Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back . . . about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, everybody living today has exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants. . . .

It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in
Iraqis descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman's family has African roots. . . .

{the fairly simple math of this is explained at the link above}

Exiled to the End Zone

2006-06-29T15:33:00.000+08:00

"Of all the aspects of exile, silence pleased me least. Other things were not so displeasing. Exile compensates the banished by offering certain opportunities. Each day, for example, I spent some time in meditation. This never failed to be a lovely interlude, for there was nothing to meditate on. Each day I added a new word to my vocabulary, wrote a letter to someone I loved, and memorized the name of one more president of the United States and the years of his term in office. Simplicity, repetition, solitude, starkness, discipline upon discipline. There were profits here, things that could be used to make me stronger; the small fanatical monk who clung to my liver would thrive on such ascetic scraps. And then there was geography. We were in the middle of the middle of nowhere, that terrain so flat and bare, suggestive of the end of recorded time, a splendid sense of remoteness firing my soul. It was easy to feel that back up there, where men spoke the name civilization in wistful tones, I was wanted for some terrible crime.

Exile in a real place. a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own private history."

--Don DeLillo from the novel End Zone, 1972.

In the End Zone

2006-06-24T04:25:00.000+08:00

"Let me ask. What's the strangest thing about this country? It's that when I wake up tomorrow morning, any morning, the first bit of fear I have doesn't concern our national enemies, our traditional cold-war or whatever-kind-of-war enemies. I'm not afraid of those people at all. So then who am I afraid of because I'm definitely of somebody. Listen and I'll tell you. I'm afraid of my own country. I'm afraid of the United States of America. It's ridiculous, isn't it? But look. Take the Pentagon. If anybody kills us on a grand scale, it'll be the Pentagon. On a small scale, watch out for your local police. Look at you looking at me that way, some of you. Question. Will two polite college-educated-of-course friendly agents of the brainwash squad knock on my door at three in the morning? You see my winning infectious smile and you know I'm not worried. This is America. We say what we want. I could talk all day, citing chapter and verse. But when the true test comes, I'll probably go running to a beauty shop, if you can find one in this neck of the world, and I'll get my hair dyed blond so everybody will think I'm one of those small blondie boys with the faraway look in their eyes who used to be so big on the Himmelplatz three or four decades ago. . . . I have a deep thought for you. Science fiction is just beginning to catch up with the Old Testament. See artificial nitrates run off into the rivers and oceans. See carbon dioxide melt the polar ice caps. See the world's mineral reserves dwindle. See war, famine and plague. See barbaric hordes defile the temple of the virgins. See wild stallions mount prarie dogs. I said science fiction but I guess I meant science. Anyway there's some kind of mythical and/or historic circle-thing being completed here. But I keep smiling. I keep telling myself there's nothing to worry about as long as the youth of America knows what's going on. Brains, brawn, good teeth, tallness. I look at your faces and I have to let out a controversial little grin. Some of you in nifty blue uniforms here to learn about outer space and how to police it. Uniforms, flags, battle hymns. I offer you my only quotable remark of the entire fall semester. A nation is never more ridiculous than in its patriotic manifestations. Why should I be afraid of my own government? There's something wrong here. But I'm not worried. Fortunately I'm good at ducking. I can bob and weave with the best of them. It takes a lot to stop a little man."

--Don DeLillo from the novel End Zone, 1972.

Whitman & Wittman & Sons

2006-06-19T13:11:00.000+08:00

Trippers and askers surround me,

People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
--Walt Whitman Song of Myself, section 4. Bold phrases are used as chapter titles of a novel by Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey. Another chapter is titled after the poem below also by Whitman:
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

A Song for Occupations
In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find the developments,
And find the eternal meanings.

Workmen and Workwomen!
Were all educations practical and ornamental well display'd out of me, what would it amount to?
Were I as the head teacher, charitable proprietor, wise statesman,what would it amount to?
Were I to you as the boss employing and paying you, would that satisfy you?

The learn'd, virtuous, benevolent, and the usual terms,
A man like me and never the usual terms.

Neither a servant nor a master I,
I take no sooner a large price than a small price, I will have my own whoever enjoys me,
I will be even with you and you shall be even with me.

If you stand at work in a shop I stand as nigh as the nighest in the same shop,
If you bestow gifts on your brother or dearest friend I demand as good as your brother or dearest friend,
If your lover, husband, wife, is welcome by day or night, I must be personally as welcome,
If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake,
If you remember your foolish and outlaw'd deeds, do you think I cannot remember my own foolish and outlaw'd deeds?
If you carouse at the table I carouse at the opposite side of the table,
If you meet some stranger in the streets and love him or her, why I often meet strangers in the street and love them.

Why what have you thought of yourself?
Is it you then that thought yourself less?
Is it you that thought the President greater than you?
Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser than you?

(Because you are greasy or pimpled, or were once drunk, or a thief, Or that you are diseas'd, or rheumatic, or a prostitute,
Or from frivolity or impotence, or that you are no scholar and never saw your name in print,
Do you give in that you are any less immortal?)

~~~ ~~~ ~~~
{continues for 5 more sections...}

iPod Chinese sweatshop

2006-06-17T10:08:00.000+08:00

Cost to buy an iPod = US $299.
Cost to buy an iPod Nano = US $149.
Chinese worker paid per hour to build iPods = 15 cents. (US $ 0.15).

Apple profit rose 41% and in the first half of fiscal 2006, Apple generated more than $10 billion in revenue.

Sweatshop Conditions at iPod Factory Reported
By Mike Musgrove
The Washington Post

Apple Computer Inc. is having an iPod-related public relations headache this week, following a report by a British newspaper on working conditions at Chinese factories where the popular music player is built.

The Mail on Sunday reported that a Chinese factory that manufactures iPods employs 200,000 workers who live in dormitories where visitors are not permitted. Workers toil for 15-hour days for as little as $50 per month, according to the article.

As Mac fan sites buzzed with debate over the report, Apple issued a statement saying it is investigating the matter.

"Apple is committed to ensuring that working conditions in our supply chain are safe, workers are treated with respect and dignity, and manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible," the company statement said.

Apple said it is "investigating the allegations regarding working conditions in the iPod manufacturing plant in China." It added, "We do not tolerate any violations of our supplier code of conduct."
[See update as of July 18, 2006 at:
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/071806LA.shtml]

IPod factory workers are employed by Taiwanese contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known by the brand Foxconn Electronics Inc. The relationship between Apple and Hon Hai is typical in the electronics industry, where manufacturing is frequently handled by contract builders.

The working conditions, as described in the British newspaper article, aren't unusual, said Karin Mak, a project coordinator at a nonprofit watchdog organization called Sweatshop Watch.

"It's very common," she said. "These types of conditions are very typical, unfortunately."
------------------------

The Taiwan company, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, has a market value of about $23.7 billion, and registered "Foxconn" as its trademark. It now has more than 12 branch offices around the world, marketing Foxconn products.

We're calling for a boycott and for Apple to put the precision squeeze on Hon Hai Precision and their foxy con.

See update as of July 18, 2006 at:
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/071806LA.shtml

BLOOMSDAY

2006-06-16T12:00:00.000+08:00

June 16 is the annual BLOOMSDAY.

{excerpt}

James Joyce called Dublin the "center of paralysis," and complained in a letter:

"How sick, sick, sick I am of Dublin! It is the city of failure, of rancor and of unhappiness. I long to be out of it." (22 August 1909)

He spent the last thirty years of his life in exile, settling for periods in Trieste, Rome, Zurich, Paris -- anywhere but Dublin.

It is a much remarked-upon irony that his masterpiece Ulysses is not only set in Dublin, but never allows us to forget it. The novel recounts the hour-by-hour events of one day in Dublin -- June 16, 1904 -- as an ordinary Dubliner, Leopold Bloom, wends his way through the urban landscape, the odyssey of a modern-day Ulysses. . . .

{continues about Bloomsday round the world at link above}

History is a weapon.

2006-06-15T05:55:00.000+08:00

. . . and that weapon can be used against you, or for you . . .

--Thanks to C.B. for the lead on this one.

Caught in Falluja Fire

2006-06-14T22:23:00.000+08:00

Unreported: The Zarqawi Invitation

2006-06-10T12:44:00.000+08:00

Link above to an expose by Greg Palast that cuts through all the smoke and mirrors. It reminds the forgetful why there is an insurgency and a civil war in Iraq, reviews the 101 page American Plan to rip off Iraq's economy, reminds us who halted elections and democracy there, why Garner was replaced by Bremer, and how this led to Zarqawi and his crew and the complete betrayal of the Iraqi people who had so far cooperated with the US occupation. Contains a key insider interview also.

It's sort of "Iraq Quagmire for Idiots" and handy if you haven't yet figured out what's what and who's who.

William Gibson Interview

2006-06-08T16:44:00.000+08:00

Recently put a webpage with my summary of a video interview with cyberpunk author, William Gibson. Not wanting to post the whole thing on this blog, but instead just a pointer and link:

Notes from No Maps for These Territories

Class War Brutality in 2005

2006-06-08T10:40:00.000+08:00

{excerpt}

Brussels - 115 trade unionists were murdered for defending workers' rights in 2005, while more than 1,600 were subjected to violent assaults and some 9,000 arrested, according to the ICFTU's Annual Survey of Trade Union Rights violations, published today. Nearly 10,000 workers were sacked for their trade union involvement, and almost 1,700 detained.

Latin America remained the most perilous region for trade union activity, with Colombia once again topping the list for killings, intimidation and death threats. 70 Colombian unionists paid the ultimate price for standing up for fundamental rights at work. Other countries under the spotlight for violence and repression against unionists include Iraq, Iran, El Salvador, Djibouti, China, Cambodia, Guatemala, Zimbabwe and Burma. Some Arabian Gulf countries continue to ban trade unions altogether, while in several other countries including North Korea, government-controlled "official trade unions" are the order of the day. In Australia, the government rushed through new laws depriving the country's workforce of the most fundamental protections.

"This year's report reveals deeply disturbing trends, especially for women, migrant workers and those who work in the public sector", said ICFTU General Secretary Guy Ryder. "The death toll was slightly lower in 2005 than the previous year, but we are nevertheless witnessing increasingly severe violence and hostility against working people who stand up for their rights," he added. . . .

{full report continues at link above}

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the stolen election

2006-06-06T18:06:00.000+08:00

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Rolling Stone

Thursday 01 June 2006

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

The complete article, with Web-only exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary, is at the link above.

Remembering the Fallen

2006-06-04T03:00:00.000+08:00

Today is the anniversary of the 1989 massacre of student pro-democracy protests in China. Merely 17 years ago, and yet Chinese students in Beijing University today reply that they are not sure what it was, and that they have never seen the iconic images from those events that the rest of the world recognizes immediately. Censorship of history is effective in keeping people ignorant and confined.

Students in Taiwan have indeed heard about this history, although they remain vaguely unaware of what it implies about their own lives in the 21st century. None of my students has ever seen a video or photo of those momentous events. The link below downloads a BBC video shot live during the massacre. It plays with the free RealPlayer software.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/video/otdvideo/89/06/04/nb/7653_04-06-89_4x3_nb.ram

2 Options for the Post-Carbon Age

2006-06-03T09:00:00.000+08:00

Preparing for the Post-Carbon Age
by Doris "Granny D" Haddock

{excerpt}
. . . .
The question for environmental activists is this: can the planet be saved even if many of the people do not understand the problem or, despite the ready facts, are insistent upon staying the course of self-destruction because it profits them in the short term? Will the rising stormy seas, the spreading deserts and droughts, only prompt them to dig their heels deeper into the mud of the melting levees?

And as a species, are we not waddling toward the cliff? Why has no great leader stood upon a rock with sufficient persuasion to halt the march and save the day? Are the forces now too great against mere words? Are the zombie masses, holding the hands of their children, on a Jonestown-like death march we cannot fathom or halt? Is it evolution itself we are watching, with our species automatically pre-wired for extinction when there are, say, by God's count, more Washington lobbyists than tree frogs - and with stickier fingers?

. . . .
Strategically, I can imagine two possible outcomes for this battle. One is dark and one is bright.

Here is the dark one. Global catastrophe builds upon global catastrophe. Democracies become dictatorships as the masses reach for leadership and rescue from storm, pestilence and famine. Shooting wars break out between those who follow and those who oppose. A time of violence and suffering falls upon the planet. The resources that could have been spent to repair the ecosystem are needed for police security and mass imprisonment or worse. The weakened species, as a whole, finds itself in no position to survive when agricultural systems collapse and anarchy overwhelms all authority. I cannot see much past that, though there is probably much to see.

Here is the bright one. Global catastrophe builds upon global catastrophe. (Yes, I know it starts out badly.) More and more people opt out of the carbon economy to join a rising society of people and communities who have moved rapidly toward an ethic of responsibility and sustainability. These communities produce the best leaders, more and more of whom are elected to national positions. Many existing national leaders begin to move toward the ethic of these communities and of sustainability. More and more towns and cities, led by goal-setting organizations dominated by young people, accept sustainable goals. The first President of the United States from such a community is elected in the same year that similar leaders are chosen in Europe, India and several other regions. The Untied Nations is rapidly reorganized around its own Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a post-carbon age economic model. Multi-national corporations are outlawed, as corporations must now be overseen by the communities that grant their limited, public purpose charters.

Now, which one of these visions, among the millions we could dream up, is the more likely? Or will the future be something in-between, where there are solar cells on every roof, but every roof is a detention facility?

What shall it be? Must we find caves in the far woods and set our booby traps against the storm troopers of the Empire who might come for us, or shall we get some responsible communities moving forward?
. . . .
["Granny D" continues this address with recommendations for success at the link above. . .]

On Successful Revolt in France

2006-05-29T16:00:00.000+08:00

Ken Knabb over at Bureau of Public Secrets reflects on the implications and consequences of the latest successful revolt in France:

{excerpt}

A new and in some ways unprecedented radical movement has emerged in France. Beginning in February as a protest against the CPE, a law that would have made it easier to fire young workers, it rapidly developed into a widespread and much more general contestation. Over the next two months millions of people took part in demonstrations, universities and high schools were occupied, public buildings were invaded, train stations and freeways were blockaded, and thousands of people were arrested. A compromise offered by President Chirac on March 31 was rejected by just about everyone. On April 10 the government backed down and canceled the CPE.

The American media reacted even more cluelessly than usual, solemnly scolding French youth for "resisting progress" and "modernization", i.e. for not realizing that a "healthy economy" requires us to return to the dog-eat-dog "free market" conditions of the nineteenth century. Behind the commentators' grumblings one senses their uneasy awareness that America's supposedly free-market system is hardly a model of success, and that the United States lags behind France and many other countries when it comes to health care, employment security and other social protections.

But in France as elsewhere those protections have been eroding in recent years, as the owners of society chip away at the reforms they were forced to accept during the last century (social security, unemployment insurance, labor regulations, and other social-democratic or New Deal-type programs). . . .

[long section comparing and contrasting this revolt with May '68 . . .followed by the conclusion below]

It was one of those rare moments when qualitative change really becomes possible; when everything is up in the air and the usual presumptions no longer apply; when people are shaken out of their habitual, spectacle-induced stupor and get a glimpse of real life, life as it could be if we weren't stuck in such an absurd social system. One breakthrough leads to another, and another, and yet another. While it's happening, the participants can hardly believe what they used to put up with in "the old days." Once it's over and they sink back into the "normal" state of mind, they can hardly believe what they dared to do during that magical interlude.

It doesn't last very long -- a few hours, a few days, a few weeks at most. Threatened with destruction, the ruling order brings all its forces into play, not only its obvious forces of physical repression, but also its vast arsenal of more subtle methods for confusing the issues, for diverting and dividing and coopting the opposition. Under such pressure, a revolt cannot stand still. Its only hope is to keep spreading and innovating. The only way to defend it is to extend it.

But even if the present movement goes no further than it has, it has already achieved two victories. The first is its success in forcing the government to back down. The second, far greater one is the experience of the movement itself. Its very existence is a refutation of the snide "conventional wisdom" that has prevailed for so long: "Revolution is obsolete. There is no alternative to the reigning system. There is nothing we can do except humbly beg for a few reforms. Don't be too radical or you'll alienate the general public." The uprising in France has shattered those myths. In the space of a few weeks a whole generation has been politicized. The participants will never again be quite the same, and their creativity and their audacity will be an inspiration to people around the world for years to come.

{whole essay at link above}

Halliburton Solves Global Warming

2006-05-24T16:44:00.000+08:00

SurvivaBalls save managers from abrupt climate change

An advanced new technology will keep corporate managers safe even
when climate change makes life as we know it impossible.

"The SurvivaBall is designed to protect the corporate manager no
matter what Mother Nature throws his or her way," said Fred Wolf, a
Halliburton representative who spoke today at the Catastrophic Loss
conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida.
"This technology is the only rational response to abrupt climate
change," he said to an attentive and appreciative audience.

Most scientists believe global warming is certain to cause an
accelerating onslaught of hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes,
etc. and that a world-destroying disaster is increasingly possible.
For example, Arctic melt has slowed the Gulf Stream by 30% in just
the last decade; if the Gulf Stream stops, Europe will suddenly
become just as cold as Alaska. Global heat and flooding events are
also increasingly possible.

In order to head off such catastrophic scenarios, scientists agree we
must reduce our carbon emissions by 70% within the next few years.
Doing that would seriously undermine corporate profits, however, and so
a more forward-thinking solution is needed.

At today's conference, Wolf and a colleague demonstrated three
SurvivaBall mockups, and described how the units will sustainably
protect managers from natural or cultural disturbances of any
intensity or duration. The devices - looking like huge inflatable
orbs - will include sophisticated communications systems, nutrient
gathering capacities, onboard medical facilities, and a daunting
defense infrastructure to ensure that the corporate mission will not
go unfulfilled even when most human life is rendered impossible by
catastrophes or the consequent epidemics and armed conflicts.

"It's essentially a gated community for one," said Wolf. . . .

{article continues at link above...}
--For those of you loyal readers who've been paying attention, yes The Yes Men are at it again.

Election Fraud & Propaganda

2006-05-23T12:00:00.000+08:00

Yet another measurement of Fox News propaganda effectiveness and of American disinformation campaigns.

{excerpt}
A recent OpEdNews/Zogby People's poll (http://tinyurl.com/hgkgl) of Pennsylvania residents, found that �39% said that the 2004 election was stolen. 54% said it was legitimate. But let�s look at the demographics on this question. Of the people who watch Fox news as their primary source of TV news, one half of one percent believe it was stolen and 99% believe it was legitimate. Among people who watched ANY other news source but FOX, more felt the election was stolen than legitimate. The numbers varied dramatically.�. . .

{continues at link above -- frightening details of extensive security lapses in electronic voting system}

This is not a blog.

2006-05-22T09:56:00.000+08:00

Surrealism old and new --

"This is not a pipe" by Magritte.

"This is not a president" by Ted Rall, 2006.

Rumsfeld Lives in Notorious Home

2006-05-17T20:00:00.000+08:00

Heavily scarred back of an American slave. Slavery & sadistic torture in North America existed for 350 years.

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense in the G.W. Bush administration. His vacation house was previously owned by a slaveholding family made infamous by a classic of American letters from 1845: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass, mid-19th century American author of that ex-slave autobiography, and lifelong activist and orator for social equality. His autobiography details the street addresses and persons who beat him during his slave years. He was beaten at least 25 times in the house now owned by Rumsfeld.*

This uncanny fact strikes me as a revealing non-coincidence. Some will complain about my tortured logic, nevertheless this is a logic of torture.

*According to Harper's Index: "Minimum number of times that Frederick Douglass was beaten in what is now Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home: 25."

Thoreau Reincarnated as English Major

2006-05-16T16:04:00.000+08:00

{excerpt from a commencement speech}
I thought of these things with the tools with which we English majors graduate into the world - not the tools that enable you to splice genes, cantilever bridges, or make piles of money, but those that enable you to analyze, to see patterns, to acquire a personal philosophy rather than a jumble of unexamined, hand-me-down notions; those that enable you not to make a living but maybe to live. This least utilitarian of educations prepares you to make sense of the world and maybe to make meaning; for one way to describe the great struggle of our time is as the endeavor to become a producer of meanings rather than a consumer of them - in an age when meaning as advertising and marketing, as others' definitions of pleasure and terror, is daily forced down our throats.

To make meaning, to change the world, or just to read it thoughtfully (which can itself be insurrectionary) . . . And never has our world been so overloaded, so rapidly changing, and so full of surprises that require us to change our minds, rethink possibilities, and then do so again; never has it required such careful reading. In my own case, the kind of critical reading I first learned to do with books, then with works of art, turned out to be transferable to national parks, atomic bombs, revolutions, marches, the act of walking - a skill transferred not only to feed my writing but my larger path through the world.

Books themselves sometimes change the world directly: you can talk about nonfiction like Diderot's Encyclopedia, about the Communist Manifesto, The Origin of Species, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, about an essay that mattered a great deal only a very long time after it was written, Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," and about a book in that Thoreauvian vein whose practical impact we might actually be able to measure.

In 1975, Edward Abbey published his novel about a charming bunch of what the Department of Homeland Security would now call domestic terrorists, The Monkey Wrench Gang. . . .
{Rebecca Solnit's commencement address at Berkeley continues at the link above...}

Da Vinci Dress Code

2006-05-13T15:13:00.000+08:00

This man (on the left wearing a fabulous vintage chiffon-lined Dior gold lamé gown over a silk Vera Wang empire waist tulle cocktail dress, accessorized with a 3-foot beaded peaked House of Whoville hat, and the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in the Wizard of Oz) is worried that The Da Vinci Code might make the Roman Catholic Church look foolish.

--from the Betty Bowers Best Christian website, marvelously continued at link above... and merci beaucoup to Philippe for spotting this one!

FBI still harrassing artist

2006-05-11T01:20:00.000+08:00

Best Bush Moment

2006-05-10T15:45:00.000+08:00

"Analysts found that President George W. Bush had claimed exemption from 750 laws, and Bush said that the best moment of his presidency was when he caught a seven-and-a-half-pound perch."
--from Harper's Weekly

see also:
http://www.willthomas.net/911/Bush/

Asian Glaciers Turn to Sand

2006-05-09T18:08:00.000+08:00

{excerpt . . .}

Ice-capped roof of world turns to desert
Scientists warn of ecological catastrophe across Asia as glaciers melt and continent's great rivers dry up
By Geoffrey Lean

Global warming is rapidly melting the ice-bound roof of the world, and turning it into desert, leading scientists have revealed.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences - the country's top scientific body - has announced that the glaciers of the Tibetan plateau are vanishing so fast that they will be reduced by 50 per cent every decade. Each year enough water permanently melts from them to fill the entire Yellow River.

They added that the vast environmental changes brought about by the process will increase droughts and sandstorms over the rest of the country, and devastate many of the world's greatest rivers, in what experts warn will be an "ecological catastrophe".

The plateau, says the academy, has a staggering 46,298 glaciers, covering almost 60,000 square miles. At an average height of 13,000 feet above sea level, they make up the largest area of ice outside the polar regions, nearly a sixth of the world's total.

The glaciers have been receding over the past four decades, as the world has gradually warmed up, but the process has now accelerated alarmingly.
. . . .

Sandstorms, blowing in from the degraded land, are already plaguing the country. So far this year, 13 of them have hit northern China, including Beijing. Three weeks ago one storm swept across an eighth of the vast country and even reached Korea and Japan. On the way, it dumped a mind-boggling 336,000 tons of dust on the capital, causing dangerous air pollution. . . .

{article continues at link above...}

American Immigrants in Mexico

2006-05-01T12:58:00.000+08:00

Mexico just solved the immigration clash in one legislative stroke.
They legalized most drugs for personal recreational use. People can possess small amounts of just about whatever drug you can name, with the exception of peyote which is now allowed in huge quantities (see link above for more detail).

What's the connection? Hardworking, ambitious, immigrant families are moving to America to find jobs doing the work that slacker Americans don't want to do for lower pay. In a reciprocal and symmetrical arrangement, now those slacker Americans can legally get high by slumming around in Mexico. We could begin to measure the cross-border exchange as the laborers move north and the recreational users move south. A global recirculation of of the global division of leisure.

The new global cross-migration in social classes. Drugs cannot legally be shipped over international borders, but now their users can be moved.

And, no, I am not high while writing this sobering view.

Radical Greens Influence Mainstream

2006-04-30T01:00:00.000+08:00

From the "we were right all along department"

{excerpt...}

New research shows how radical activists have triggered innovations that are helping move the UK in a more sustainable direction. Long seen as the bane of rational economic progress, these devotees to a greener lifestyle turn out to have been a key source of ideas that have seeded new industries in areas such as food, housing and energy. Rather than dismissing activists as hopelessly idealistic, mainstream business and policy should recognise how they create a diversity of options for sustainability, and improve their own capacities to learn from them.
The study, carried out at the University of Sussex. . ., clearly shows the value of "green niche" initiatives in influencing mainstream activities. The study examined three radical niches; wind energy, organic food and eco-housing. In each case, the activists' original ideas went far beyond what actually became mainstream. Yet the role of the niche ideas in providing solutions for 'newly' perceived problems within the mainstream should not be under-estimated.

The report's author, Dr Adrian Smith, said: 'Activists often struggle to keep projects going and fail to produce the radical transformations they originally envisaged. This lack of breakthrough inclines them (and others) to under-estimate the effect of their ideas. But we found that although their influence is more subtle and beyond their control, it is still hugely significant in many cases'.

In the case of wind power, activists kept the idea of wind power alive during its wilderness years in the 1970s and 1980s when it was ignored or actively opposed by those involved in mainstream power provision. The idealists envisaged small-scale off-grid autonomous systems that were community owned. The mainstream appropriation of wind power has resulted in large wind farms connected both to the grid and to the commercial market.

In food production, niche thinking demanded sustainable local food economies based around organic farming. These ideas were transformed into an organic food industry, when mainstream farmers, food processors, and large retailers perceived the potential commercial advantage of going green, but not to the extent envisaged by activists in the organic movement.

Niche ideas in housing around environmentally friendly, reclaimable materials, autonomous buildings and self-build in small communities, have also had an influence. Here policy and regulatory pressures have directed mainstream builders towards green building ideas pioneered by activists. . . .

On Gullible Americans

2006-04-27T10:00:00.000+08:00

America's Blinders
By Howard Zinn
The Progressive

{excerpt...}

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?
. . . .
Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn't talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like "national interest," "national security," and "national defense" as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that - not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor - is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there - the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be "checks and balances" - do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

The deeply ingrained belief - no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general - that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to "pledge allegiance" (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with "liberty and justice for all."

{whole essay at link above}

Designing Green Cities

2006-04-26T10:00:00.000+08:00

Link above takes you to an intro for "The Next Green Revolution" issue of Wired, where the emphasis is on "present-day solutions to present-day problems" that must engage the cooperation of engineers, designers, architects, entrepreneurs, consumers, business, education, media . . . the whole ball of wax.

Three More

2006-04-22T13:33:00.000+08:00

"If the linguistic behavior blocks conceptual development, if it militates against abstraction and mediation, if it surrenders to the immediate facts, it repels recognition of the factors behind the facts, and thus repels recognition of the facts, and of their historical content. In and for the society, this organization of functional discourse is of vital importance; it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason."

--Marcuse One-dimensional Man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society.

--------------------------

"History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it."

"The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption."

--Adorno Minima moralia: Reflections from A Damaged Life

---------------------------

Popular assumptions, due to what they conceal, work for the dominant organization of life. One such assumption is the notion that language is not dialectical, thereby implying that all use of dialectics should be rejected. But in fact nothing is more clearly subject to dialectics than language, since it is a living reality. Thus, every critique of the old world has been made in the language of that world, yet directed against it and therefore automatically in a different language. Every revolutionary theory has had to invent its own terms, to destroy the dominant sense of other terms and establish new meanings in the “world of meanings” corresponding to the new embryonic reality needing to be liberated from the dominant trash heap. The same reasons that prevent our adversaries (the masters of the Dictionary) from definitively fixing language, today enable us to assert alternative positions that negate existing meanings. But we already know that these same reasons also prevent us from proclaiming any definitive certitudes. A definition is always open, never definitive. Ours have a historical value, they are applicable during a specific period, linked to a specific historical practice. . . .

The decline of radical thought considerably increases the power of words, the words of power. Power creates nothing, it coopts. Words forged by revolutionary criticism are like partisans’ weapons: abandoned on the battlefield, they fall into the hands of the counterrevolution and like prisoners of war are subjected to forced labor. Our most direct enemies are the proponents and established functionaries of false critique. The divorce between theory and practice provides the central basis for cooption, for the petrification of revolutionary theory into ideology, which transforms real practical demands (for whose realization the premonitory signs are already appearing in the present society) into systems of ideas, into demands of reason. The ideologues of every variety, the watchdogs of the reigning spectacle, carry out this task, emptying the content from most corrosive concepts and putting them back into circulation in the service of maintaining alienation: dadaism in reverse. They become advertising slogans (see the recent Club Med prospectus). Concepts of radical critique suffer the same fate as the proletariat: they are deprived of their history, cut off from their roots. They become grist for power’s thinking machines.

Our project of liberating words is historically comparable to the Encyclopédiste enterprise. The Enlightenment’s language of “tearing apart” (to continue the Hegelian image) lacked the conscious historical dimension; it was a real critique of the decrepit feudal world, but it had no idea of what would emerge from it (none of the Encyclopédistes were republicans). It was, rather, an expression of the bourgeois thinkers’ own internal tearing apart. Our language aims first of all at a practice that tears the world apart, beginning with tearing apart the veils that cloak it. Whereas the Encyclopédistes sought a quantitative enumeration, the enthusiastic description of a world of objects in which the bourgeoisie and the commodity were already victorious, our dictionary will express the qualitative, the possible but still absent victory, the repressed of modern history (the proletariat) and the return of the repressed. We propose the real liberation of language because we propose to put it into a practice free of all constraints. We reject any authority, linguistic or otherwise: only real life allows a meaning and only praxis verifies it. Debates over the reality or unreality of the meaning of a word, isolated from practice, are purely academic. We place our dictionary in that libertarian region which is still beyond the reach of power, but which is its only possible global successor.

--Mustapha Khayati "Captive Words: Preface to a Situationist Dictionary"

At the Stillpoint of Emergency

2006-04-20T18:20:00.000+08:00

Two Theses on History
By Walter Benjamin

VIII [The real state of emergency]
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is actually the rule. We must attain to a concept of history which corresponds to this. For then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency, thereby improving our position in the struggle against fascism. The reason that fascism stands a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, treat it as a historical norm. The surprise that the things we are experiencing in the [21st] century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. This is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it is the knowledge that the conception of history [historicism] on which it rests is useless.

XVII [Historical Materialism vs. Bourgeois Historicism]
Historicism inevitably culminates in Universal History. Nowhere else does the materialist writing of history distance itself from historicism more clearly in methods. Universal historicism has no theoretical framework. Its method is merely additive: it marshals a mass of facts, in order to fill up a homogenous and empty time. In contrast, historical materialism for its part is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the stream of thoughts but also their still-point [Stillstellung]. Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation
overflowing with tensions, there it yields the same kind of shock by which it crystallizes itself into a monad [or microcosm]. Historical materialism approaches any historical object only when beholding it as such a monad. In this unit, it recognizes the sign of a messianic still-point of history, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past. We perceive this in order to explode a specific epoch out of the homogenous course of history, a specific life out of its epoch, or a specific work out of its oeuvre. The result of the method is this: that the life-work is preserved and transcended within the work, just as the epoch is within the lifework, and the entire course of history is within the epoch. . . .

Hikmet on Living

2006-04-20T16:58:00.000+08:00

This earth will grow cold, a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet --

I mean this, our great earth.

This earth will grow cold one day.
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even

but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space.

You must grieve for this right now
-- you have to feel this sorrow now --

for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived"...
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
From "On Living" by Nâzým Hikmet, written in prison February 1948,
translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

Neil Young Album Impeaches Bush

2006-04-19T16:58:00.000+08:00

Alicia's blog, Last Left Turn Before Hooterville reports that she was invited to sing in a stellar choir on a new album by Neil Young, a good ole fashioned protest album that calls for the impeachment of Bush II. Her blog was picked up by the mass media where the story became News. This news was then treated as hateful treason by the usual Rightwing nutjobs.

Here's an excerpt:

On Wednesday, I was at work when I got a call for a Neil Young session the next day. Needless to say, I was excited about it - Neil Young is one of my musical heroes. When my husband and I got to Capitol, we found 98 other singers, a collection of L.A.'s finest. All I knew was that we were singing on a new Neil Young record, but when the lyrics we were supposed to sing flashed on the giant screen, a roar went up from the choir. I'm not going to give the whole thing away, but the first line of one of the songs was "Let's impeach the President for lyin'!" Turns out the whole thing is a classic beautiful protest record. The session was like being at a 12-hour peace rally. Every time new lyrics would come up on the screen, there were cheers, tears and applause. . . .

Neil said it should be out in 6 to 8 weeks. I hope all of you get a chance to hear it.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Alicia's blog is linked above.

Theocons and Theocrats

2006-04-18T17:16:00.000+08:00

In the May 1st issue of The Nation, the author of a book on American Theocracy explains why it is a genuine problem for democracy today.

Here's how the essay begins:
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Is theocracy in the United States (1) a legitimate fear, as some liberals argue; (2) a joke, given the nation's rising secular population and moral laxity; (3) a worrisome bias of major GOP constituencies and pressure groups; or (4) all of the above? The last, I would argue.

The characteristics are not inconsistent. No large nation -- no leading world power -- could ever resemble theocracies like John Calvin's Geneva, Puritan Massachusetts or early Mormon Utah. These were all small polities produced by unusual migrations of true believers.

As a great power, a large heterogeneous nation like the United States goes about as far in a theocratic direction as it can when it meets the unfortunate criteria on display in George W. Bush's Washington: an elected leader who believes himself in some way to be speaking for God; a ruling party that represents religious true believers and seeks to mobilize the nation's churches; the conviction of many rank-and-file Republicans that government should be guided by religion and religious leaders; and White House implementation of domestic and international political agendas that seem to be driven by religious motivations and biblical worldviews.

As several chapters in American Theocracy make clear, this kind of religious excess has been a problem -- indeed, a repeating Achilles' heel -- of leading powers from late-stage Rome (historian Gibbon thus explained Roman decline and fall) to the militant Catholicism of Habsburg Spain and most recently the evangelical and moral imperialist Britain that saw 1914 as something of an Armageddon against the German Kaiser's Antichrist and wound up in 1917-18 crusading in the Middle East to liberate Jerusalem. But although this facet of historical decline constitutes a major caution regarding the future of the United States, this essay will concentrate on the domestic political aspects-the theocratic tendencies in the GOP and the notable "religification" of American politics across a spectrum from life and death to science and medicine to climate change and biblical creationism. . . .
~~~ ~~~ ~~~

{continues at link above}

On Sheehan's Tomb

2006-04-12T14:17:00.000+08:00

A Markerless Grave in Vacaville
By Cindy Sheehan

I am so tired of the Rovian, heartless, and ignorant smear machine attacking me and my family at every turn of my back.

The latest abomination in their scrutiny of my life is the fact that Casey has no "tombstone." As if it were anybody's business but Casey's family. I am sure every last person who has a problem with this has buried a child and they know what we are going through.
. . . .

I will tell the world why Casey has no marker yet. In the first place, does anyone who is attacking me know how Casey was brought home from Iraq? We picked him up in the United loading dock in a cardboard box and he was off-loaded into a hearse without one honor guard. We had to wait for about a half hour on a curb near the United freight area for his one escort, who rode from Dover Air Force Base in a seat, while Casey was treated as an over-sized piece of luggage. Has anybody held her other sobbing children who are sitting on a curb in San Francisco, waiting for the remains of their big brother to be carried over to the dock by a forklift?

Our so-called, illegitimate president has never attended a funeral, nor can families see the pictures of their loved ones as they are hauled like freight with flags on them from an immoral war zone. WE don't see them because Mama Bush doesn't want to "bother her pretty mind" with the images. America doesn't want to be bothered, either. We had a Casualty Officer who abandoned us when our mortuary refused to pay the cemetery and told us that the "government sent the money to the mortuary, so now it is your problem. You may have to sue the mortuary." Our government discards and dishonors its own.

My Casey wasn't always a soldier. He was a son and brother whose murder has left an aching hole in our lives worse than an amputation. Sooner or later, amputations heal and quit throbbing; this hole never will, or can, heal.

For the first year after Casey was killed, I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want to place a TOMBstone on my son's grave. I didn't want one more marble proof that my son was dead. I couldn't even call where he was buried a "cemetery," I had to call it "Casey's Park." I placed fresh flowers in the cup every week and journaled there almost on a daily basis, and often laid on it and fell asleep and dreamed of my needlessly killed son. Have any of these people who claim that I am pissing on my son's grave even visited him? Have they visited the grave of any soldier needlessly or senselessly killed in George's war of choice for oil and profit? Have they sobbed uncontrollably for my first born who shouldn't even need a gravestone? No, all they want to do is attack a mother who wants to prevent other people from having to bury their own child. They want to perpetuate a war that has already killed many thousands of our fellow human beings for absolutely nothing.

Casey's shell is buried in Vacaville, California, not his spirit. He lives with me and he is constantly with me as I travel the world so other families, Iraqi or American, do not have to bury their children. Casey lives in the hearts of everyone who wants peace and works for peace. He will never truly die.

There are many people whom the Bush regime has killed, either directly or indirectly, by their murderous policies: there are people buried under rubble of Iraq and who were buried under the rubble of the World Trade Towers, and if their families were lucky they could find small parts to bury, before their remains were carted away in the enormous trucks and barges; there are people still unaccounted-for in the swamps of New Orleans and in refrigerated trucks in Mississippi that will never even have graves, let alone gravestones. The Bush regime is good for business, all right; especially the funeral business.

I know these people are searching for proof that I am a horrible person, and it must be evidence that I didn't love Casey if he doesn't have a marker. I know that they can't support a criminal regime that is slipping into fascism, so they have to attack a mom for the "crime" of being broken-hearted and trying to save lives.

What they don't know is that they can't stop me from trying to save lives. No matter what they cook up next.

It is too important. No more needless gravestones. No more wasted lives.

American Intelligence as Oxymoron

2006-04-12T14:12:00.000+08:00

Polls found that while only 36 percent of Americans worry a great deal about global warming, 90 percent were prepared to fight its effects by caulking. Many scientists said that it was too late to stop climate change and that the earth was "past the point of no return." "We are looking for the devil," said a geochemist, "and we have found ourselves."
--from Harper's Weekly

Best Countries in the World, 2005.

2006-04-10T16:24:00.000+08:00

Most and Least Livable Countries: UN Human Development Index, 2005

The Human Development Index (HDI), published annually by the UN, ranks nations according to their citizens' quality of life rather than strictly by a nation's traditional economic figures. The criteria for calculating rankings include life expectancy, educational attainment, and adjusted real income. The 2005 index is based on 2003 figures.
“Most Livable” Countries, 2005

 
1. Norway           11. Japan 
2. Iceland          12. Netherlands  
3. Australia        13. Finland 
4. Luxembourg       14. Denmark  
5. Canada           15. United Kingdom 
6. Sweden           16. France 
7. Switzerland      17. Austria 
8. Ireland          18. Italy  
9. Belgium          19. New Zealand  
10. United States   20. Germany

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Upshot: Ireland & Iceland are more advanced than the US now.
In related news, El Salvador (!?!) has been offered as a model for where the USA is heading under the Christian regime in power. See: Pro-Life Nation.

Chicken Soup For The Chicken Hawk

2006-04-08T00:21:00.000+08:00

From the warmongers-r-us department, a roll call of key Chicken Hawks and the promotions they now enjoy, over at ThinkProgress.org:

The Architects of War: Where Are They Now?
Three years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the signs of the Bush administration’s mismanagement are glaring:

* No nuclear weapons
* No WMD
* No collaborative relationship with al Qaeda
* International terrorism on the rise
* Botched reconstruction
* Anarchic civil war
* No independent Iraqi army
* No Iraqi government
* $300 billion spent and counting
* More than 2,300 U.S. troops dead
* An estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, as of October 2004

President Bush has not fired any of the architects of the Iraq War. In fact, a review of the key planners of the conflict reveals that they have been rewarded – not blamed – for their incompetence.

Check out the full report HERE.
See also a very informative list of other promoted Chicken Hawks at Chicken Soup For The Chicken Hawk

Pacific Ocean Unwell

2006-04-05T12:00:00.000+08:00

Research fresh off a boat that docked Thursday in Alaska reveals some frightening changes taking place in the Pacific Ocean.

As humans are pumping out more carbon dioxide that is helping to warm the planet, the ocean has been doing yeoman's work to lessen the effects - but it's taking a toll.

Over time, the changes could have an impact that ripples through the food chain, from microscopic plants that can't grow right to salmon and whales unable to find enough to eat.

The Pacific is getting warmer and more acidic, while the amount of oxygen and the building blocks for coral and some kinds of plankton are decreasing, according to initial results from scientists with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, the University of Washington and elsewhere. . . .

{article continues at link above}

Water, water everywhere

2006-03-28T23:24:00.000+08:00

And not a drop to drink.

"The United Nations celebrated World Water Day by noting that 40 percent of the world's population lacked basic sanitation, and it was reported that the World Bank's plan to privatize water supplies in impoverished nations had largely failed. Of the $25 billion invested in clean water, only 1 percent had reached sub-Saharan Africa, and much of the money had gone to providing clean water to the wealthy. ..."

--from Harper's Weekly March 28, 2006

Eco-terrorism Campaign

2006-03-27T11:11:00.000+08:00

Karen Pickett | The Green Scare

{excerpts}
On January 20th, eleven people were indicted in Oregon by a grand jury investigating acts of sabotage linked to the underground Earth Liberation Front (ELF). The actions, going back nearly a decade, include a number of arsons - with such targets as a ski resort expansion into endangered lynx habitat and a facility for rounding up wild horses for dog food. There were no injuries in any of the actions, but the FBI claims over $25 million in damage to property.

Some of those indicted had been arrested in December, including one person who died in custody in Arizona. Shock waves have been reverberating through the environmental activist community, and the situation is still unfolding. Two more people were arrested in Olympia, Washington, on February 23, and the day before, outspoken Native American and animal rights activist Rod Coronado was arrested in Tucson, Arizona, on charges sent down by a grand jury in San Diego. In addition, there is a grand jury investigating Animal Liberation Front (ALF) activities in San Francisco.

But those being rounded up are not only being charged with crimes associated with the acts the FBI and grand juries allege - they are also being labeled as terrorists. . . . .

The agenda is criminalization of dissent, long within the purview of the FBI, but the less recognized agenda is also protection of wealth and private property. It seems ALEC would put damage to property on par with threat or actual harm to life. Nowhere, in the FBI's pronouncements of how heinous these acts they call terrorism are, is a body count or even a litany of injuries. The "injury" is defined in millions of dollars to corporations who are in the business of building multi-million dollar developments on endangered species habitat.

If property destruction is put on par with threat to life, the question must be asked whether the next step will be increased prosecution for the revered tradition of non-violent civil disobedience or vilification of the successful market campaigns carried out by the likes of Rainforest Action Network, because after all, those activities, as well as boycotts and strikes, put a dent in the bottom line of profit margin. In fact, attacks disguised as IRS investigations and other back door strategies are already on the rise against organizations that carry out civil disobedience and market campaigns.

"Eco-terrorism," a term trumpeted in the media, was invented in the early 1990s by public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, in the employ of corporations in the extractive industries. It was then put into popular use by right-wing ideologues like Ron Arnold, long known as a vehement anti-environmentalist whose self-professed goal is to destroy the environmental movement.

Property destruction is sabotage, not terrorism. Call it what it is, and then debate appropriate prosecution and penalties.

Oglala Sioux Tribe Rescues White Women

2006-03-24T11:53:00.000+08:00

"When Governor Mike Rounds signed HB 1215 into law it effectively banned all abortions in the state with the exception that it did allow saving the mother’s life. There were, however, no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. His actions, and the comments of State Senators like Bill Napoli of Rapid City, SD, set of a maelstrom of protests within the state.
Napoli suggested that if it was a case of “simple rape,” there should be no thoughts of ending a pregnancy. Letters by the hundreds appeared in local newspapers, mostly written by women, challenging Napoli’s description of rape as “simple.” He has yet to explain satisfactorily what he meant by “simple rape.”

The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women.

“To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,” she said to me last week. “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.”

Strong words from a very strong lady. I hope Ms. Fire Thunder challenges Gov. Rounds and the state legislators on this law that is an affront to all independent women."

Peasant Commons

2006-03-23T19:54:00.000+08:00

Peasants Say No to ‘Selling' Traditional Knowledge
by Mario Osava

CURITIBA, Brazil, Mar 21 (IPS) - The international small farmers' and peasant movement Via Campesina is opposed to any payment for traditional knowledge, one of the formats proposed for sharing the benefits derived from biodiversity.

{...excerpt...}
Sharing the profits arising from appropriating something that is "a product of collective accumulation, at the service of all people," so that "knowledge becomes merchandise that can be traded," is the beginning of exploitation and privatisation, the activist argued. This is in conflict with the "long-term vision" of the peasant movement, which is aimed at "preserving goods in common ownership," he added.

An example of the harm that this can bring about happened in Canada in the past, when industry bargained with indigenous peoples, offering them benefits in return for land and knowledge, and "they lost everything," Pederson said. . . .

{continues at link above, includes Greenpeace report about ocean decline in biodiversity (AKA: "life") . . .}

Rose Colored Iraq

2006-03-19T13:58:00.000+08:00

This is your computer on LSD

2006-03-19T12:00:00.000+08:00

By ANDREW LEONARD The New York Times

Book Review of WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry By John Markoff

Engineers can be so cute. In the early 1960's, Myron
Stolaroff, an employee of the tape recorder
manufacturer Ampex, decided to prove the value of
consuming LSD. So he set up the International
Foundation for Advanced Study and went about his
project in classic methodical fashion.

Test subjects - almost all engineers - were given a
series of doses under constant observation and
expected to take careful notes on their own
experience. A survey of the first 153 volunteers
revealed that "83 percent of those who had taken LSD
found that they had lasting benefits from the
experience." (Other results: increase in ability to
love, 78 percent; increased self-esteem, 71 percent.)
Such precision might seem antithetical to the fuzzy
let-it-all-hang-outness of the psychedelic experience.
But John Markoff, a senior writer for The New York
Times who covers technology, makes a convincing case
that for the swarming ubergeeks assembling in the San
Francisco Bay Area in the 1960's, approaching drugs as
they might any other potentially helpful tool or
device - from a soldering iron to a computer chip -
was only natural. The goals were broad in the 60's:
the world would be remade, the natural order of things
reconfigured, human potential amplified to infinity.
Anything that could help was to be cherished, studied
and improved.

It is no accident, then, that the same patch of land
on the peninsula south of San Francisco that gave
birth to the Grateful Dead was also the site of
groundbreaking research leading the way to the
personal computer. That the two cultural impulses were
linked - positively - is a provocative thesis.

Revisionist histories of the 60's often make an
attempt to separate the "excess" of the era from the
politics. In this view, all those acid-gobbling,
pot-smoking, tie-dyed renegades were a distraction
from the real work of stopping the Vietnam War and
achieving social justice. But Mr. Markoff makes a
surprisingly sympathetic case that it was all of a
piece: the drugs, the antiauthoritarianism, the
messianic belief that computing power should be spread
throughout the land.

"It is not a coincidence," he writes, "that, during
the 60's and early 70's, at the height of the protest
against the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement
and widespread experimentation with psychedelic drugs,
personal computing emerged from a handful of
government- and corporate-funded laboratories, as well
as from the work of a small group of hobbyists who
were desperate to get their hands on computers they
could personally control and decide to what uses they
should be put."

Judging by the record presented in "What the Dormouse
Said," it is indisputable that many of the engineers
and programmers who contributed to the birth of
personal computing were fans of LSD, draft resisters,
commune sympathizers and, to put it bluntly,
long-haired hippie freaks.

This makes entertaining reading. Many accounts of the
birth of personal computing have been written, but
this is the first close look at the drug habits of the
earliest pioneers. "What the Dormouse Said" may not
reach the level of the classics of computing history,
Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" and Steven
Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution."
But there is still plenty of fun between its covers.

A central character - and one of the early volunteers
at Stolaroff's foundation - is Douglas Engelbart, a
man worthy of his own book. His team at the Augmented
Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford
Research Institute was the first to demonstrate the
potential of the computing future. The research
demonstration that he conducted for a packed
auditorium in San Francisco in 1968 is still talked
about in Silicon Valley with the reverence of those
who might have witnessed Jehovah handing Moses the Ten
Commandments. The mouse, man! Engelbart gave us the
mouse! But Mr. Engelbart's story is not a happy one.
He saw further ahead than most, but had a difficult
time articulating his vision. He became heavily
involved with Werner Erhard's human potential
movement, EST, and his laboratory ultimately ended up
losing both its way and its government financing. Many
of his researchers went on to the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center, where the first personal computer,
the famous Alto, was invented, while he lapsed into
semi-obscurity. As a metaphor for the 60's, which
exploded with promise and ended in disarray, he's just
about perfect.

Looking back at the 60's from the jaundiced
perspective of the early 21st century, it's easy to
wonder what was really accomplished, outside of the
enduring split of the nation into two irreconcilable
ideological camps. Sure, there was the civil rights
campaign, women's liberation, environmentalism and a
movement that eventually brought a war to heel, but
the era is as likely to be ridiculed in modern memory
as to be revered. But what happens if we add the birth
of personal computing to the counterculture's list of
achievements? Does that change the equation?

The answer depends on how one rates the personal
computer as consciousness-enhancing device. Remember,
after all, what the dormouse did say, in the
stentorian full-throttle voice of Jefferson Airplane's
Grace Slick: "Feed your head!"

By choosing that as his title, Mr. Markoff makes clear
his belief that computers, like psychedelic drugs, are
tools for mind expansion, for revelation and personal
discovery. And to anyone who has experienced a
drug-induced epiphany, there may indeed be a cosmic
hyperlink there: fire up your laptop, connect
wirelessly to the Internet, search for your dreams
with Google: the power and the glory of the computing
universe that exists now was a sci-fi fantasy not very
long ago, and yes, it does pulsate with a
destabilizing, revelatory psychic power. Cool!

But wasn't the goal of those 60's experimenters to
make the world a better place? One has to wonder - and
this is a question Mr. Markoff doesn't really address
- whether the personal computer achieved that goal. Or
has it only allowed all of us, heroes and villains
alike, to be more productive as the world stays
exactly the same?

Sterling: Decide without fear.

2006-03-18T12:20:00.000+08:00

Bruce Sterling on the edge between the present and the future:

"When you actually ignore reality for years on end, the payback is a bitch brother! ... We're seeing just frantic collisions of fundamentalist delusion with objective reality... We're on a kind of slider bar between the unthinkable and the unimaginable now, bteween the grim meathook future and the bright green future. There are ways out of this situation; there are actual ways to move the slider bar from one side to the other, except that we haven't invented the words for them yet."

Here's a summary of Sterling's speech from WorldChanging
The challenge, Bruce says, is that the worst people in the world -- genocidal ethnic mafiosos, fundamentalist fanatics, Washington lobbyists -- are running the show, American government has become the new Soviet Union (ossified, corrupt and widely perceived as illigitimate by the rest of the planet) and things are not good in much of the world. That said, if you look honestly at the world, you see a new story emerging, with millions of smart, dedicated people locked in a struggle to steer us towards a better future using every tool in their power, and that "that's a big story!" Finally, he reminds those of us who are part of that story of the motto of the old Soviet-era Eastern European dissidents: "Make no decision out of fear."

Top 14 Corporations of Evil

2006-03-15T11:39:00.000+08:00

Global Exchange : "Most Wanted" Corporate Human Rights Violators of 2005 . . . and who is working to stop them also.

Surveillance, Infiltration, and Harassment of Environmentalists

2006-03-12T23:51:00.000+08:00

'Surveillance, Infiltration, and Harassment of Environmental Organizations': "Hope Marston, of the Lane County Bill of Rights Defense Committee, spoke on the panel on 'Surveillance, Infiltration, and Harassment of Environmental Organizations' at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (pielc.org) held March 2-5, 2006, in Eugene, Oregon.

We have just heard a litany of horrible things that we are all dealing with all the time now and we've been dealing with for the last four years, and I don't know how many of you feel overwhelmed with it, but I do every day. I feel overwhelmed with all that's happening. The executive branch is now so far out of control that I'm really not sure how long it is going to take before we can restore our liberties, our Bill of Rights and our fundamental freedoms. The house cleaning that must take place, the dismantling of the repressive system that has now permeated our society, will be enormous."

{continues at link above...}

Separation of Oil & State

2006-03-09T11:23:00.000+08:00

Price of Oil: Oil & State

How much $$ did your U.S. Congressional Representative get from big oil corporations? Go to the link above and enter your zip code for an instant accounting.

Cindy Sheehan Arrested

2006-03-08T11:59:00.000+08:00

Cindy Sheehan & Medea Benjamin ArrestedA Code Pink peaceful gathering at the UN to present my petition was smashed by the order "from higher up the chain" to arrest the organizers. See link above for photos, etc.

Comparative Impeachments

2006-03-07T16:40:00.000+08:00

Twice as many Americans now favor the impeachment of Bush than the number who favored the impeachment of Clinton. Irony: Congress actually tried to impeach Clinton, but they won't consider the more serious case against Bush.

The Power of Negative Thinking

2006-03-03T18:08:00.000+08:00

The Power of Negative Thinking
by Robert Chasse

{excerpt for a Situationist classic}

...The polarization of means and ends — thought and action — into logical categories reveals a true antagonism between them in the bourgeois world. Thought is always separated from action, always hobbles after occurrence. Or else is discombobulated and deals with other. In his dirge to the bourgeois world, Spengler noted that there are two fundamental — irreconcilable — kinds of men: those who think and those who do. Malraux, another bourgeois haunted by the primacy of death, said: “Man conceives of himself but it is in no way necessary that he do so (and many don’t). The essential drama, or problem, is in the opposition between two systems of thought, one which tends to question man and life, the other to suppress all questioning by activity.”

The means elicit the emergence of the ends that realize them. The action you engage in engages you. Not to act is another form of action. Action always generates the thought, as thought generates the action. These opposites always fuse. The rest is liberalized fiction.

The radical who penetrates a group to radicalize it, who parcelizes himself, to bring some of its members up to his degree of radicalization, also enters on the level of the group. He is of them immediately. Any subsequent radicalization therefore is something other than thought, mediated by his creation of the conditions that negate that thought.

.....
{entire text at link above}

Ocean Scare

2006-03-02T12:16:00.000+08:00

The Fate of the Ocean

{excerpt}
. . . The 25 years I've spent at sea filming nature documentaries have provided a brief yet definitive window into these changes. Oceanic problems once encountered on a local scale have gone pandemic, and these pandemics now merge to birth new monsters. Tinkering with the atmosphere, we change the ocean's chemistry radically enough to threaten life on earth as we know it. Making tens of thousands of chemical compounds each year, we poison marine creatures who sponge up plastics and PCBs, becoming toxic waste dumps in the process. Carrying everything from nuclear waste to running shoes across the world ocean, shipping fleets spew as much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as the entire profligate United States. Protecting strawberry farmers and their pesticide methyl bromide, we guarantee that the ozone hole will persist at least until 2065, threatening the larval life of the sea. Fishing harder, faster, and more ruthlessly than ever before, we drive large predatory fish toward global extinction, even though fish is the primary source of protein for one in six people on earth. Filling, dredging, and polluting the coastal nurseries of the sea, we decimate coral reefs and kelp forests, while fostering dead zones.

I'm alarmed by what I'm seeing. Although we carry the ocean within ourselves, in our blood and in our eyes, so that we essentially see through seawater, we appear blind to its fate. Many scientists speak only to each other and studiously avoid educating the press. The media seems unwilling to report environmental news, and caters to a public stalled by sloth, fear, or greed and generally confused by science. Overall, we seem unable to recognize that the proofs so many politicians demand already exist in the form of hindsight. Written into the long history of our planet, in one form or another, is the record of what is coming our way.

"The root cause of this crisis is a failure of both perspective and governance," concludes the seminal Pew Oceans Commission's 2003 report to the nation. "We have failed to conceive of the oceans as our largest public domain, to be managed holistically for the greater public good in perpetuity." Instead, we have roiled the waters, compromising the equilibrium that allowed our species to flourish in the first place, and providing ourselves with a host of challenges that will test our clever brains and our opposable thumbs as never before. Afloat on arks of dry land, we sail toward a stormy future.
. . . .
{detailed article continues, with multiple links out to scientific sources at link above}

India Protests Bush Visit

2006-03-01T13:00:00.000+08:00

By Arundhati Roy
The Nation

On his triumphalist tour of India and Pakistan, where he hopes to wave imperiously at people he considers potential subjects, President Bush has an itinerary that's getting curiouser and curiouser.

For Bush's March 2 pit stop in New Delhi, the Indian government tried very hard to have him address our parliament. A not inconsequential number of MPs threatened to heckle him, so Plan One was hastily shelved. Plan Two was to have Bush address the masses from the ramparts of the magnificent Red Fort, where the Indian prime minister traditionally delivers his Independence Day address. But the Red Fort, surrounded as it is by the predominantly Muslim population of Old Delhi, was considered a security nightmare. So now we're into Plan Three: President George Bush speaks from Purana Qila, the Old Fort.

Ironic, isn't it, that the only safe public space for a man who has recently been so enthusiastic about India's modernity should be a crumbling medieval fort?

Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo, George Bush's audience will be a few hundred caged animals and an approved list of caged human beings, who in India go under the category of "eminent persons." They're mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.

So what's going to happen to George W. Bush? Will the gorillas cheer him on? Will the gibbons curl their lips? Will the brow-antlered deer sneer? Will the chimps make rude noises? Will the owls hoot? Will the lions yawn and the giraffes bat their beautiful eyelashes? Will the crocs recognize a kindred soul? Will the quails give thanks that Bush isn't traveling with Dick Cheney, his hunting partner with the notoriously bad aim? Will the CEOs agree?

Oh, and on March 2, Bush will be taken to visit Gandhi's memorial in Rajghat. He's by no means the only war criminal who has been invited by the Indian government to lay flowers at Rajghat. (Only recently we had the Burmese dictator General Than Shwe, no shrinking violet himself.) But when Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.

We really would prefer that he didn't.

It is not in our power to stop Bush's visit. It is in our power to protest it, and we will. The government, the police and the corporate press will do everything they can to minimize the extent of our outrage. Nothing the happy newspapers say can change the fact that all over India, from the biggest cities to the smallest villages, in public places and private homes, George W. Bush, the President of the United States of America, world nightmare incarnate, is just not welcome.

Octavia Butler R,I.P.

2006-02-28T17:00:00.000+08:00

By GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press

SEATTLE - Octavia E. Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, has died . . . . She was 58.

Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home, said Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and employee at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle. . . . Butler's work wasn't preoccupied with robots and ray guns, Howle said, but used the genre's artistic freedom to explore race, poverty, politics, religion and human nature.

She received many awards, and in 1995 Butler was the first science fiction writer granted a "genius" award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which paid $295,000 over five years.

Butler described herself as a happy hermit, and never married.

"Mostly she just loved sitting down and writing," Seattle-based science fiction writer Greg Bear said. "For being a black female growing up in Los Angeles in the '60s, she was attracted to science fiction for the same reasons I was: It liberated her. She had a far-ranging imagination, and she was a treasure in our community."
~~~ ~~~ ~~~

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_Butler for more about her works.
___

Halliburton Prisons for Martial Law

2006-02-25T13:01:00.000+08:00

{excerpt}
--------------------------
. . . in response to Hurricane Katrina in Sept. 2005, according to the Washington Post, White House senior adviser Karl Rove told the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, that she should explore legal options to impose martial law "or as close as we can get." The White House tried vigorously, but ultimately failed, to compel Gov. Blanco to yield control of the state National Guard.
--------------------------

Halliburton Subsidiary Gets Contract to Add Temporary
Immigration Detention Centers

By Rachel L. Swarns, New York Times, Saturday,
February 4, 2006, National Desk, Late Edition - Final,
Section A, Page 7, Column 1, 741 words

The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract
worth up to $385 million for building temporary
immigration detention centers to Kellogg Brown Root,
the Halliburton subsidiary that has been criticized
for overcharging the Pentagon for its work in Iraq…

---------------------------

Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention
Camps

by Peter Dale Scott, February 6, 2006, Pacific News
Service

A little-known $385 million contract for Halliburton
subsidiary KBR to build detention facilities for "an
emergency influx of immigrants" ,,,
Full:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20SC20060206&articleId=1897

---------------------------

Halliburton Detention Centers

By Margaret Kimberley, Freedom Rider, Black
Commentator, Issue 171 - February 16, 2006
See:
http://www.blackcommentator.com/171/171_freedom_rider_halliburton_detention_centers.html

~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Thanks to C.B. for sending this in.

Troubadour

2006-02-23T09:16:00.000+08:00

Here's a picture of me recently, still playing guitar.

More of Eric Drooker's artwork here ...

Poverty Worsening in U.S.

2006-02-20T12:33:00.000+08:00

37 million poor hidden in the land of plenty

Americans have always believed that hard work will bring rewards, but vast numbers now cannot meet their bills even with two or three jobs. More than one in 10 citizens live below the poverty line, and the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening

by
Paul Harris in Kentucky
Sunday February 19, 2006
The Observer

{excerpts…}

A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit's streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.

Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.

Even families with two working parents are often one slice of bad luck - a medical bill or factory closure - away from disaster. The minimum wage of $5.15 (£2.95) an hour has not risen since 1997 and, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest since 1956.
. . . .

· There are 37 million Americans living below the poverty line. That figure has increased by five million since President George W. Bush came to power.

· The United States has 269 billionaires, the highest number in the world.

· Almost a quarter of all black Americans live below the poverty line; 22 per cent of Hispanics fall below it. But for whites the figure is just 8.6 per cent.

· There are 46 million Americans without health insurance.

· There are 82,000 homeless people in Los Angeles alone.

Running from America: 40 Years Later

2006-02-20T01:01:00.000+08:00

Painting by F. Kulon
more of his paintings at http://coolon.net/

China's Enviro-Insurgecy

2006-02-08T01:00:00.000+08:00

When Red Goes Green
A burgeoning Chinese environmental movement tries to stem the devastation wrought by the country's massive economic transformation.
By Jehangir Pocha

{...excerpt...}

China's economic "miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace," Pan Yue, China's deputy minister for the environment, said in a recent interview with Der Spiegel magazine. "Acid rain is falling on one third of China's territory, half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless. ... One third of the urban population is breathing polluted air ... [and] because the air and water are polluted we are losing between 8 and 15 percent of our gross domestic product."

{... interesting article from In These Times at link above

2005 Academic Awards

2006-02-01T17:54:00.000+08:00

Time again for the annual Academic Awards for the most analyzable films of the year. This year, unlike last year, we have selected films that were neglected, sadly, by other award-giving institutions, despite the film's artistic excellence. And we have expanded the number of awards to include new categories. Nevertheless, like last year, all of this year's winners are invited to have a cup of green tea in Taipei.

Best Auteur
Manderlay directed by Lars von Trier. Part 2 of his trilogy which began with Dogville and is improving.

This film continues to explore the hidden historical roots of that sickness named America. If you're not sure what that is, then this is why the film was made for you. Enjoy!

Best Foreign Picture
Mountain Patrol or, Keke Xili is a powerful drama based on a true story of Tibetan peasant defense of wild herds of antelope -- the sustainability of which their traditional livelihood depends. The self-organized patrol is life or death defense against poor Chinese poachers who come in with machine guns and slaughter everything standing. Most of the cast members were local Tibetan people. Original Chinese news reporter's expose in the 1990's led to the successful creation of a national park protected zone there more recently. The setting is not merely "background scenery", but rather a major aspect of the story, the cinematography, and the visceral feeling experienced in such a dangerous yet beautiful wilderness.

Best Documentary
The Yes Men.
Witty pranks played by two political activists against the global corporate mentality. Unbelievably amazing results recorded cinÃ©ma vÃ©ritÃ©.
Low budget, DIY stuff here, released to alternative theaters slowly, so hard to catch. Now on DVD, in French & English here.
This documentary must be memorized.

Best Postmodern Existential Zen Comedy

I Heart Huckabees
Directed by David O. Russell. So far has won almost nothing. Perhaps the most unusual film of the year from America. Some rarely heard speeches against WASP middle-class hypocrisy, especially around the dinner table in the suburbs. But more to the point, an interesting synthesis of some postmod physics and Buddhism and "existential detectives". Plot pits a bohemian poet vs corporate executive for control over a natural area in town. The DVD version, by the way, also contains a wonderfully original talk show with Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin still in character as hosts, the original musician for the score, and the intellectual inspiration in person: the father of Uma Thurman, who is a professor of eastern religion in New York. Some very silly-serious stuff here.

A lot of supposedly middlebrow people out there wrote in to say that they didn't get it, so therefore it must be stupid nonsense. Think about that!

Best Remake for the Post-Cold War

The Manchurian Candidate
Directed by Jonathan Demme. This remake of the old Cold War thriller film is a wildly new and improved version, updated for our new era of corporate control over "democracy" and its endless wars on this wars on that wars on everything so long as behind the scene the capitalist keep the profits flowing in the Right direction. (Coming soon: "The War On Warming"-- you heard it here first). Presents an especially heartwarming slam of the oligarchy and the Cheney-ish Vice President. This film is a good illustration of how pop culture can be more radical than the high culture pablum spoonfed in academia.

Best First-Time Newcomer
Me & You & Everyone We Know
Directed by Miranda July. A quirky story filmed in Portland, Oregon. Incorporates video art inside the film about a young artist struggling for recognition and love -- and along the way a number of themes regarding desire, e.g., even between persons of different generations -- from very young to very old. Yet this intrinsically explosive subject is handled sweetly with gentle outcomes. Many viewers hated this film for its supposed "sex scene" which only demonstrates again how the average mind cannot distinguish between porn and art, yet rejects both. Make no mistake, this is art.

Impeachable

2006-01-27T21:00:00.000+08:00

• He lied to Congress and the
American people to launch
an illegal war of aggression
• He set up a worldwide
network of secret prisons,
torture and assassinations
• He unleashed a massive
unconstitutional wiretap and
spying operation against the
people of the United States

--from an ad in today's New York Times, paid for in part by yours truly. See www.ImpeachBush.org for more.

The Princes of Evil

2006-01-23T14:00:00.000+08:00

Crawford, Texas in April 2005: The ruling patriarchs of both the USA and Saudi Arabia get together for some powerful prayer.

Christian Warriors

2006-01-21T22:00:00.000+08:00

From an op ed in the New York Times yesterday at the link above:

"The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003. Recent polls indicate that 68 percent of white evangelicals continue to support the war. But what surprised me, looking at these sermons nearly three years later, was how little attention they paid to actual Christian moral doctrine. Some tried to square the American invasion with Christian "just war" theory, but such efforts could never quite reckon with the criterion that force must only be used as a last resort. As a result, many ministers dismissed the theory as no longer relevant."

[ And this is of course why I dismiss evangelicals as no longer relevant.

Will Civilization Burn Out?

2006-01-17T16:24:00.000+08:00

Lovelock, the earth scientist who promoted the "Gaia hypothesis", is back with a new warning about planetary warming -- an extremely distressing prediction of inevitable climate change over the next 100,000 years, massive extinctions, and a receding core of the remnants of civilization, perhaps preseved like the lost knowledge of ancient manuscripts hidden in monasteries of the Dark Ages. He says we've passed the turning point already.

I suppose that if his prediction is right, we'll be entering The Hot Ages. Bad time to be living in the tropics.

Lovelock's essay is at the link above.

Students Protest Recruiters, Spied On.

2006-01-15T11:00:00.000+08:00

The good old Banana Slug tradition continues at my alma mater: Students Against War protest against military recruiters on the campus of University of California, Santa Cruz. 4/2005 (Photo by Bill Lovejoy, Santa Cruz Sentinel).

"Racist, sexist, antigay
"Hey, recruiters, go away!"

The Pentagon then blacklisted and spied on students in this group as a "credible threat" to . . . well, the Pentagon I guess.

Glowing Neon Pigs

2006-01-13T15:30:00.000+08:00

A transgenic fluorescent green pig bred by the National Taiwan University is seen in Taipei January 12, 2006. Taiwan, home to the world's first transgenic glowing fish, has successfully bred fluorescent green pigs . . .

I'm so happy that we've finally bred glow in the dark pigs! I'm so tired of tripping over pigs in the dark. Yea technology!

2700 Coal Mines Closed

2006-01-10T11:11:00.000+08:00

Cramped conditions on display at the Coal Miner's Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

China recently shut down 2,700 coal mines due to safety violations (link above). It is a dirty and dangerous job as the recent tragic accident in West Virgina reminds us, but it is one hundred times more dangerous in China than anywhere else. Last year, about 7,000 miners died in China according to an official estimate. Labor rights groups estimate about 20,000 deaths. At least they are finally beginning to address the problem, so probably the number of deaths for 2006 will be less.

Chinese coal miner, 21st century.

Chinese rescuers rush an injured miner to a hospital after a gas leak at the Zijiang mine in Lengshuijiang, central China's Hunan province, June 8, 2005.

This has been an update on last year's bloggence: China Remains in the Coal Age and also Miners Get the Blind Shaft . . .

2006: Peak Water, Peak Food, Peak Oil

2006-01-04T12:20:00.000+08:00

Another in our ongoing series of predictions for 2006: Peak oil is so, like, yesterday man. We're already over the peak and sliding to an oily end. For this year, with 67,000,000 more people added to the list living beings, we will witness the beginning of the beginning of peak water and peak food.

In the current "world system" distribution of resources, as always the poorest of the poor will be unable to obtain sufficient water.

For more details on this from Bill McKibben, see Getting Resourceful About Resources.

Bush is Reading 2 Books

2006-01-02T13:00:00.000+08:00

G.W. Bush, while on his 704th vacation, is reading two books. Since he's bragged about never finishing a whole book and seldom reading newspapers, we should be worried about how the very little that he reads overly impresses his untutored mind. And sure enough, he reads for inspiration the kinds of authors who fit comfortably into his narrowly distorted worldview. Here are the two books:

1. When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House by Patricia O'Toole. Speculation is that Bush is planning ahead for his own "after the White House" career, just like Teddy: safari, etc. Deeper speculation is that Bush looks for inspiration to TR on imperial leadership-- remember that TR was the macho mover behind the American shift away from a republic and toward a colonial power. It's not so much neoconservative as retro. Actually this book does not hero worship TR, but suggests his blinkered limitations also.

2. Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground by Robert Kaplan. This book is much more worrying -- by one of the most reactionary and pro-imperialist flag wavers of American might = right. Rather than "support our troops", this author would have us exploit their gruntness for world domination. The next time I run across Robert Kaplan at some bookstore reading, I'll be sure to explain to him why he's a danger to himself and others, and therefore legally insane.

And that's it for the GW Bush information this New Year -- a retro-imperialist and a neo-imperialist. Does this offer us any hope for the future of the Executive Branch?

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? LOOK AT THE BOOK COVER IN BUSH'S HANDS.

For a more detailed description of these books, see:Jim Lobe: Anti-Imperialists Beware - Bush Is Reading Again

Caught in Subdued Perspex

2006-01-01T14:56:00.000+08:00

{Excerpt from another blog about one of Time Magazine's pictures of the year 2005 }

The picture above deserves international recognition and the widest exposure. It is awesome in its scope and depth. It is a photograph from the heart of a dead country. Where does one start? The lighted humanity of the three uniformed marines administering to their dead comrade (bending, touching, caring...)? Perpendicular (opposed) to the lines of the flag draping the coffin, the layers above the silver'd belly of the cargo hold—coloured red white and blue—and into which are frozen a multiplicity of waxen, glass-cased faces and attitudes of suited... what? Corporate America? The average citizen? Corpses? Like faded stills, their TV faces caught in subdued perspex, it is they who are trapped mute, dumb, and lifeless in their casket of tubular steel. And yet the hydraulic power of that door is evident; good to disgorge such remains (perhaps processed from the asses six feet above) into perpetuity.

{ see rest of this comment on the blog YBLOG ZA

2006: Bin Laden Remains Free

2005-12-30T12:00:00.000+08:00

In our 3rd prediction for 2006:

Osama bin Laden remains free in Pakistan, while the USA directs its manhunt for American peace activists, environmentalists, artists, and "radical librarians".

On a related story from this week, see below for how the New York Times suppressed until after the national elections their story about how the Bush admin has a new policy to leave Bin Laden alone, because capturing him would cause too much trouble in Pakistan where he lives.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
by Cenk Uygur

James Risen, the same New York Times reporter who broke the NSA story, also broke a story on where Osama bin Laden is hiding about a year ago. He wrote the story on Osama's sanctuary -- northern Pakistan, in case you were wondering -- for the December 13, 2004 issue of the Times. When we interviewed him a couple of weeks later on The Young Turks, he told us that he had held the potentially explosive story until after the election.

Risen told us, "I wanted to do it after the election. I didn't want to get caught up in the politics of it."

That story could have been politically damaging to the Bush administration before the November election because it contained government sources saying we had made a conscious decision not to pursue Osama bin Laden more actively (for some understandable though debatable reasons, you can listen to the whole interview here). After the election, the story was nearly ignored, perhaps ironically because people thought it made no difference after an election that confirmed we were going to continue with the same strategy as before.

Now, one has to wonder if Jim Risen and the New York Times made a similar decision about the NSA story. As you read Risen's quote about the earlier story, consider if the same thoughts might have run through his head on the spying piece as well:

"I thought that since we wrote this after the election, that it wouldn't be so politicized, that people might look at it more objectively. And that's why I was hoping -- that's one reason I wanted to do it after the election. I didn't want to get caught up in the politics of it."

If the New York Times is holding stories until after elections on a regular basis, we have to question if that's a wise policy. It's imperative that citizens who are about to vote have all the information at their disposal. If a media organization is purposely holding back critical information that can help voters decide who they want to be their leader, one has to wonder if they are neglecting their duty to their readers and fellow citizens.

Not running a story is just as important, and just as political, as running a story. It puts the newspaper in the role of kingmaker, deciding what the people should and should not hear. I was under the impression that their role was to deliver all the news that's fit to print. If they have a story that is well sourced and that they believe in, and they hold it because they don't want to run a politically damaging story, they are making a decision that is inherently political. That decision is driven not by the merit of the story, but by politics. It makes no difference if the NYT was concerned that they would be accused of being political -- the decision was still guided by political considerations, rather than news considerations.

This seems to me to be dangerous. I think we should have an honest debate about whether the New York Times has become too political, perhaps ironically in an effort to be less political.

2006 preview continues

2005-12-28T17:00:00.000+08:00

Following up on yesterday's blog with a 2nd preview of the top stories of the coming year ahead:

Conservative Republican Congress avoids, deflects, and suppresses several attempts to formally censure and to impeach President Bush for pissing on the original Constitution. Nevertheless, in 2006 the majority of Americans will believe that something is rotten in the State.

2005 as Preview of 2006

2005-12-27T00:12:00.000+08:00

This week, I predict that other blogs will follow traditional news conventions to review the top stories of 2005 as it comes limping toward its final collapse. But this bloggence will offer much more: a preview of the coming year's major stories! In all modesty, I cannot predict everything that might happen in the future, yet all of my past predictions have come to pass. This skill is not based on otherworldly ESP, but rather based on reading the writing on the wall. Today's preview:

In 2006, militaries around the world will patrol certain coastal cities after a series of ecological crises leads to declarations of a State of Emergency. In some cases, martial law will be imposed.

"Ecological catastrophes are only terrifying for civilians. For the military, they are but a simulation of chaos, an opportunity to justify an art of warfare which is the more autonomous as the political State dies out. At this point, all civilian populations are helpless victims of the scam, of this ransacking of the world's resources." - Paul Virilio

Monk Meets Monk

2005-12-26T23:11:00.000+08:00

Thomas Merton, the widely admired Christian mystic, Trappist monk and spiritual writer, died on a pilgrimage to India on December 10th, 1968. Father Merton published some 60 books and lived a devout life as both a cloistered contemplative and as a social critic of American imperialism. He had traveled to India to meet with Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama, after cultivating an interest in Zen by exchanging letters with D.T. Suzuki and writing books exploring the deeper connections between Christian mysticism and Eastern mysticism. A few days before his death in India, he experienced an epiphany on December 3rd while gazing at Buddhist figures carved out of a cliff. Here's what he wrote in his journal about that day:

Looking at these figures, I was suddenly, almost forcibly jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious . . . . The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya . . . everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. . . . my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. . . . I don't know what else remains but I have seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. This is Asia in its purity, not covered over with garbage, Asian or European or American, and it is clear, pure, complete. It says everything; it needs nothing. And because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we, Asians included, who need to discover it. [qtd in Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America 2nd edition, pg 300. ]

A week later Merton died in an accident that apparently involved touching an electric fan while standing on a wet stone floor. This fatal accident occurred within two hours of a speech he gave in Bangkok, Thailand to some Catholic abbots. The topic of his final talk was on "Marxism & Monasticism". A revolutionary student leader from France had once remarked to him, "We are monks also." According to the Fields book cited above, "Merton went on to say that the monk, like the revolutionary, is 'essentially someone who takes up a critical attitude toward the contemporary world and its structures," with the fundamental difference that the Marxist sought to change economic substructures, while the 'monk is seeking to change man's consciousness'."
He then talked about the central concern of monastic life, which is a "total inner transformation." Here's the conclusion of those last words from Merton, delivered in the fullness of his illumination:

And I believe that by openness to Buddhism, to Hinduism and to these great Asian traditions, we stand a wonderful chance of learning more about the potentiality of our own traditions, because they have gone, from the natural point of view, so much deeper into this than we have. The combination of the natural techniques and the graces we have and other things that have been manifested in Asia and the Christian liberty of the gospel should bring us all at last to that full and transcendent liberty which is beyond mere cultural differences and mere externals -- and mere this and that.

A Ferlinghetti Christmas

2005-12-25T11:00:00.000+08:00

Christ Climbed Down
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck crèches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagen sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody’s imagined Christ child

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carolers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
--from A Coney Island of the Mind 1958

Crowds & the Architecture of Belief

2005-12-24T11:11:00.000+08:00

"The future belongs to crowds"
--Don DeLillo in Mao II

Photo of a 21st century megachurch, where Christian evangelism cultivates mass crowd behavior.

Christmas Mass Cancelled

2005-12-24T10:00:00.000+08:00

News reports that several mega-churches in America have decided to cancel their Sunday mass services on the religious holiday popularly known as Christmas. This holiday used to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, whom christians claim as a god. But nowadays, folks are just too darn busy with consumer values on Christmas to attend church, so in a pragmatic compromise, the megachurches called a day off.

Oh, by the way, Merry Xmas! Now it really is Exmass.

Jesus Was Born, Probably

2005-12-23T11:11:00.000+08:00

{Excerpts from a debate among three scholars about historical evidence for the life of Jesus, found in Slate at the link above. }

Alan F. Segal:
. . . .
Although the birth stories in the Bible may be happy tales of religious hope, many New Testament scholars simply dismiss them as legendary, contradictory, and unhistorical. Here's why. The New Testament contains no clue as to the time of Jesus' birth, though the theme of shepherds watching their flocks in the field by night suggests any time but winter. Christmas, the celebration of Jesus' birth, was placed in December in the fourth century to correspond to the Saturnalia, a popular pagan Roman holiday. We have no record of the census (mentioned only in the Gospel of Luke) in the Roman Empire under Emperor Augustus. Likewise, we have no record that Herod savagely decreed the murder of the male children of Bethlehem (mentioned only in Matthew among the gospels). The birth stories in Luke and Matthew contradict each other not only in the details, but in fundamental ways. Even the famous star over Bethlehem, which would cinch the date of Jesus' birth, is famously ambiguous: Either it was a miracle of a traveling star—which no one else at the time noticed—or it was an astronomic commonplace, leaving us with too many comets, super novae, and planetary conjunctions to locate the year of Jesus' birth with certainty.

In fact, we have absolutely no record of Jesus' existence in any contemporary historical source. All reports of Jesus' life come from believers. . . .

Almost all Christians see their own beliefs as grounded in the authentic New Testament facts; the criterion [of "dissimilarity" --see full debate for more on this method] suggests that very few facts are actually undisputable.

For all the rigor of the standard it sets, the criterion demonstrates that Jesus existed. Here are some facts in the Gospels that embarrassed the early church: Jesus was baptized by John (a great theological problem). He preached the end of the world (which did not come). He opposed the Temple in some way (and this opposition led directly to his death). He was crucified (a disreputable way to die). The inscription on the cross was "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews" (the church never preached this title for Jesus and shortly lost interest in converting Jews). No one actually saw him arise (though evidently his disciples almost immediately felt that he had). Ironically, it's the embarrassing nature of these facts that assures us of their authenticity. The exalted figure of Jesus as a heavenly redeemer and the Lord of the Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, was the response of Jesus' closest disciples to the events of Easter morning. These are tenets of faith, not claims that can be demonstrated historically.

Larry Hurtado:
. . . .
Whatever we are supposed to make of the stories of Jesus' conception and birth, arrogance and religious self-congratulation have no basis in these familiar narratives. I hope that's not banal. Heaven knows it's a point that bears repeating. But I've found that the most devout, and those who have drunk most deeply of their religion, rarely need reprimanding about arrogance. Instead, it's most often those with just enough religion to make them dangerous! So, whether as a celebrant or an observer of Christmas, the stories point us to something worth celebrating, but in humble celebration.

John S. Kloppenborg:
. . . .
But there is an easy confusion between statements of empirical fact and statements of value and belief. We need to be cautious about which is which, especially in the documents that we study, which don't make this distinction at all. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it, "there is a great difference between disagreements as to whether there is a Last Judgment and whether there is a German airplane overhead." The point is not simply that one cannot verify empirically that there is a Last Judgment; the point is that the statements are of a different order. Statements of empirical fact can be probabilistic; we can hedge our bets. The plane above my head is perhaps German but it could be American; or maybe it isn't a plane at all—maybe it's a bird. It would be odd to say, however, "I believe that there might be a Last Judgment" or "It is probable that God spoke to Moses but I'm really not sure." Religious beliefs are not merely probabilistic, for in that case they would be, as the philosopher David Hume argued a propos of miracles, far less probable than most of the other beliefs we hold about the world—in other words, hardly worth holding at all.

To apply this to the debate at hand: I take the belief in the virginal conception to be a statement of religious belief—that is, a theological statement in Larry's terminology. Therefore, it is wrong to confuse it with a statement about gynecology or embryology. That doesn't make it "less" than an empirical statement any more than "murder is a crime" or "the maintenance of human dignity is a good" are of less value or importance than empirical statements. This also means, however, that whether I can trace the tradition of the virginal conception to a stage earlier than, say, A.D. 80, or A.D. 70, or A.D. 40—all of which would be tentative, historical, and probabilistic conclusions—has nothing to do with the meaning and function of the belief in the virginal conception as a religious belief. So in that sense, I agree fully with Alan that there is no reason why Christians ought to stop celebrating Christmas, or Jews Hanukkah, since the beliefs involved in those two celebrations are not the kind of beliefs that are empirical or need historical foundation. . . .

Deconstructing theology

2005-12-22T19:07:00.000+08:00

{...also excerpted from chapter 2 of Derrida's Of Grammatology, offered here in my dialectical development of a post-metaphysical theory which is neither empiricism as usually understood nor theology as usually practiced, because it moves between the binary opposition between subject and object }

The outside, “spatial” and “objective” exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear without the grammé, without difference as temporalisation, [or, deferral] without the nonpresense of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present. Metaphor would be forbidden. The presence-absence of the trace, which one should not even call its ambiguity but rather its play (for the word “ambiguity” requires the logic of presence, even when it begins to disobey that logic), carries in itself the problems of the letter and the spirit, of body and soul, and of all the problems whose primary affinity I have recalled. All dualisms, all theories of the immortality of the soul or of the spirit, as well as all monisms, spiritualist or materialist, dialectical or vulgar, are the unique theme of a metaphysics whose entire history was compelled to strive toward the reduction of the trace. The subordination of the trace to the full presence summed up in the logos, the humbling of writing beneath a speech dreaming its plenitude, such are the gestures required by an onto-theology determining the archaeological and eschatological meaning of being as presence, as parousia, as life without difference: another name for death, historical metonymy where God's name holds death in check. That is why, if this movement begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist metaphysics. Only infinite being can reduce the difference in presence. In that sense, the name of God, at least as it is pronounced within classical rationalism, is the name of indifference itself. Only a positive infinity can lift the trace, “sublimate” it (it has recently been proposed that the Hegelian Aufhebung be translated as sublimation; this translation may be of dubious worth as translation, but the juxtaposition is of interest here). We must not therefore speak of a “theological prejudice,” functioning sporadically when it is a question of the plenitude of the logos; the logos as the sublimation of the trace is theological. Infinitist theologies are always logocentrisms, whether they are creationisms or not. Spinoza himself said of the understanding — or logos — that it was the immediate infinite mode of the divine substance, even calling it its eternal son in the Short Treatise. It is also to this epoch, “reaching completion” with Hegel, with a theology of the absolute concept as logos, that all the non-critical concepts accredited by linguistics belong, at least to the extent that linguistics must confirm — and how can a science avoid it? — the Saussurian decree marking out “the internal system of language.”

It is precisely these concepts that permitted the exclusion of writing: image or representation, sensible and intelligible, nature and culture, nature and technics, etc. They are solidary with all metaphysical conceptuality and particularly with a naturalist, objectivist, and derivative determination of the difference between outside and inside.

Deconstructing empirical consciousness

2005-12-22T13:01:00.000+08:00

{excerpts from chapter 2 of Derrida's Of Grammatology }

I have already begun to justify this word [writing, ecriture], and especially the necessity of the communication between the concept of arche-writing and the vulgar concept of writing submitted to deconstruction by it. I shall continue to do so below. As for the concept of experience, it is most unwieldy here. Like all the notions I am using here, it belongs to the history of metaphysics and we can only use it under erasure [sous rature]. “Experience” has always designated the relationship with a presence, whether that relationship had the form of consciousness or not. At any rate, we must, according to this sort of contortion and contention which the discourse is obliged to undergo, exhaust the resources of the concept of experience before attaining and in order to attain, by deconstruction, its ultimate foundation. It is the only way to escape “empiricism” and the “naive” critiques of experience at the same time. Thus, for example, the experience whose “theory,” Hjelmslev says, "must be independent” is not the whole of experience. It always corresponds to a certain type of factual or regional experience (historical, psychological, physiological, sociological, etc.), giving rise to a science that is itself regional and, as such, rigorously outside linguistics. That is not so at all in the case of experience as arche-writing. The parenthesising [or, bracketing out] of regions of experience or of the totality of natural experience must discover a field of transcendental experience. This experience is only accessible in so far as, after having, like Hjelmslev, isolated the specificity of the linguistic system and excluded all the extrinsic sciences and metaphysical speculations, one asks the question of the transcendental origin of the system itself, as a system of the objects of a science, and, correlatively, of the theoretical system which studies it: here of the objective and “deductive” system which glossematics wishes to be. Without that, the decisive progress accomplished by a formalism respectful of the originality of its object, of “the immanent system of its objects,” is plagued by a scientificist objectivism, that is to say by another unperceived or unconfessed metaphysics. This is often noticeable in the work of the Copenhagen School. It is to escape falling back into this naive objectivism that I refer here to a transcendentality that I elsewhere put into question. It is because I believe that there is a short-of and a beyond of transcendental criticism. To see to it that the beyond does not return to the within is to recognise in the contortion the necessity of a pathway [parcours]. That pathway must leave a track in the text. Without that track, abandoned to the simple content of its conclusions, the ultra-transcendental text will so closely resemble the precritical text as to be indistinguishable from it. We must now form and meditate upon the law of this resemblance. What I call the erasure of concepts ought to mark the places of that future meditation. . . .

To make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words “proximity,” “immediacy,” “Presence” (the proximate [proche], one's own [propre], and the pre- of presence), is my final intention in this book. This deconstruction of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction of consciousness, and therefore through the irreducible notion of the trace [Spur, German for "track" ], as it appears in both Nietzschean and Freudian discourse. And finally, in all scientific fields, notably in biology, this notion seems currently to be dominant and irreducible.

If the trace, arche-phenomenon of “memory,” which must be thought before the opposition of nature and culture, animality and humanity, etc., belongs to the very movement of signification, then signification is a priori written, whether inscribed or not, in one form or another, in a “sensible” and “spatial” element that is called “exterior.” . . .

Democrats Call for Impeachment Steps to Begin

2005-12-21T11:11:00.000+08:00

{Excerpt from the Congressional report by the House Judiciary Committee Minority Staff on the Constitutional Crisis, which calls for legal action on impeachment, thereby answering my prayers }
...
"In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war with Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and other legal violations in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration.

There is a prima facie case that these actions by the President, Vice-President and other members of the Bush Administration violated a number of federal laws, including (1) Committing a Fraud against the United States; (2) Making False Statements to Congress; (3) The War Powers Resolution; (4) Misuse of Government Funds; (5) federal laws and international treaties prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; (6) federal laws concerning retaliating against witnesses and other individuals; and (7) federal laws and regulations concerning leaking and other misuse of intelligence.

While these charges clearly rise to the level of impeachable misconduct, because the Bush Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress have blocked the ability of Members to obtain information directly from the Administration concerning these matters, more investigatory authority is needed before recommendations can be made regarding specific Articles of Impeachment. As a result, we recommend that Congress establish a select committee with subpoena authority to investigate the misconduct of the Bush Administration with regard to the Iraq war detailed in this Report and report to the Committee on the Judiciary on possible impeachable offenses."
. . . .
{whole report available online from within the link above }

Bush Threatens to Spy on More Americans

2005-12-19T13:37:00.000+08:00

The news article above gives you the absurd facts of the matter: that President Bush continues to ignore the US Constitution on several fronts, and to ignore the critical advice he's just been given. Basically, like the inflexible King Creon in classical Greek tragedy, Bush insists that he's the Man and he will impose his will on the country formerly known as a democracy, come what may. But come what may -- did we just suggest that the genre is Tragedy?

The democrats are putting more spine into opposing him on this lately, finally taking the Patriot Act out of commission. Here's their reaction to Bush's spy tyranny:
---------------------------
Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., said the president's remarks were "breathtaking in how extreme they were." Feingold said it was "absurd" that Bush said he relied on his inherent power as president to authorize the wiretaps.

"If that's true, he doesn't need the Patriot Act because he can just make it up as he goes along. I tell you, he's President George Bush, not King George Bush. This is not the system of government we have and that we fought for," Feingold told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

The president had harsh words for those who talked about the program to the media, saying their actions were illegal and improper. {!?!?!?}
-----------------------------
The issue of who is "illegal and improper" in this case should not be so hard to spot. Hasn't impeachment yet occured to anyone in Washington D.C.?

Bloom on Twilight of the US

2005-12-17T12:00:00.000+08:00

{Today we continue to hammer away at the themes of illiteracy and American decline, with an excerpt from a new lecture by literary critic, Harold Bloom on the "American Religion"}

...I am a teacher by profession, about to begin my 51st year at Yale, where frequently my subject is American writers. Without any particular competence in politics, I assert no special insight in regard to the American malaise. But I am a student of what I have learned to call the American Religion, which has little in common with European Christianity. There is now a parody of the American Jesus, a kind of Republican CEO who disapproves of taxes, and who has widened the needle's eye so that camels and the wealthy pass readily into the Kingdom of Heaven. We have also an American holy spirit, the comforter of our burgeoning poor, who don't bother to vote. The American trinity pragmatically is completed by an imperial warrior God, trampling with shock and awe.

These days I reread the writers who best define America: Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, Mark Twain, Faulkner, among others. Searching them, I seek to find what could suffice to explain what seems our national self-destructiveness. DH Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), wrote what seems to me still the most illuminating criticism of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Of the two, Melville provoked no ambivalence in Lawrence. But Whitman transformed Lawrence's poetry, and Lawrence himself, from at least 1917 on. Replacing Thomas Hardy as prime precursor, Whitman spoke directly to Lawrence's vitalism, immediacy, and barely evaded homoeroticism. On a much smaller scale, Whitman earlier had a similar impact on Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lawrence, frequently furious at Whitman, as one might be with an overwhelming father, a King Lear of poetry, accurately insisted that the Americans were not worthy of their Whitman. More than ever, they are not, since the Jacksonian democracy that both Whitman and Melville celebrated is dying in our Evening Land.

What defines America? "Democracy" is a ruined word, because of its misuse in the American political rhetoric of our moment. If Hamlet and Don Quixote, between them, define the European self, then Captain Ahab and "Walt Whitman" (the persona, not the man) suggest a very different self from the European. Ahab is Shakespearean, Miltonic, even Byronic-Shelleyan, but his monomaniacal quest is his own, and reacts against the Emersonian self, just as Melville's beloved Hawthorne recoiled also. Whitman, a more positive Emersonian, affirms what the Sage of Concord called self-reliance, the authentic American religion rather than its Bushian parodies. Though he possesses a Yale BA and honorary doctorate, our president is semi-literate at best. He once boasted of never having read a book through, even at Yale. Henry James was affronted when he met President Theodore Roosevelt; what could he have made of George W Bush?
. . . .
What has happened to the American imagination if we have become a parody of the Roman empire?
. . . .
Our politics began to be contaminated by theocratic zealots with the Reagan revelation, when southern Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals, and Adventists surged into the Republican party. The alliance between Wall Street and the Christian right is an old one, but has become explicit only in the past quarter century. What was called the counter-culture of the late 1960s and 70s provoked the reaction of the 80s, which is ongoing. This is all obvious enough, but becomes subtler in the context of the religiosity of the country, which truly divides us into two nations. Sometimes I find myself wondering if the south belatedly has won the civil war, more than a century after its supposed defeat. The leaders of the Republican party are southern; even the Bushes, despite their Yale and Connecticut tradition, were careful to become Texans and Floridians. Politics, in the United States, perhaps never again can be separated from religion. When so many vote against their own palpable economic interests, and choose "values" instead, then an American malaise has replaced the American dream.
. . . .
{continues at link above in The Guardian}

Universities Colonized

2005-12-16T00:12:00.000+08:00

State Universities Use Part-Time Professors

For yet another in a long series of stories on the declining state of the professing profession in the U.S. due to the "New University of Excellence" designed by MBA management, see the article above with details about Oregon. The short version: social funding is down because the rich need to get richer despite massive war funding and factory closings; meanwhile class sizes and tuition costs are rising, yet professors are now paid less for more hours as part-time temp workers without even health insurance. Where is all the money going? Journalists have yet to inquire into that minor trivia. The faculty response? An funky ostrich imitation. They often reject unions since they haven't yet realized that they are paid less than plumbers and construction workers, moreover that they are now managed by accountants who are worried about keeping the customers formerly-known-as-students coming back. Such facts are avoided by the usual bourgeois illusions of self-reliance and cultural dignity.

Those young customers now assume that the university is supposed to train them for a comfy position in a corporation. Education = exchange value on the open market. Yet those same corporations have legally maneuvered to avoid funding their own staff training, which now comes down to the individual person paying for their own corporate training, and then working for the next 30 years to pay off the student loan.
Alas for the ideal of the university now sadly worn out under this calculated colonization by capitalism. You can still even today get a good liberal arts education, but my complaint is that you have to fight against the university system in order to do so. The status quo now is a lot of watered down Power Points spoon fed in fragments to bored semi-literate customers by harried parttime instructors -- a perfect preparation for the same world they must work in to pay for this "education".

And that's it for today's news from the U.

{photo from anti-capitalist global protest in Hong Kong, 2005}

Chiang Kai-shek idol falls down

2005-12-14T17:05:00.000+08:00

Hey, somebody was listening to me after all!

A bronze equestrian statue of the late dictator Chiang Kai-shek lies on the grass next to a monument reading "Our national savior" in Ilan, Taiwan.
PHOTO: CHIANG CHIH-HSIUNG, TAIPEI TIMES

Do you still recall that in 1989 the statues of Lenin were knocked down all over the world in the bloodless revolution as the Berlin Wall came down? That same summer, students and faculty of Beijing University attempted a peaceful revolt for democracy, only to be crushed by the army in one bloody night at Tiananmen Square.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, life went on as usual, that is to say, business. The numerous statues of the Capitalist-Leninist dictator Chiang Kai-shek were left standing in full view, where even kids can see them daily. As of today, December 14, 2005, this is the only case I've heard about where his statue somehow fell down.

Tookie Execution OK'd by Arnold

2005-12-13T14:00:00.000+08:00

So you've heard the controversial news about Tookie Williams. He's to be executed later today in this contraption at San Quentin Prison -->

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger decided not to commute Tookie's sentence to a life behind bars, opining that the condemned man had not shown sufficient remorse or redemption. I find this utterly predictable, since I've watched a few of Arnold's movies, and I've read interviews with this Conservative Republican man of "values". His entire career has been devoted to a show of brute power, where justice comes from the barrel of a gun or a slashing sword. Might is right -->

Without any hint of irony, Gov Schwarzenegger official statement says, "that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems." Obviously "he" in this quote refers to Tookie, yet the statement applies to Gov Schwarzenegger as well. In announcing this very same text, the Gov commits an act of fatal violence "as a legitimate means to address societal problems". It relegates the specific problem to a mere footnote added as an afterthought to the corrected edition later:

"Breaking the cycle of hopelessness and gang violence is the responsibility of us all, not just the most affected African-American or inner city communities. It is important to work together with respect, understanding and patience if we are to one day succeed." [footnote 6 on page 4]

This is technically a performative contradiction of the most destructive kind. I would not trust the author of that hypocritical text with my family, nor would I move into the same neighborhood where he rules.

In stark and revealing contrast, here's what Tookie actually wrote for young kids in the ghetto:

"As a teenager, I didn't know the meaning of power. I thought that by using violence to scare people, I was proving that I had a lot of power. But when you use your power to make someone do something they don't want to do, or to hurt someone, you are abusing your power. The people you hurt will someday hurt you. They may call your parents to tell them the bad things you've done. They may call the police and have you arrested. They may even use a weapon on you."

--from Gangs and the Abuse of Power

"Since I had big muscles and a big reputation, I thought no one could hurt me. But my big muscles and big reputation couldn't stop the bullets that a gang member fired at me one day. Doctors said I would never walk again. It took a long time, but I can walk now. I don't want you to get shot too. That's why I'm telling you my story. You can learn from my mistakes."

--from Gangs and Weapons

It is entirely probable that Arnold didn't comprehend that these words are about himself also.

Aspartame, Toxic Ignorance of Rumsfeld

2005-12-12T12:00:00.000+08:00

C.B. alerts me to an interesting bit of research by public interest scientist, Mary O'Brien on how the artificial sweetener, aspartame, was approved by US government officials for human consumption despite empirical results that showed it causes cancers and even "holes in the brain" in animal experiments. Turns out that this typical story of backroom deals and corporate purchasing power involves a guy named Donald Rumsfeld who transferred from Secretary of Defense (sound familiar?) under President Gerald Ford in 1977 over to CEO of the company that owned aspartame and needed FDA safety-approval to market it. Rumsfeld got a Pentagon insider doctor as the medical authority to overturn the FDA decision against aspartame. The rest is history, as you can see by reading the label on your can, your drink, your sugarfree gum and cake and etc.

Agnotology reveals the corporate construction of toxic ignorance again.

Here's Mary O'Brien's moral of the story:

First, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's leap over lack of WMD evidence, his own military's advice, and UN process to get President Bush's Iraq War underway is a well-practiced move.

Second, a child or soldier who dies in Iraq from a bomb and an adult who dies in the U.S. from aspartame-caused cancer share at least one person in common who contributed to their death.

Third, whenever politically positioned people, whether nationally or locally, regard law and evidence as mere hurdles to leap over to get what they want, it's our job as citizens to keep those laws in place, that evidence in the open, and those people in line.

Story originally published in a small alternative press paper, The Eugene Weekly at the link above.
See comment below for update on political action taken on December 14.

How to Get Away with the State of Emergency

2005-12-09T17:00:00.000+08:00

Getting Away with the State (of Emergency). In today's bloggence, we teach the up and coming ambitious politico-wannabees how to legally steal, lie, cheat, and yes, even murder -- and then get re-elected. Read on for this guide to the top methods of becoming a True Prince lording it over all those pathetic cowards out there! First lesson is free! Send in just $29.99 for additional lessons!

War Crimes Made Easy
By Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith
Tom Dispatch

How has the Bush administration gotten away with such apparently illegal acts as hiding intelligence reports from Congress, creating secret prisons, establishing death squads, kidnapping people and spiriting them across national borders, and planning unprovoked wars? Part of the answer lies in the administration's deliberate effort, initiated even before September 11, 2001, to tear down any existing legal and institutional means for preventing, exposing, or punishing violations of national and international law by American officials. . . .

{detailed essay continues at link above}

Pinter's Nobel Accusation

2005-12-08T18:00:00.000+08:00

Harold Pinter gave his acceptance speech for this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Here's a section from the middle, the guts of it:
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Whole speech is available at the link above, in audio or video or text in several languages. This has been an update from an earlier bloggence at: A Pint of Pinter Pointers

Our Climate Ourselves

2005-12-07T13:46:00.000+08:00

"The struggle against climate change is a struggle against much of what we have become. It is a struggle against some of our most fundamental urges."
-- George Monbiot

see his speech to the Climate March in December 2005 here: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/05/the-struggle-against-ourselves/

Paris Surrealist Movement on the Riots

2005-12-06T10:00:00.000+08:00

Link above takes you to an interesting report about the recent unpleasantries in suburban Paris: weeks of fire, rage, destruction, miscommunication, brutality, accusations, gangsters, youngsters, frustration, racism, and all the rest of 21st century life.
With much of France now in the mood to return to "normal" (otherwise known as the conditions which led to the riots in the first place), this report is worth more careful perusal.

The report is admirably evenhanded, if undiplomatic. But perhaps some frankness is needed in the Francophone world. Coming out of the fire phoenix-like, with an unmistakably avantiste tone of perceptive conceiving and conceptual perceiving, this report is signed by one "Paris Group of the Surrealist Movement". Which now raises a hopeful question: Who are they, and have they more to say?

Here's their conclusion:

"In a society in which all previous forms of belonging, and therefore of associated consciousness, have been wiped out, these events testify to the eruptive and uncontrollable return of the social question, firstly under an immediately negative form, that fire—emblem of all apocalypses— symbolizes. Indeed, unlike the rebellions in Los Angeles in 1965 and in 1992, the population of the districts here did not massively join the rioters. And in contrast to May ‘68 neither poetry nor brilliant ideas are on the barricades. No wildcat strike is going to spread widely with these troubles. But the rulers have been given a good hotfoot and have been forced to unmask themselves.

A democracy which, in order to face up to a quantitatively limited movement (considering the number of participants), has been obliged to put back in force an old colonial law, but also to reveal its constituent deception: that is, where the police abuse their powers, the state of emergency gives to their abuse the legitimacy that it lacks. What we long ago called "individual freedom" is today known as the “discretionary power” of the cops.

In a flash, such warning lights have revealed—during these November nights—the return of a possibility that seemed to be lost: that of throwing power into a panic even when its forces are harassed in a disorganized manner through the whole territory by a handful of forsaken social casualties. From now on, we can imagine the strength of an uprising that would—beyond the inhabitants of the ghettos—include the whole population suffering from the rise of impoverishment, and would turn into civil war against the organs of capital and the state.

Beyond recent infernos presented as the very image of a nightmare, it is time that the dream of concrete utopia is raised anew."

~~~ ~~~ ~~~
If you can read French, they've got a website at:
http://ed.surrealistes.free.fr/index.htm

Planet Changes

2005-12-05T09:33:00.000+08:00

Carbon Dioxide

New research has found that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - the main cause of global warming - are higher than at any time in the past 625,000 years. HOTTEST EVER

This year is expected to be the warmest ever recorded; 1998 was the hottest so far, but the past three years currently occupy the next three places.

Desertification

The giant Kalahari desert, already four times the size of Britain, threatens to become larger still, covering farmland in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa.

Expanding Oceans

The level of the world's seas and oceans is rising twice as fast as in the past, as their waters expand in rising temperatures and glaciers melt.

Ocean Exiles

The people of the Carteret Islands, a scattering of atolls off Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific, have started to leave as their homes succumb to rising seas.

Hurricanes

Hurricane Epsilon - the 14th of the year - is forming in the Atlantic, even though the worst recorded hurricane season by far formally ended on Wednesday.

Glacier Melt

Greenland glaciers have suddenly started racing towards the sea and melting. Much the same is beginning to happen to glaciers in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Water Shortage

Areas such as the western USA, which depend on mountain snows for their water supplies, are running short as less snow falls - and what does fall melts earlier.

Disappearing Species

Sealife and birdlife have declined catastrophically this year along America's north-west Pacific coast, after a similar meltdown in the North Sea.

Coral Reefs

Corals on the Great Barrier Reef are bleaching out and dying as sea temperatures rise and scientists fear that the whole reef may perish by 2050.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
What you can do about it:
1. Work for radical changes in civilization.
2. The three R's: reduce, reuse, recycle.
3. Vote green; avoid theocratic candidates.
4. Don't buy land at sea level.

Shiites Win Iraq War

2005-12-03T20:00:00.000+08:00

How Bush Created a Theocracy in Iraq
By Juan Cole

{excerpt}
The Bush administration naively believed that Iraq was a blank slate on which it could inscribe its vision for a remake of the Arab world. Iraq, however, was a witches' brew of dynamic social and religious movements, a veritable pressure cooker. When George W. Bush invaded, he blew off the lid.

Shiite religious leaders and parties, in particular, have crucially shaped the new Iraq in each of its three political phases. The first was during the period of direct American rule, largely by Paul Bremer. The second comprised the months of interim government, when Iyad Allawi was prime minister. The third stretches from the formation of an elected government, with Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister, to today.

In the first phase, expatriate Shiite parties returned to the country to emerge as major players, to the consternation of a confused and clueless "Coalition Provisional Authority."

The oldest of these was the Dawa Party, founded in the late 1950s as a Shiite answer to mass parties such as the Communist Party of Iraq and the Arab nationalist Baath Party. Dawa means the call, as in the imperative to spread the faith. Dawa Party leaders in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed of a Shiite paradise to rival the workers' paradise of the Marxists, with a state ruled by Islamic law, where a "consultative council" somehow selected by the community would make further regulations in accordance with the Koran. . . .
{Cole's conclusion:}
"The real winners of the Iraq war are the Shiites."

Terminal City

2005-12-01T13:01:00.000+08:00

An illustration of one chapter of my old dissertation from 1997 about the ideology of the information society. Theme: alienation vis-a-vis "communication".

Painting by Drooker. See more of this art at www.drooker.com

Regime Change Made EZ

2005-12-01T00:00:00.000+08:00

In recent memory, U.S. covert* imperialism has overthrown three authoritarian governments by funding and organizing soft power and nonviolent civil resistance movements in:
1. Serbia (Milosevic)
2. Georgia (Shevardnadze)
3. Ukraine (Yanukovych)

To do so, the U.S. relies on think tanks to brainstorm how to overthrow governments without deploying the military. A key document of this brainstorming as it was applied successfully is Gene Sharp's FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY: A conceptual framework for liberation online at: http://www.hermanos.org/nonviolence/dictodem.html

This work efficiently summarizes the tactics and strategy used to overthrow those three governments listed above. It was supposedly published in 1993 by a Senior Scholar-in-Residence at The Albert Einstein Institution. This think tank / advocacy group was started by Gene Sharp, and it specializes in nonviolent regime change. For an expose of how the CIA and NATO use his approach, see this expose. But don't waste too much time there. We still have a future to win -->

Nonviolent change from bumbling authoritarian regimes to democratic elections is at least a step in the right direction, although of course it doesn't go far enough by half. What we are proposing today is that Sharp's work be redirected: Regime change begins at home! Now that the U.S. itself is mired in a militantly bumbling authoritarian regime that has consistently defied the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not to mention several international treaties, we believe that Sharp's tactics can be reappropriated to create a mass nonviolent resistance movement.

After all, why reinvent the wheel when it's already on a roll?

~~~ ~~~ ~~~
*By "covert" we don't refer to the overt imperial force applied to Haiti or Afghanistan or Panama or ad nauseam.

**I was tipped off to this connection by the blog Crimes of the State

Venezuela to Sell Cheap Oil to U.S. Poor

2005-11-30T20:00:00.000+08:00

Are you freezing cold this winter? Can't afford to drive to the supermarket? Maybe Chavez's socialism can help.

"Venezuela will soon begin selling heating oil at
discount prices to poor communities in Boston and New
York, following up on a promise by President Hugo
Chavez, Venezuela's state oil company announced.

"Citgo, a subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil
company that runs roughly 16,000 gas stations in the
United States, will offer fuel at discounted rates in
Boston as early as next week, according to a statement
posted Friday on the company's Web site.

. . . .

"Chavez often blames the plight of the poor on
unbridled capitalism and strongly criticizes the Bush
administration for failing to reduce poverty in the
United States."

----------------------------------
--thanks to C.B. for this lead to cheap oil

Get Down on Intelligent Design

2005-11-27T11:49:00.000+08:00

The most intelligent comment about Intelligent Design thus far, is to be found above at Get Your War On