Stop the EXECUTION of Troy Davis

Stop the execution of Troy Davis.

Innocence Project.

Amnesty USA


Amnesty France

Reverse Nuremberg

We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders.

Thunk

« La classe ouvrière n’existe plus. Mais elle prend tout sur la gueule »

The working class no longer exists. But it's still taking it in the chops.

« Le communisme c’est le seul contrepoison le seul antidote le seul remède la seule alternative à la société d’exploitation au capitalisme qui jamais n’a le visage humain. Tous les damnés de la terre savent ça qui sont de plus en plus nombreux et de plus en plus damnés. Seuls les salauds ne sont pas avec eux et c’est comme ça qu’on les reconnaît. »

Communism is the only antitoxin the only antidote the only remedy the only alternative to the capitalist society of exploitation which never has a human face. All the wretched of the earth who are more and more numerous and more and more wretched know it. Only the bastards aren't with them and that's how we recognise them.

Georges Labica, Démocratie et révolution

Convenient Suicide

The accused terrorist who said he was tortured into making a false connection between al Qaeda and Iraq has died in a Libyan prison, human rights monitors said Tuesday.

Not A Spoof.

La Chinoise

The rest...

The Spring of the Zombies

Stiglitz

The Economic Homeless

For the economic homeless, the American ideal that education and hard work lead to a comfortable middle-class life has slipped out of reach. They're packing into motels, parking lots and tent cities, alternately distressed and hopeful, searching for work and praying their fortunes will change.

The Day Ronald Reagan Was Elected...

"The day Ronald Reagan was elected, this crisis was locked in as something that was going to happen, maybe not precisely on September 15 2008, but it was going to happen."

Evidence

This is exactly what affirmative action is meant to correct: People coming to the arbitrary conclusion that someone is "an idiot" despite all evidence to the contrary, except if you consider not being a white man evidence.

The weirdest bicycle since The Third Policeman

"Bosnia and Herzegovina is like a bicycle," says Lord (Paddy) Ashdown, who served as the country's UN high representative between 2002 and 2006. "If it is in constant motion, the chances of things going wrong are avoidable. As long as there is momentum. If it stops or is pedalled backwards, that is when I fear the prevalent mood becomes one of pessimism. Then there is the risk that it turns in on itself. And it has lost momentum.

Realists v. Neo-Cons

Blue corner:

...Petraeus expressed the view that the Pakistani army could survive the fall of the government of President Ali Zardari and that the army, led by Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, is “superior” to the civilian government.

This statement echoed the position indicated by President Barack Obama at the Wednesday evening press conference marking his first 100 days in office. Obama said he was confident that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal would remain secure, “Primarily, initially, because the Pakistani army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands.” He added, “We’ve got strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation.”

In contrast, the American president described Zardari’s government as “very fragile” and lacking “the capacity to deliver basic services” or “gain the support and the loyalty of their people.”

Obama concluded by saying of Pakistan, “We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don't end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.”

Red Corner:

To prevent catastrophe will require considerable American effort and unquestionably provoke resistance from many Pakistanis, often for widely differing reasons. We must strengthen pro-American elements in Pakistan's military so they can purge dangerous Islamicists from their ranks; roll back Taliban advances; and, together with our increased efforts in Afghanistan, decisively defeat the militants on either side of the border. This may mean stifling some of our democratic squeamishness and acquiescing in a Pakistani military takeover, if the civilian government melts before radical pressures. So be it.

May Day

Into the Streets May First!


Alfred Hayes


Into the streets May First!
Into the roaring Square!
Shake the midtown towers!
Shatter the downtown air!
Come with a storm of banners,
Come with an earthquake tread,
Bells, hurl out of your belfries,
Red flag, leap out your red!
Out of the shops and factories,
Comrades, these are our tools,
A song and a banner!
Roll song, from the sea of our hearts,
Banner, leap and be free;
Song and banner together,
Down with the bourgeoisie!

Sweep the big city, march forward,
The day is a barricade!
Pour forth like a second Flood!
Thunder the alps of the air!
Subways are roaring our milllons --

Comrades, into the square !!!


Alfred Hayes, May 1, 1934

AMY GOODMAN: Why would any library agree to give over their work to a private company?

BREWSTER KAHLE: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Because Google was going to pay for the digitization of these books. And what they said originally is that they would—like a web search engine, they would go and index these books and then allow people to see bits and pieces, but direct people back to the libraries or direct people back to bookstores to be able to get them. What we now find through this suit is Google’s ambitions were far greater than just directing people back to where they came from; they wanted to be the library or the bookstore themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: So they will make money on these libraries?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Not only will they make money, they will be the sole organization to control access to these works.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “control access”?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Well, if they want those books to be available to people, they can have it in their search engine and rank it high. If books are things they don’t want to have available, I don’t know, for any reason that corporations might want to do that, they can take it effectively out of the library. If they get to be the library that the next generation grows up with, then they get to decide who has access to works, and if you happen to be reading a book, they’ll know about it.

Speaking Of Swine

The Gospel of the Creole Pig by Michelange Quay

The NAFTA Flu

The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.

False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the current “swine flu” media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international sale.

None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international pandemic.

Welcome to the aftermath of “free trade.” Authorities now want you to grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember this: The real name of this infirmity is “The NAFTA Flu,” the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of “free trade” agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.

Tell her he's a liar. Tell her he's an anti-Semite. Tell her we'll ruin his life.

Everyone involved in the dispute over William I. Robinson talks about lines being crossed.

A tenured professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Robinson said that his critics have crossed lines of fairness by equating his criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and that the faculty judicial system is crossing lines that are supposed to protect academic freedom by investigating him.

His critics say that he crossed a line of professionalism by sending e-mail to all of the students in one of his courses material about "parallel" images of Nazi and Israeli attacks. Some students view the material as anti-Semitic, and they quit the course and filed a grievance against him.

Faculty members are in the process of selecting a panel that will consider the charges against Robinson and determine whether to recommend that a standing faculty panel conduct a full investigation of the incident. While no action has been taken against him at this time, he views the inquiries as an attempt to quash criticism of Israel. Robinson is consulting with lawyers and may sue to block the coming proceedings.

At issue is an e-mail message that Robinson sent to the approximately 80 students in January in a course about sociology and globalization. The e-mail contained an an article criticizing the Israeli military's actions in Gaza. Part of the e-mail was an assemblage of photos from Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews and from Israel's actions in Gaza. Students were invited to look at the "parallel images." A message from Robinson argued that Gaza would be like "Israel's Warsaw."

For Gaza? Honestly?

Seven Jewish Children - a Play for Gaza.

Now what could Gaza want with this play I wonder?

Someone in a haloscan somewhere "was struck by how powerful and moving it was". Yes.

The crazed, positively illiterate reactions of Jacobson and Goldberg of course incite one to defend the play from their absurd, cynical, malicious comments.

And that's a pity because the piece is not only anti-Semitic (in a distinctively British philoSemitic way) but, more disturbingly, contemptuously Orientalist, Eurocentric (racist) and Imperial-apologetic. And of course a very competent piece of theatre. Engaging, moving and entertaining.

Did the British public really need yet another piece of deft kitsch of this sort, another compelling statement of the comfortingly familiar white British viewpoint which shoves Palestinians to the barely glimpsed margins of their own calamities, reduces them to silhouettes loping along the background horizon on camels and bloodied corpses flashed on television, while preferring to examine (as foil for its own righteous self) the endlessly fascinating collective psyche of an AngloAmerican-mass-culture-produced Jewish Tribe as the ultimate Type of victim-perpetrator, a compelling figure of traumatised imperialist, and to remind us that history arrived in Palestine with European Zionists in the early 20th century? “For Gaza”, yet another solemn account of how terribly some previous incarnations, less ancestors than earlier avatars of the Type, of the agents of white supremacist imperialism besieging and bombarding it once suffered? Gaza needs yet another reiteration of how really the Middle East came under European imperial domination and so remains because of some anguished parental protectiveness taken to extremes? Another acknowledgement that the path to Palestinian Liberation must lie through the therapeutic mass psychoanalysis and cure of the only true protagonist of Palestinian history: "The Jewish People", that is, generations of identically loving parents of little girls?

“For Gaza” yet another touching tale of the psychic pain and terror endured by the European overlords? “For Gaza” a play about the eternally well meaning compassionate innocent inheritor of expropriated wealth and land, a parade of little harmless helpless girl children, hiding from Cossacks, orphaned by Nazis in Europe, cherished by refusenik cousins in Israel? "For Gaza" another explanation of how all the propaganda fables under which Palestinian history is obscured - here on stage yet again - have been concocted to protect the ignorant naivety of a vulnerable little girl, to keep this innocent of genteel civilisation from being frightened? “For Gaza” yet another emphatic illustration that Palestinian suffering is endowed with what little significance it has – should it become too garish and bloody - only by the hazy disquieting reflections it leaves in the piquantly tormented psyche of this ordinary European family with its pretext children, giving rise to the familiar powerful poignant stories - so familiar they can be fully conveyed in this abbreviated way (the entire genre of Holocausterie transmitted by "don’t tell her what they did”) - that English people tell their children and their theatre audiences?

(I suppose it is what one expects of a British playwright whose Romania of 1989 hosts vampires and whose "critique" of British colonialism consists of a sex farce set in that old reliable "unspecified African country".)

Reality

Pynchon, Vineland

Justin found his father and Zoyd in the back of a pickup, watching “Say, Jim,” a half-hour sit-com based on “Star Trek,” in which all the actors were black except for the Communications Officer, a freckled white redhead named Lieutenant O’Hara. Whenever Spock came on the bridge, everybody made Vulcan hand salutes and went around high-threeing. About the time the show ended, Prairie came by, Zoyd and Flash went off looking for beer, and she and Justin settled down, semi-brother and sister, in front of the eight O’Clock Movie, Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story. It was mostly Pee-wee talking in a foreign accent, or sitting around in front of some pieces of paper with some weird-looking marker pen, and the kids’ attention kept wandering to each other. “There’s the Movie at Nine,” Justin said, looking in the listings, “Magnificent Disaster, TV movie about the ’83-’84 NBA playoffs – wasn’t that just back in the summer? Pretty quick movie.”

“They’ve been getting quicker over the years, from what I remember,” Prairie said.

“Hey Prairie, would you like to baby-sit me sometime?”

She gave him a look. “Some baby. Maybe I’ll have to kid-sit you.”

“What’s that?”

“Involves some tickling,” Prairie already headed for her new brother’s armpits and flanks, and Justin squirming even before they touched.

Out under yellow bulbs at a long weathered table, Zoyd found himself trying to help flash with the shock of meeting so many in-laws in one place, both men from time to time looking around fearfully, like unarmed visitors in a jungle clearing, as out beyond this particular patch of light Traverses and Beckers went practising on scales, working on engines, debating, talking back to the Tube, sending up gusts of laughter like ritual smoke cast to an unappeasable wind. A Traverse grandmother somewhere was warning children against the October blackberries of this coast, “They belong to the Devil, any that you eat are his property, and he don’t like blackberry thieves – he’ll come after ya.” Even sceptical adolescents weaved in her voice’s spell. “When you see those unhappy souls out by the roadside, back up the lanes, in the ruins of the old farms, wherever the briars grow thick, harvesting berries out in the clouds and rain of October, why just drive by, and don’t look back, because you’ll know where they’ve come from, and who their labor belongs to, and where they have to go back to at the close of the day.” And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a pre-fascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows. One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began – some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia – Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath.