The First Bad Man

Out-foxed

Symphony in Slang

The Cat That Hated People

Granma, 24 January 1970:

From the psychological point of view, Dr. Barral has the following opinion of the personality of the prisoner who is responsible for many criminal bombings of the people of DRV:
He showed himself to be intellectually alert during the interview. From a morale point of view he is not in traumatic shock. He is neither dejected nor depressed. He was able to be sarcastic, and even humorous indicative of psychic equilibrium. From the moral and ideological point of view he showed us he is an insensitive individual without human depth, who does not show the slightest concern, who does not appear to have thought about the criminal acts he committed against a population from the almost absolute impunity of his airplane, and that nevertheless those people saved his life, fed him, and looked after his health, and he is now healthy and strong. I believe that he bombed densely populated places for sport. I noted he was hardened, that he spoke of banal things as if he were at a cocktail party.
During the interview he quietly drank three cups of coffee and smoked one of the cigarettes the Vietnamese had placed on the central table.

Our innumeracy means that our fight against these super-rarities is likewise ineffective. Statisticians speak of something called the Paradox of the False Positive. Here's how that works: imagine that you've got a disease that strikes one in a million people, and a test for the disease that's 99% accurate. You administer the test to a million people, and it will be positive for around 10,000 of them – because for every hundred people, it will be wrong once (that's what 99% accurate means). Yet, statistically, we know that there's only one infected person in the entire sample. That means that your "99% accurate" test is wrong 9,999 times out of 10,000! Terrorism is a lot less common than one in a million and automated "tests" for terrorism – data-mined conclusions drawn from transactions, Oyster cards, bank transfers, travel schedules, etc – are a lot less accurate than 99%. That means practically every person who is branded a terrorist by our data-mining efforts is innocent.

"Another Yugoslavia"

Italy puts out unwelcome mat for Roma

As a wave of xenophobia sweeps the country, immigrants find themselves on the run, fearing 'another Yugoslavia'

ERIC REGULY
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
May 21, 2008 at 4:26 AM EDT

ROME — Janos Koztarsasag fears for his safety for the first time since he arrived in Italy in 1989, and his bags are packed. He and his dog, Rex, are clearing out.

The genial 62-year-old Hungarian has no Italian documents and no job, beyond selling secondhand books from his perch on the ancient Milvio bridge in northern Rome. A few weeks ago the police shut down a Roma camp on the banks of the Tiber River, below the bridge.

Since then, the area has been thick with police. The caravan on a nearby street that was his home was towed away.

Mr. Koztarsasag has not been threatened by the police in the Italian crackdown on alleged illegal immigrants, most of them Roma, often called Gypsies, who have moved from Eastern Europe. But he's not pressing his luck. "I'm leaving for France tonight," he said, producing his train ticket and the dog's vaccination card. "I'm afraid."

His Romanian friend Nico, who lives in a tent in a Roma camp but insists he is not a Roma, said he's plotting his escape too. Both men said racism is suddenly alive in Italy and that ethnic tensions could turn the country into "another Yugoslavia."
The Italians are fearful too. A recent poll found 68 per cent of Italians want Roma kicked out of the country. Many are also happy to see any jobless or illegal Eastern European and North African expelled or moved from squalid urban camps to the countryside.

They blame the Roma for crimes from the petty to the violent and, in extreme cases, have resorted to crowd retaliation. Last week several hundred Italians used sticks and gasoline bombs to attack a Roma camp in the eastern suburbs of Naples. They went in after a teenage Roma girl was accused of trying to kidnap a baby (some reports said she may have been playing with the baby). "Out, out!" they yelled, according to local news reports. "You're dirty and smelly and rob babies."

Italy's anti-immigrant campaign has been building for some time, as the European Union adds new members. Romania and Bulgaria were admitted in January. Citizens of 27 countries are free to live where they wish, though many countries, including Italy, still require work permits and related documents.

As the number of Roma increased in Italy - as many as 1,000 a week arrive in Rome, according to some estimates - the media and the politicians, including some centre-left politicians, demanded a crackdown. "The Invasion of Nomads," was one headline last year in the Corriere della Sera, Italy's top daily newspaper. Last spring the municipalities of Rome and Milan issued "security" pacts that appeared to allow the police to run roughshod through Roma camps and shantytowns.

The tension has mounted since then. Last autumn in Rome, the particularly savage slaying of Giovanna Reggiani, the 47-year-old wife of an Italian naval captain, sparked something close to anti-immigrant panic. The man accused of robbing, sexually assaulting and beating her to death was Romanian.

A few days later the Italian president signed an emergency decree to allow prefects (the local Interior Ministry representatives) to expel EU citizens if they are judged public security threats. About the same time, Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome who is now national opposition leader after failing to defeat Silvio Berlusconi in the recent national election, said the Roma are guilty of 75 per cent of the city's petty crime.

EU Employment Commissioner Vladimir Spidla yesterday reminded Italy that all European citizens must be treated equally, and warned the government not to discriminate against Roma people.

Maurizio Pagani, the vice-president of Opera Nomadi, a volunteer group that arranges jobs, housing and education for the Roma, said the rise of the political right and the centre-right in Italy is bad news for the immigrants in general and the Roma in particular. "It all comes from the right and their call for security," he said.
Mr. Berlusconi's centre-right movement owes its election victory in part to its get-tough policy on immigrants. The virulently anti-immigrant Lega Nord (Northern League) is part of Mr. Berlusconi's ruling coalition and its leader, Umberto Bossi, was made Minister of Institutional Reforms and Federalism. "This operation against illegal immigrants is what people want," Mr. Bossi said recently. "They ask us for security and we have to give it to them."

Rome's new mayor, Gianni Alemanno, the founder of the Social Right party, has joined the anti-immigrant crusade too. He has vowed to dismantle the "nomad camps" where the Roma live in "third-world conditions." In a visit to a camp this week, he said "there are no words to describe what I saw."

Afraid that Italy is in the grip of xenophobic fervour, the human-rights and Roma assistance groups are going on the offensive. Mr. Pagani, of Opera Nomadi, said the campaign against the Roma has gone way too far, even though he admits some are guilty of "micro criminality." He said not all Roma can be lumped together; half of the 160,000 or so of the Roma in Italy are Italian citizens and another 25,000 are war refugees from the former Yugoslavia.

Last week the European Roma Rights Centre, a human-rights group funded by George Soros, the New York hedge fund manager and philanthropist, sent a letter to Mr. Berlusconi demanding "urgent intervention by Italian authorities to adequately protect Roma in the country from further acts of racist aggression and to diffuse the climate of anti-Romani hostility."

Tara Bedard, the ERRC's programs co-ordinator in Budapest, said there are no data backing up Mr. Veltroni's assertion that 75 per cent of Rome's petty crime is committed by the Roma, and scant evidence that the expulsions were legally carried out. "Expulsions are allowed but a legal process has to be followed," she said.

Italy's war against the Roma is now being criticized across Europe.

Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, Spain's Deputy Premier, said the Spanish government "rejects violence, racism and xenophobia, and therefore cannot agree with what's happening in Italy." Italy's Foreign Minister dismissed the criticism as unwarranted interference in domestic affairs.

In Italy, however, there is no warning from the mainstream Italian media or the top politicians that the crackdown is out of control.

"Realistically, this could get worse when you have a government in Italy promoting the negative image of the Roma," Ms. Bedard said.

“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights. “I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It's just not worth it anymore to do.’”

Comedy Central: The Marxist Colbert Report

Today's routine.

Nixon was heroic. Hamas and Hezbollah intend to "push the Jews into the sea." There's a constant mindless threatening unrest going on in the outskirts of Paris, whose protagonists are Muslims. Most importantly - for the lead propagandist and ideologist for the privatisers and ethnic cleansers of Slovenia - the openly fascist doctrine: ethnic homogeneity and ethnic nationalism are necessary to true democracy.

if you don’t have a basic patriotic identification—not nationalism, but in the sense of “we are all members of the same nation and so on”—then democracy doesn’t function. You cannot have a living democracy in this pure multiculturalist liberal dream.

That deserves to be read twice:

if you don’t have a basic patriotic identification—not nationalism, but in the sense of “we are all members of the same nation and so on”—then democracy doesn’t function. You cannot have a living democracy in this pure multiculturalist liberal dream.

You see, in the good old days, after the massive ethnic cleasings and homogenising work of generations of ruling class policy, Western Europe was racially homogenous Yerope divided into ethnically homogenous nations. For fifty years, paradise nearly reigned. But now, others have come, the protagonists of this sinister multiculturalism, and brought "new divisions". In Paris they burn cars just to insist they're here. So this paradise of ethnically nationally cohesive Western Europe, with its democracy, high living standard, and civil liberties, cannot last. These others have come with their otherness, incendiary outbursts, and multicultures to divide and destroy it.

We cannot save the democracy and the civil liberties, but we can save the capitalism, and control or otherwise deal with these multicultural others, with an authoritarian State. Leftists must withdraw and let ruling class history take its course.

Listen, let’s be frank. I don’t know what to say about the United States. But if we take Western Europe in the last fifty years, let’s be frank. One should give to the devil what belongs to the devil. OK, we can say this was because of economic exploitation of third world, but nonetheless, I don’t think there was, in the entire history of humanity, an era where so many people lived comparatively, in comparative way, such—in such relative welfare and freedom that’s there. One should admit this, honestly, not to engage into the Stalinist statistics proving that they are not doing so well. The problem is, I think, it cannot last. The new divisions are getting visible on and on. And so, again, the problem is not—my fear is not that capitalism will not last forever. The struggle is beginning today for what will replace it. There, we will have to make tough decisions.
If we don’t act, I can see quite well the possibility—some Western version of the Chinese option, what they poetically call Asian values capitalism, which is really capitalism with authoritarian structure. Here, I see a world historical meaning of what goes on in China. Until now, liberals were saying, OK, maybe in the beginning you need a little bit of authoritarian push to create conditions for capitalism, like Pinochet, Chile, South Korea. But they claim, sooner or later, capitalism always brings then democracy. I doubt if this holds. I think—my hopes are—our hopes are vain if we expect the same in China. I think they are a model where capitalism and democracy are dissociated, and capitalism, if anything, works even better. This is the sign of the future.

So, if “we don’t act”, “we”, those in the West of Europe who count, will have authoritarian capitalism, which “works” very well – for someone, us I guess - better even than in lib dem situations, rendered impossible now by the multiculture invasion, and we will stave off the threats presented by the “new divisions” ( the Islamofascists in Palestine and Lebanon as well as the “constant unrest” in the banlieues of Paris). He praises Fukuyama for recognising the need for a stronger State. Zizek’s conclusion, then is, his advice is - don’t act:

OK, maybe, the point that I always like to repeat: don’t beat—don’t get caught into a fake discourse of humanitarian emergency. Remember that when somebody is telling you, “You’re doing your theory. You are dreaming. But people are starving out there and so on. Let’s do something,” this is the threat. This is the threat.
Today’s hegemonic ideology is this kind of state of emergency ideology. What we need is to withdraw—don’t be afraid to withdraw and think. You know, Marx thesis eleven: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is, we have now to change it. Maybe, as good Marxists, we should turn it around. Maybe we are trying to change it too much. It’s time to redraw and to interpret it again, because do we really know what is going on today?
…. Don’t be—don’t feel guilty for withdrawing from immediate engagement and for trying to understand what’s going on.

One more time now, the highlights:

if you don’t have a basic patriotic identification—not nationalism, but in the sense of “we are all members of the same nation and so on”—then democracy doesn’t function. You cannot have a living democracy in this pure multiculturalist liberal dream... it cannot last....The struggle is beginning today for what will replace it. There, we will have to make tough decisions....If we don’t act, I can see quite well the possibility—some Western version of the Chinese option, what they poetically call Asian values capitalism, which is really capitalism with authoritarian structure.....You know, Marx thesis eleven: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is, we have now to change it. Maybe, as good Marxists, we should turn it around. Maybe we are trying to change it too much....Remember that when somebody is telling you...“ Let’s do something,” this is the threat. This is the threat....What we need is to withdraw—don’t be afraid to withdraw....Don’t be—don’t feel guilty for withdrawing from immediate engagement.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, "Honest Reporting" claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews "poisoning the wells."

Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a renowned plastic surgeon, wrote My Beautiful Mommy to help patients explain their transformation to their children. The story guides children through Mommy's surgery and healing process in a friendly, nonthreatening way.

The Obama phenomenon has been likened to that of cults, celebrity groupies and Messiah worshipers. But what we’re actually witnessing is ObamaMania (as in tulip mania), the third and final bubble orchestrated and financed by the wonderful Wall Street folks who brought us the first two: the Nasdaq/tech bubble and a subprime-mortgage-in-every-pot bubble.

What Do You Think

At a meeting not long ago with mayor Juppé, to discuss the "twinning" of Bordeaux with another city - the town twinning thing, you know - one of those invited didn't have a suggestion, and when pressed said well, why not try first twinning south Bordeaux with north Bordeaux?

Neighborhood twinning, for your consideration.

Farce. Sort Of.

"The American taxpayers are paying for too many things . . . that the Iraqis ought to pay for out of their surplus," said Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). "They export 2 million barrels of oil a day. That oil brings in about $120 a barrel. It is unconscionable, it is inexcusable, it makes no common sense for a country that has that kind of wealth and that kind of surplus in our banks and their banks to be sending us the tab."

Oops!

According to the art historian Kenneth Clark, The Third of May 1808 is "the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention".

"Rats are treated with more humanity"

Sami al-Hajj hits out at US captors

Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj has hit out at the US treatment of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay military prison where he was held for nearly six and a half years.

Saying that "rats are treated with more humanity", al-Hajj said inmates' "human dignity was violated". Al-Hajj, who arrived in Sudan early on Friday, was carried off the US air force jet on a stretcher and immediately taken to hospital.

Later, he had an emotional reunion with his wife and son. His brother, Asim al-Hajj, said he did not recognise the cameraman because he looked like a man in his 80s.

VIVA LA HUELGA!

Press Release:

INTERNATIONAL
LONGSHORE &
WAREHOUSE UNION

...
Longshore workers are standing down at West Coast ports:

“We’re standing up for America, we’re supporting the troops, and we’re telling politicians that it’s time to end the Iraq war now!”

(SAN FRANCISCO, CA) More than 25,000 longshore workers at 29 west coast ports are exercising their First Amendment rights today by taking a day off work and calling for an end to the war in Iraq.

“Longshore workers are standing-down on the job and standing up for America,” said ILWU International President Bob McEllrath. “We’re supporting the troops and telling politicians in Washington that it’s time to end the war in Iraq.”

McEllrath says rank-and-file memb ers made their own democratic decision in early February when Longshore Caucus delegates voted to take action on May 1.Employers were notified of the plan, but refused to accommodate the union’s request despite plenty of advance notice. The employer group, represented by the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) consists of large carriers and port operators, most of which are foreign-owned.

“Big foreign corporations that control global shipping aren’t loyal or accountable to any country,” said McEllrath. “For them it’s all about making money. But longshore workers are different. We’re loyal to America, and we won’t stand by while our country, our troops, and our economy are destroyed by a war that’s bankrupting us to the tune of 3 trillion dollars. It’s time to stand up, and we’re doing our part today.”

-30-

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) represents 60,000 working women and men in five states (California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii) and Canada. Through more than 60 locals ILWU unites longshore workers, warehouse workers, watchmen, clerks, ferry and tugboat workers, tourism industry workers and agricultural workers.