No beaver activity today. Maybe his teeth are sore. Maybe there is a pattern. The beaver started out with two days making good progress chewing on my tree. That was followed by three says of little or no activity. Then there were two more days with lots of progress. Then there has been two days of little or no activity.

What goes on here? Does the beaver work a few days, collect his paycheck and go on a binge? Does the beaver have dental problems that need taking care of? Or is the beaver just a slacker Islander like I first thought? Enquiring minds want to know.

Based on previous experience, we can assume that the beaver will be taking another day off for recovering from who knows what. That will be followed by two days of feverish gnawing. That may be enough to topple the tree. Stay tuned to find out. The tension is mounting.

The gift that keeps on giving

US Wins Defeat of Depleted Uranium Study

After lobbying by Washington, the General Assembly rejected yesterday an Iraqi proposal that the UN study the effects of the depleted-uranium shells used by US-led forces in the Gulf War.

Baghdad has insisted for years that there is a link between the depleted uranium used in armor-piercing weapons during the 1991 war and an increase in the number of Iraqis with leukemia and other kinds of cancer.
[read more]

thanks to kill your tv dot com

A chamber of horrors so close to the 'Garden of Eden'

I thought I had a strong stomach – toughened by the minefields and foul frontline hospitals of Angola, by the handiwork of the death squads in Haiti and by the wholesale butchery of Rwanda. But I nearly lost my breakfast last week at the Basrah Maternity and Children's Hospital in southern Iraq.

Dr Amer, the hospital's director, had invited me into a room in which were displayed colour photographs of what, in cold medical language, are called "congenital anomalies", but what you and I would better understand as horrific birth deformities. The images of these babies were head-spinningly grotesque – and thank God they didn't bring out the real thing, pickled in formaldehyde. At one point I had to grab hold of the back of a chair to support my legs.

I won't spare you the details. You should know because – according to the Iraqis and in all likelihood the World Health Organisation, which is soon to publish its findings on the spiralling birth defects in southern Iraq – we are responsible for these obscenities.

During the Gulf war, Britain and the United States pounded the city and its surroundings with 96,000 depleted-uranium shells. The wretched creatures in the photographs – for they were scarcely human – are the result, Dr Amer said.
[read more]

thanks to Unknown News

The Not-War

No War against Afghanistan!

I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability.

Right now we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan which have fought two wars before over Kashmir and yet today are nuclear armed. The longer this war goes on, the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 57 Muslim states in the world, none of whom believe the Bush administration¹s propaganda that this is not a war against Islam.
(...)

I was giving an interview the other day to the San Francisco Chronicle, and the reporter said, "Is there any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves?" I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent. That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946 where the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg Briand Pact of 1928, the predecessor to the UN Charter, and self-defense as determined by themselves. In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg, lawyers for the Nazi defendants had the hutzpah to argue the entire Second World War was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves, and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well, of course, the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no: what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law. That has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves.

Clearly, what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best, this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis, call it what you want. It is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense. Indeed, that was the official position of the United States government. Even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War, when former Under Secretary of State Eugene V. Rosca tried to get the State Department to switch their position, they refused and continued to maintain, no, retaliation is not self-defense. And this is not self-defense what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up as a matter of law, then what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this.
(...)

The critical question is: When will the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency start to turn these powers, that they have under the Ashcroft police state bill, against American citizens? Clearly, that will be the next step.
[read more]

thanks to Unknown News

Poetry interlude

Political Doggerel

Words that belonged to us
Are being buried deep in time

The president of Thebes
Has issued a decree

In the present tense
& beyond appeal

No records shall be kept
The public shall not know

Rest assured the ones who know
Understand the crisis of events

In ways the rest of us
Are too ignorant to see

The nation is at war
There are prices to be paid

We must take these steps
Right now so as to insure

Our way of life will be
Eternally Preserved

We understand the evil
& the good & we will act

Accordingly we will besiege
Our enemies at home

As well as those who live
& breathe beyond the shores

Of this sacred land of ours
That those others would betray

You must understand
We love the flag & state

We will do anything to keep
The freedom to conform

To do anything it takes
To believe is to believe

But buried things will out
If history has power to teach

It teaches this one fact
You cannot hide the truth

The king of Thebes himself . . .
Oh shit, never mind—

Tiresias stumbles on the road
One blind among the blind

Leaning on his staff
He mumbles to himself

“I will not kiss your fucking flag”

[e.e. cummings]

poem and links thanks to reading & writing