Musings on some ironies of history by Edwardo Gaelano, author of among others 'Open Veins of Latin America'.
4/30/2008
Turn on, Tune in, Drop out
I'm reminded of the amazing film from the 40's 'The Third Man' (screenplay by Graham Green) where Joseph Cotton, the hack USian writer goes over to post-war Austria to visit his long-lost buddy, played by Orson Wells, who is involved in dasterdly deeds in the black market there. And who could ever forget the evocative sound-track performed by 1 zither (talk about doing it on the cheap). When Cotton's character discovers the ramifications of his friends activities, he confronts him with it. Orsons's character explains that out of the corruption of Medici Italy, Leonardo Di Vinci was produced, while what came out of centuries of good government in Switzerland was the coo coo clock! Well, that was before Hoffman.
Father of LSD Albert Hofmann dies at age of 102 - Times Online
4/29/2008
Council of Foreign Relations
Within the history of this organization it seems one can catch a glimpse of those who direct activities, behind the scene, of most policy decisions of the United States. I'm a little reticent in posting this as I don't want to be seen as some sort of conspiracy monger by doing so. A lot of this information has been researched and ideologically used by such unsavory groups as The John Birch Society and others, but as an author of one of the articles points out, it doesn't make the information any less true. So I'll just point you to it and you decide.
The first article I came across on Uruknet, which got me onto this kick, (thanks, Uruknet!) referred to earlier, is by Malcolm Lagauche and can be found here
& here
The second article is by Baker and is found on his page on znet here
and here
Interestingly, The Council is behind and is a facilitator of the ongoing Security and Prosperity Partnership. And check out the South American agenda.
And here's a speech by Steve Harper at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Relations last year. Notice the neat blending of agendas and the referal of the dictatorial regeme (read: Venezuala or Bolivia or both.
Steve's speech
The first article I came across on Uruknet, which got me onto this kick, (thanks, Uruknet!) referred to earlier, is by Malcolm Lagauche and can be found here
& here
The second article is by Baker and is found on his page on znet here
and here
Interestingly, The Council is behind and is a facilitator of the ongoing Security and Prosperity Partnership. And check out the South American agenda.
And here's a speech by Steve Harper at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Relations last year. Notice the neat blending of agendas and the referal of the dictatorial regeme (read: Venezuala or Bolivia or both.
Steve's speech
New Site (to me) to Check Out
I could have posted another few posts from this site but instead decided to just point you to it. Vive Le Canada
Military or Market-Driven Empire Building: 1950-2008
An analysis by James Petras over at Global Research.ca. A pretty scathing and brutal prognosis. Not for the faint of heart.
YouTube and Google Book Search: Pain, Delight, and Copyright
Interesting musings on the copyright delemma vis a vis the internet by one of the original hackers.
Lauren Weinstein's Blog: YouTube and Google Book Search: Pain, Delight, and Copyright
Sometimes a Look Says It All
Photo by Robert W Kranz.
The caption that went along with the pic said this:
Khost, Afghanistan, 07.11.2002: Mohammad, one of the more angry young Pashtun fighters. He was just over 24, but had been with various commanders as long as he could think.They had been his family after the Russians killed his parents and now he was manning a surveillance post in the mountains just west of Khost.
It’s safe to assume that Mohammad was at the time in one of those “good guy” Afghan local militias. Today he is possibly in the Afghan National Army or Police. Or maybe in some loosely aligned Neo-Taliban outfit. Or maybe he has found a civilian job. Or maybe he is unemployed. Who knows.
Where goes the neighbourhood?
Another article on the same subject as the previous post of interest to Halifaxians , though it's the same story being played out in major cities across the continent. Gentrification and where do the other peope live.
Tax, Who Me?
The sink hole of off-shore accounts. But for God's sake don't increase the minimum wage! Tighten your belts people.
4/28/2008
Urban food deserts in major cities
Supermarkets follow banks to the suburbs leaving corner stores and check-cashing outfits. A Canadian study.
Food-price anger turns on speculators
Consumers from Asia to South America, hit by inflation in staple foods such as rice, are increasingly reluctant to accept production shortfalls or biofuel demands as the reason for their plight. Instead, governments are urged to act against dealers in commodity futures. But the speculators say they are innocent parties.
Food-price anger turns on speculators
Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:00:00 GMT
Obama and the Corporation
Would you vote for Obama (if you could) and would it matter? An informative article by Chris Hedges on Obama's corporate connections. Surprise! More of the same.
4/27/2008
Economics in One Lesson
An online book by Harry Hazlitt. (don't know if this is a permanent post yet)
The Harper Way
Interesting article in The Guardian of England looking at Harper's disdain with and paranoia of Canadian Institutions, with a lively assortment of comments. Thanks to Susan Delacourt.
Canada deaf to growing hunger crisis, UN aide says
More great press for Canada on the international stage.
globeandmail.com: Canada deaf to growing hunger crisis, UN aide says
4/26/2008
Latin America: the attack on democracy
A piece by John Pilger, journalist and director of such films as The War on Democracy (posted earlier) and Stealing a Nation. Notice that the only country Canada's Harper visited in South America was Colombia where he and Bush are high on cutting a free trade deal with. As the worm turns.
If interested in checking out some good documentaries, and are into p2p downloading, check out onebigtorrent.org.
One Canada or 10 Canadas?
Op-ed by Sinclair Stevens, former cabinet minister in the Molroney government, on the Harper agenda. While the Liberals were merrily dancing to the tune of the neo-liberal agenda of big business hand-outs, while painting themselves as the friend of the little guy, they don't hold a candle to Harper and the things he has in mind if he ever gets the majority he's looking for. Lets move ahead and take apart the remaining remnants of the welfare state fought for since the 40's and proceed to the final sell-off of what's left.
You might also read a recent blog post by James Laxer here
4/25/2008
The Security, Prosperity Partnership: Round Four
Two massive pipelines to the U.S., no pipeline to Eastern Canada. Mega pollution, etc. A little more info on this agreement by stealth.
The Security, Prosperity Partnership: Round Four - Embassy - Newspaper Online..
4/24/2008
4/23/2008
Quote of the Day- Hillary Clinton
Asked how she would respond to a nuclear attack on Israel by Iran, she responded that she “would obliterate them”
Canada, US and Mexico interfering with NAFTA watchdog
International coalition calls for end to political interference [April 23 2008]
Canada, US and Mexico interfering with NAFTA watchdog
Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:11:54 GMT
German military official says fight in south Afghanistan unwinnable
The head of the German Armed Forces Association said on Tuesday Germany was right not to send combat troops to southern Afghanistan because the battle there could not be won.
German military official says fight in south Afghanistan unwinnable
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:46:00 GMT
4/22/2008
Get Smarter: 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower
If your IQ is hardwired, how can you get smarter? Lots of ways, and our guide to better brain power shows you how. Think of it as a software upgrade to maximize your "functional intelligence."
Another South American Country Turns Left
Paraguay to join South America's anti-imperialist bloc? | World War 4 Report.
More on the election here and here And there’s an interview by Amy Goldman of free-lance journalist, michael Fox, based in Latin America on Democracy Now
Another Tar Sands Pipeline
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - In March 2008, the U.S. Department of State issued a federal permit for the 2,000-mile TransCanada Keystone Pipeline, which would carry heavy crude oil from the oil sands of northern Alberta across seven U.S. states to Oklahoma. The document was signed, even though mandated government-to-government consultations with concerned Native nations were described as ''ongoing'' by the State Department.
How the Rich Starved the World
Mark Lynas | New Statesman 17 April 2008
World cereal stocks are at an all-time low, food-aid programmes have run out of money and millions face starvation. Yet wealthy countries persist with plans to use grain for petrol.
How the Rich Starved the World
ron collins
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:29:46 GMT
4/19/2008
4/18/2008
what's with cats
what's with cats
I stand at the sink
And look out my dirty kitchen window
On this gray end of winter day
And there he sits
an old gray cat
staring back
An old gray cat
In the yard next door
atop the wood-pile
it's gray too
There's no light
In the kitchen
And my face isn't
Pressed up against the pane
But he sees me
staring back
As if to say
'well, I guess you can be in my world'
(yawn)
What's with cats, anyway
The Saddest Music In the World
A great little video collection from Walrus Magazine
although it might be called 'the saddest music North America and The British Isles (in English)'. Although it really doesn't have the same ring to it.
4/17/2008
Usian- part deux
Apropos my earlier diatribe re: USian, thought I’d google it and lo and behold
Or check out The Urban Dictionary.(can’t seem to link it– still learning)
4/16/2008
News from Down Under
Australia got rid of Howard, the USians are getting rid of Bush– if only Canada could rid itself of Harper.
(am I getting too cute with these pictures?)
The Name Game
I’ve got an idea. I’m a little tired of the U.S. claiming the name ‘America’. I think this has gone on long enough. I mean they aren’t even 50% of the continent, so there isn’t even any 50% majority veto on the subject. Ok, the 'America' part is easy– it’s either 'the U.S.' or 'the U.S.A'. The hard part is how to refer to the citizens (or should I say ‘folks') of said country. Well my vote is for 'USian'. I know, it looks a little weird but new things often do. Then there’s the problem of whether to put in the periods or not. 'U.S.ian', 'U.Sian'. Hmm. There must be a way. I think I like USian. I’ve actually seen it showing up a few times on the blogisphere. Any ideas?
4/15/2008
Haiti (Ayiti)
A review by Stephan Lendman of a new book on the history of Haiti, with a focus on Aristide, his tenures as elected leader and ouster in which Canada was complicit wirh the lead of the U.S. and France.
For part 2 and 3 go here.
4/14/2008
The Bolovar Experiment
2004 documentary on impact of financial neo-liberalism on Latin America and other parts of the world. an aside: i hear that the top 1% of Haitians owns over 50% of it's wealth, while in the U.S. it's only 40%. Whats that- 10% between the 1st world and the third?
It's a full length documentary. You might prefer to download it to watch later if interested.
It's a full length documentary. You might prefer to download it to watch later if interested.
4/10/2008
4/09/2008
4/08/2008
O sun O sun
O sun O sun
Shining through all creation
O sun o sun
You shine on your own
On crawling and creeping things
On flying and leaping things
You pour forth your love
O sun O sun
O shine on me
O shine on me
Design sense
A very inspiring article about a very inspired architect.
Industrial Revolution, Take Two: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com
4/06/2008
4/05/2008
911
I haven't gotten into '911' all that much. I've seen a few of the films, read a few of the blogs, 911truth seems to be the main one, but find myself coming back to it. Let's face it the world changed then beyond recognition. A virtual perfect storm of events. Here's some more from The Existentialist Cowboy, who's worth a read by name alone.
4/04/2008
Stranger than truth
Apr 3rd 2008
From The Economist print editionNot an April fool, honestly
IN THE weeks before Trinity, the first test of an atomic bomb, some of the physicists in the Manhattan Project fretted that their brainchild might set off a reaction that would burn up the Earth's atmosphere. Similarly, an experiment carried out in Long Island a few years ago, which was intended to produce a form of matter known as strange quarks, caused a few imaginative worrywarts to fear that the entire planet would be converted into subatomic particles called strangelets.
Neither of these things came to pass, of course. But that does not stop people continuing to worry that esoteric phenomena at the edge of physics might spell The End Of Everything in a satisfyingly B-movieish cataclysm. The twist in the latest of these scares is that the worriers seem to think that a court in Hawaii is somehow empowered to stop events happening half a world away, on the Franco-Swiss border.The bugaboo this time is black holes. A black hole is an object so dense (and thus with such a strong gravitational field) that nothing—not even light—can escape it. Not surprisingly, no such object has ever been observed directly. However, the indirect effects of black holes can be seen all over the place, and the universe would not make sense without them, so there is little doubt that they really do exist.
It would, nevertheless, be nice to have one to hand. And some physicists think that this will happen soon—when a machine called the Large Hadron Collider is switched on later this year. The LHC is the proud creation of CERN, Europe's main particle-physics laboratory, which is located near Geneva. It will create a zoo of new particles for those who study the fabric of reality to get to grips with. Among those objects may be some tiny black holes. The LHC's physicists are particularly excited by these because they will allow for the experimental examination of gravity. They may also allow Stephen Hawking, a well-known British physicist, to receive a much-deserved Nobel prize. That would almost certainly happen if he turns out to have been right in his prediction that tiny black holes will evaporate in a spectacular burst of energy that has come to be known as Hawking radiation.
Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner, however, are excited for a different reason. They fear that, far from evaporating in this way, any black holes created in the LHC will start sucking matter in—and will eventually swallow the Earth. This is despite the fact that if the LHC is, indeed, powerful enough to create such black holes, then so are the cosmic rays that continually bombard the Earth without noticeably sucking it into hideous doom.
This week, Mr Sancho and Mr Wagner put their fears before a federal district court in Hawaii, asking for an injunction on CERN to stop the LHC opening. They also asked, perhaps with a fractionally higher hope of success, that America's main particle-physics laboratory, Fermilab, be forbidden to furnish its European friends and rivals with equipment.
Mr Wagner, a former nuclear-safety officer who now runs a botanical garden on Hawaii, has form in this area. It was he who led worries about the Long Island strangelets, to the extent of trying to get a similar restraining order imposed on Brookhaven National Laboratory, where the strange-matter experiment was to be conducted. Strange matter also features in his worries about the LHC. But his behaviour suggests that strange matter comes in many guises, not all of them within the purview of physicists.
4/02/2008
Obama
Obama is the change that
America has tried to hide.
By Alice Walker
Only one candidate offers the radical departure for the 21st century the US needs, for its own sake and the rest of the world's
I have come home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old. On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is a space with which I am familiar.
When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative, Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as "Miss" when they reached the age of twelve.) She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she responded that of course they would not. No Montgomerys would.
My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May. They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.
We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the dairy cows herself.
When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see the school bus carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school. Later, I see my parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick. We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that "Jane" and "Dick" had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black children, permitted to enter.
The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in the library in my home town. I had had no idea – so kept from black people it had been – that such a place existed. To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.
When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known, the plantations, because they attempted to exercise their "democratic" right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.
I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.
I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.
When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.
True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth's people, after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.
I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.
I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don't understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes. But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend," and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?
It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man." One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.
I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.
And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States. My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces' case, there is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even though our family has been here longer than most North American families – and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American genes – we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.
When I offered the word "Womanism" many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence, compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old white women and men who do.
Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new possibility? In other words, as the Hopi elders would say: Who do we want in the boat with us as we head for the rapids? Who is likely to know how best to share the meager garden produce and water? We are advised by the Hopi elders to celebrate this time, whatever its adversities.
We have come a long way, Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of our time. One of which is to build alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the miracle we are witnessing. Do not stress over its outcome. Even if Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination. And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.----------------
--> This article appeared on guardian.co.uk
Canada does it again
Once again Canada sticks to human rights. The little country that could. What's going on here. Time to move to Norway?
4/01/2008
Another leap underway
In this article from Wired Magazine we hear about China's coming stage as innovator. I think it would be safe to say they see their predicament re: environmental degradation. They're on their way to doing something about it. This has got to be a good thing for us all.
Once the World's Great Factory, China Is the Next Great Innovator
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)