Archives

Friday   January 23   2004

the real war

Only two posts today. Not that there is any shortage of depressing items for links. I just didn't want anyone to miss this piece by Arundhati Roy. This is a must read.

The New American Century
by Arundhati Roy

Unlike in the old days, the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diarrhea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism. The best allegory for New Racism is the tradition of "turkey pardoning" in the United States. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation has presented the US President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they'll even speak English!) That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys--the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself)--are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO--so who can accuse those organizations of being antiturkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee--so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalization? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way? As part of the project of New Racism we also have New Genocide. New Genocide in this new era of economic interdependence can be facilitated by economic sanctions. New Genocide means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Denis Halliday, who was the UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between 1997 and 1998 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives. In the new era, apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalize inequity. Why else would it be that the US taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer twenty times more than a garment made in Britain? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa beans, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try to turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 percent of the world's cocoa beans produce only 5 percent of the world's chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidized electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonizing regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes and repay them some $382 billion a year?

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12:08 AM - link

photography

chris jordan photography

  thanks to Conscientious

12:04 AM - link

motivation for 2004

Despair, Inc.

  thanks to The Cartoonist

02:30 AM - link

iraq — vietnam on internet time

Iraqis making history

Friends, mark your calendars. Iraq's people are these days, finally, becoming the subjects of their own history. It now seems clear that in the process they will strike fateful blows not only to the ridiculous "Rube Goldberg election plan" proclaimed by Washington and its quasi-puppets of the IGC in November but also, beyond that, to George W. Bush's entire concept for a US-dominated Iraq that would lead the rest of the Middle East into a relationship of long-term servitude to US commercial interests. Such are my conclusions after reading a wide range of reporting of yesterday's 100,000-strong, Sistani-led demonstrations in the heart of Baghdad.

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Iraqis demand polls as U.S. seeks UN help

Tens of thousands of Shi'ite Muslims have marched through Baghdad to demand early elections, as Iraq's U.S. governor entreatied the United Nations to back his political plans for Iraq.

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An Absence of Legitimacy

On one side is history's most awesome superpower, victorious in war, ruling Iraq with nearly 150,000 troops and funding its reconstruction to the tune of $20 billion this year. On the other side is an aging cleric with no formal authority, no troops and little money, who is unwilling to even speak in public. Yet last June, when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani made it known that he didn't like the U.S. proposal to transfer power to Iraqis, the plan collapsed. And last week, when Sistani announced that he is still unhappy with the new U.S. proposal, L. Paul Bremer rushed to Washington for consultations. What does this man have that the United States doesn't? Legitimacy. Sistani is regarded by Iraqi Shiites as the most learned cleric in the country. He is also seen as having been uncorrupted by Saddam Hussein's reign. "During the Iran-Iraq war, Sistani managed to demonstrate that he could be controlled neither by Saddam nor by his fellow ayatollahs in Iran, which has given him enormous credibility," says Yitzhak Nakash, the leading authority on Iraqi Shiites. The United States fears that he will brand it as colonialist and the new transition government as a puppet regime. American officials know these few words could derail their plans. The occupation can survive an insurgency, but it cannot survive 10 countrywide protest marches with thousands chanting, "Colonialists go home!"

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When Sistani speaks, Bush listens

Who is the most powerful man in Iraq today? Not L Paul Bremer, the US viceroy of Iraq, not even Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of the coalition forces. It is that quiet Shi'ite cleric who is seldom seen in public, and who does not grant any interviews, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani. He communicates with his followers through written edicts (fatwas), and everyone, including the US president, listens.

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Why the US is running scared of elections in Iraq
Washington's plan to transfer power without a direct vote is a fraud

U.S. Tries to Give Moderates an Edge in Iraqi Elections

UK officials say Iraq elections by June viable

  thanks to Juan Cole

The $500 billion fire sale
In a shattered postwar Iraq, there are rich pickings to be had - and for US businesses at least, it promises to be a risk-free bonanza. Naomi Klein joins those at a trade show jostling for a stake

  thanks to Yolanda Flanagan

The devil and L Paul Bremer

A devilish thought is forming in the back of the American mind: which is better, to have Iraqis shooting at American soldiers, or at each other? During the Cold War, Moscow stood to gain from instability, and Washington sought to stabilize allied regimes (Iran being the exception that proved the rule). Now, with no strategic competitor, America can pick up the pieces at its leisure. As in finance, volatility favors the player with the most options ( Geopolitics in the light of option theory, Jan 26, 2002). No one in the Bush administration wants to let slip the dogs of civil war. On the contrary, the White House still hopes that Iraq will set a precedent for democracy in the Muslim world. Yet civil war is the path of least resistance, so clearly so that the punditry of the world press has raised the alarm with one voice. A Google news search turns up 900 hits for the search terms "Iraq" and "civil war". What is so bad about a civil war? No self-respecting state ever has been formed without one. All the European countries had at least one (some of them called religious wars). America has had two. The Middle East and Africa have them all the time (Civil War: A do-it-yourself guide, Aug 29, 2003). States are founded on compromise. Civil war is just nature's way of telling the diehards to slow down.

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02:22 AM - link

motorcycles

In 1968 I bought a Honda CB450 "Black Bomber". It was a pretty hot little bike. And then came the 1969 Honda CB750 and everything changed. It was a truly legendary motorcycle. It was stunning in 1969. Now there is a guy that is building "new" 1969 CB750s from NOS (New Old Stock) parts. The 1969 CB750 is still stunning. And I still want one. At almost $20,000, I'm afraid I won't be getting one this time, either.

Mr. CB750
World Motorcycles boss Vic World promised to assemble a new and genuine 1969 Honda CB750 K0 in front of the cameras--and in a day. How could we resist?

It's really not the sort of offer you turn down. The idea of watching a brand-new Honda CB750 take shape within 24 hours is enough to drag me out of bed--and photographer James Brown 500 miles from Los Angeles--to World's well-camouflaged Northern California industrial-park shop to see what's what. Monday, 2:00 p.m. Once World has opened the shop's triple-security locks, we wander inside, looking for the six-foot-high toolboxes. Instead, World points out a Kennedy Jr. foldout box and two slim wallets of Snap-on wrenches. "They're always surprised not to see big toolboxes," he says. We're shocked and trying not to show it. To Mr. World, tool money is better spent on genuine CB750 parts, and he loves buying 1969 CB750 parts.

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World Motorcycles

World Motorcycles is a company that specializes solely in the restoration of sandcast Honda CB750’s

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You meet the nicest people on a Honda.

01:53 AM - link

economy

This is a must read...

A New American Century?
Iraq and the hidden euro-dollar wars

Despite the apparent swift U.S. military success in Iraq, the U.S. dollar has yet to benefit as safe haven currency. This is an unexpected development, as many currency traders had expected the dollar to strengthen on the news of a U.S. win. Capital is flowing out of the dollar, largely into the Euro. Many are beginning to ask whether the objective situation of the U.S. economy is far worse than the stock market would suggest. The future of the dollar is far from a minor issue of interest only to banks or currency traders. It stands at the heart of Pax Americana, or as it is called, The American Century, the system of arrangements on which America’s role in the world rests. Yet, even as the dollar is steadily dropping against the Euro after the end of fighting in Iraq, Washington appears to be deliberately worsening the dollar fall in public comments. What is taking place is a power game of the highest geopolitical significance, the most fateful perhaps, since the emergence of the United States in 1945 as the world’s leading economic power. The coalition of interests which converged on war against Iraq as a strategic necessity for the United States, included not only the vocal and highly visible neo-conservative hawks around Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. It also included powerful permanent interests, on whose global role American economic influence depends, such as the influential energy sector around Halliburton, Exxon Mobil, ChevronTexaco and other giant multinationals. It also included the huge American defense industry interests around Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Northrup-Grumman and others. The issue for these giant defense and energy conglomerates is not a few fat contracts from the Pentagon to rebuild Iraqi oil facilities and line the pockets of Dick Cheney or others. It is a game for the very continuance of American power in the coming decades of the new century. That is not to say that profits are made in the process, but it is purely a bypro-duct of the global strategic issue. In this power game, least understood is the role of preserving the dollar as the world reserve currency, as a major driving factor contributing to Washington’s power calculus over Iraq in the past months. American domination in the world ultimately rests on two pillars — its overwhelming military superiority, especially on the seas; and its control of world economic flows through the role of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. More and more it is clear that the Iraq war was more about preserving the second pillar – the dollar role – than the first, the military. In the dollar role, oil is a strategic factor.

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  thanks to Badattitudes Journal

Bush's Black Hole Economic Policy

Henry Ford fathered the notion that workers should at least earn a wage high enough to enable them to buy the products they build. Ford's industrialist contemporaries thought he was nuts to pay workers more than the prevailing wage. History, however, proved Ford a visionary whose egalitarian notion spurred the most vibrant, self-sustaining economy in history. The current trend of driving wages down reverses that logic, threatening to reverse the result as well. While American consumers currently benefit from lower prices by feeding on foreign-produced goods, it is a short-term benefit. Over time, more well paying U.S. jobs will be lost and replaced by lower-paying jobs. Eventually American workers will be less and less able to fuel the product-consumption continuum that has been the engine of the American economy for the past 60 years. And then begins the death spiral. Fewer companies will be paying U.S. taxes. Those still domiciled in the U.S. will have lower profits, resulting in less tax revenue. American workers will be paying less in withholding taxes as well since they will be earning less. It is a downward spiral that feeds on itself; a kind of black hole from which no energy or light – or economy – can escape.

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01:28 AM - link

books

The Modern Word

What is TheModernWord.com? The Modern Word is a large network of literary sites dedicated to exploring twentieth century writers who have pushed the envelope of traditional narrative and structure. This includes many writers associated with Modernism, surrealism, "magical realism," and postmodernism. Our mandate includes both writers who have experimented with prose styles and narrative conventions, such as Joyce, Burroughs, or Pynchon, and those who use literary techniques to frame alternate ways of perceiving reality, such as Borges and Philip K. Dick. Errrr....right. So you have no real guiding credo? Isn't this all a bit fuzzy? If this sounds a bit unfocused, that's something we can live with. Labels, genres, schools, movements -- these are things we try to de-emphasize here at The Modern Word. We believe that good literature overflows all boundaries. Of course, there are some elements that many of "our" writers share -- the use of allusion and intertextuality; a tendency for "open texts" and self-reflexive narrative; a fondness for word-games, paradox, and linguistic free-play; an embrace of whimsy or deadpan fabulism; and a desire to use language to create a sense of subjective reality.

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  thanks to wood s lot

This is a wonderful resource. I've been reading Umberto Eco's "Baudolino" and the site has an extensive section on Eco...

Umberto Eco — Porta Ludovica

The Paradox of Porta Ludivoca... the native lives in a "magic space" where the directions front, back, left, and right are not valid and consequently all orientation is impossible

While I've also read "The Name of The Rose" and "The Island of the Day Before", I've not read his non-fiction. His day job is in semiotics and he has two books, which I would really really really like to read — if only some kind souls would buy them for me. Here are Amazon links and they are in my Amazon Wish List.

jobs

The no jobs president
Don't believe the Bush administration's hand-wringing over its pathetic record on employment. The president's backers want a stagnant job market -- it keeps the help from getting uppity.

The Bush years are a study in deliberately wasted effort: Repeal of the estate tax. Tax exemption for stock dividends. Ballistic Missile Defense. The USA PATRIOT Act. The war on Iraq. Each of these initiatives has a clientele. None of them seriously aims to achieve its stated goal, be that economic recovery or homeland security or national security writ large. The method is clear to any who choose to study closely: It is a method of subterfuge and deception. It is the systematic and relentless pursuit of partly hidden agendas, sold to the public with slogans. The tax cuts were not aimed to produce recovery and jobs; they were a reward to the rich. The war on Iraq was not waged to help the war on terror; it was about getting Saddam, as we have now had confirmed by Paul O'Neill's report on the Iraq agenda Bush carried from the beginning. Missile defense is not about North Korea, and still less about Iran or any other "rogue state"; it's about the contracts. In all these cases, the decision on what to do came first -- then the circumstances of the day were arranged to suit. So it is today on the economy. What does Bush want? He wants a growth rate high enough to get him through the election. That's obvious. After that, he doesn't care. His clientele -- the military contractors, oil companies, pharmaceutical firms and big media that control this government -- make their money on patents, contracts and the exercise of monopoly power. (Case in point: Bush is pressuring impoverished Central Americans, in trade negotiations, to add 10 years to the length of drug patents.) These people have no interest in full employment. They like unemployment, weak labor, low wages and a government that bullies on their behalf. And after the election, if Bush wins, that is what they will get for four more years.

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David Neiwert has some additional comments on this piece...

Latin Americanization

I'm not sure how many people writing in the blogosphere -- or working in journalism, or especially among the pundit class -- have a clear sense of the reality of this existence -- what it is like to be trapped working for a Wal-Mart or a Con-Agra or any of the thousands of faceless bad bosses whose main purpose in life seems to be finding ways to worsen everyday life for their workers: refusing raises, shortening hours, slashing benefits, pitting employees against each other, allowing work conditions to steadily deteriorate. Eventually they may taste it, of course (anyone who works for a midsized or small-town chain newspaper already has), but for now it is mostly an abstraction, and thus not something as important as, say, John Kerry's haircut. I have, however -- when I was younger, and before I graduated from college. It is nearly impossible to describe: the claustrophobia, the oppressiveness, the complete mindfuck that is life when one is caught up in this machinery. All I can say is that I worked desperately to escape it, and swore I would try never to forget the masses of people out there caught up in it. I used to like to joke: "A recession is the Republican way of shortening the lift lines at the ski hill." But things are much more serious than that now. Much more. If the current generation of Democrats does not recognize it, and fails to begin shouting it from the rooftops, then I genuinely fear that Frank Church's darkest premonitions will finally be realized. It simply boggles my mind that, over the past generation, progressives have allowed working-class people to increasingly identify with conservative Republicans. The GOP has mainly achieved this through a combination of demagoguery and jingoism, appealing to people's baser instincts, particularly the desperate selfishness that in fact is forcibly part of life in the sinking classes. In the process, they have convinced working people to slit their own throats -- and ultimately everyone else's too.

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12:18 AM - link

sculpture

LORRAINE VAIL

Deity
1994
Bronze Sculpture
Edition of 9
25"h x 9"w x 23"d

  thanks to cipango

11:50 PM - link

emperor bush

The U.S. Supreme Court and The Imperial Presidency: How President Bush Is Testing the Limits of His Presidential Powers
by John W. Dean

Can the President of the United States arrest any American he suspects of being a terrorist and toss him in a military brig, deny him a lawyer, omit to bring any charges against him -- yet indefinitely keep him imprisoned nonetheless? Can the President kidnap foreigners charged with violating federal law, and bring them to the United States to stand trial? How about Osama bin Laden, for starters? These are only a few of the issues raised by cases now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court that will examine the limits of presidential powers. As David Savage, the legal writer for the Los Angeles Times, has noted, this is a remarkable collection of cases. "[T]he justices have voted to take up five cases that test the president's power to act alone and without interference from Congress or the courts," Savage explains. The description of these cases, as Savage has ably summarized them, is startling: "They involve imprisoning foreign fighters at overseas bases, holding American citizens without charges in military brigs, preserving the secrecy of White House meetings, enforcing free-trade treaties despite environmental concerns, and abducting foreigners charged with U.S. crimes." What the Supreme Court has placed on its agenda, in short, is the Imperial Presidency -- that is, the Presidency in which the Executive largely acts alone, pushing the Constitution to the limits and beyond. And how the Justices deal with this overwhelmingly important topic could affect the reelection prospects of the Bush presidency, for, as David Savage notes, at least four of the five rulings are anticipated to be handed down during the summer of 2004 -- right in the middle of the presidential campaign.

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11:41 PM - link

photography

Camera Studies in Iraq

This album of 73 photographs of Iraq from the early twentieth century was published by the Hasso Brothers in Baghdad and printed by Rotophot A.G. in Berlin. The collection as a whole serves to contextualize the monuments further described on ArchNet. Of the collection there is a selection of photographs of an ethnographic nature that would ordinarily not be included on ArchNet. True to the publication, each image is captioned as it appears in the original, regardless of the sometimes questionable, Orientalist-slanted terminology.

Ctesiphon as it looks from an aeroplane

This is part of the remarkable site ArchNet, which I ran across in in researching sites in India for the latest report in Griff's Story, which should be up this week.

11:35 PM - link

empire

America's Empire of Bases

As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.

[more]

  thanks to Juan Cole

11:20 PM - link

photography

"Does Size Matter?"
Pedro Meyer
January 2004

Have you ever opened your e-mail to find in your inbox several e-mails with the subject: "Does Size Matter?" I think you might have. I read somewhere that around 250 billion of such spam e-mails have been sent all over the world. In the prestigious Journal of Photographic Arts, CAMERAWORK published in San Francisco, Vol # 30, this past winter, I came across an interesting article by Geoffrey Batchen, under the title "Does Size Matter?" making reference to the intimacy between the viewer and the size of the photograph questioning through the size of the image presented the photographic experience. The title of the article I perceived as essentially being a teaser, however, it never got to humor me through out the entire article. I wondered how can someone who I assume receives email and is part of modern society, not have been the recipient of at least two dozen penis enlargement offerings claiming that "Size does Matter" and thus made the connection between the title of that piece and the spam mail which has inundated all mailboxes from Argentina to Zambia and all the countries in between in the alphabet soup, by the billions, literally As I read the article in further detail, I soon discovered why the author probably never made such a deliberate connection and the title simply wasn’t even an intentional pun. It turns out that in his rather well documented article the existence of the Internet as a source for viewing photographs is totally ignored. It would seem according to the examples presented by the author, that the only public places one has the option to look at pictures is in the context of either museums or gallery spaces Strangely enough, even one of the photographers Mr. Batchen makes reference to, Seydou Keita from Mali, in relation to the various sizes of how his images were exhibited in the recent past, is a photographer we have featured in ZoneZero (here on the internet) for the past six years, yet the author seems not to be cognizant of this fact anymore than he is of the internet in general. I am sure that if he had included the existence of the pictures on the computer screen in his considerations of image size, his analysis would have benefited greatly.

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11:16 PM - link

mental illness

How Satan is propping up Bush's war on terror
An obsession with the devil, born out of personal experience, explains why so many fundamentalist Christians believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were working together.

Yet one could make a case that this unglamorous professor is a curious kind of cultural hero. At the very least, Ellis has demonstrated courage and fortitude for little tangible reward. His research field -- Satanism and the occult, especially as perpetuated in the folklore and rituals of teenage culture -- is not seen as respectable either by the society at large or the academic world. He has sporadically been attacked by fundamentalist Christians for spreading the evil gospel of the Horned One. "If you think that Satan is not alive and an ever present threat to Christians," wrote one Penn State alumnus, "then you are either (A) not a Christian or (B) a dupe of Satan himself." The writer went on to say he would pray for Ellis' removal from the classroom -- a prayer the university administration, to its credit, has declined to answer. When I ask whether people in Hazleton judge him harshly because of his scholarly interest in Satan, Ellis chuckles quietly. "I would say they would judge me harshly on my commitment to literacy," he says. "We're in an area where intellectualism is not especially liked." But the more you read about Ellis' research into the history of Ouija boards, chain letters, lucky rabbit's feet and adolescent "legend-tripping" (i.e., late-night visits to haunted graveyards and other spooky locations), the more you understand that behind these obscurities lie key questions in contemporary culture. Among other things, Ellis says he understands exactly why so many Americans believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were working together, despite the lack of any factual evidence to support that claim. In both "Lucifer Ascending" and his 2000 book "Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media," Ellis builds a sober and persuasive argument that the recent hysteria over the influence of Satan in America, much of it emanating from the Christian right, reflects a misunderstanding of a cyclical or dialectical process that has repeated itself for centuries. The dorm-room séance and the midnight cemetery voyage in some dude's unmuffled Camaro, he argues, are debased fragments of an ancient and genuine folk-witchcraft tradition. (More so, perhaps, than the New Age feminist happy-talk of contemporary Wiccans and neo-pagans, although Ellis speaks respectfully of such boutique beliefs.) As such, they reflect an eternal struggle between individuals and institutions over access to spiritual and supernatural realms, and the equally eternal struggle of teenagers to resist adult authority in general and the strictures of organized religion in particular.

[more]

10:17 PM - link

photography

Julio López Saguar
Inside, Under, Behind

martin luther king

The Boondocks
by Aaron McGruder

Martin Luther King: Terrorist
On the stunning disparity between a nation that glorifies war and one that honors Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with a holiday

Let’s not mince words. Were Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. alive today, he would be at risk for being imprisoned indefinitely, without charges or access to legal counsel, as an "enemy combatant." He would be decried, by powerful figures inside and outside government, as at worst a domestic terrorist, at best a publicity-seeking menace whose criticisms of America gave comfort to our unseen enemies. King would not have the opportunity to engage in repeated nonviolent civil disobediences. Media would be quickly bored by the spectacles; a nation accustomed to police violence against protesters yawns at the tanks, rubber bullets, chemical weapons, and “preventative” arrests now commonly used against those who employ the same tactics King himself once used. The felony charges against King would put him away for years -- if he were allowed to stand trial at all.

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The Martin Luther King You Don't See On TV

It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader." The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole. What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968). An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV. Why?

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This is why. Read the entire speech.

"Beyond Vietnam"
by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
4 April 1967
New York City

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." [applause] Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause] A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]

[more]

We still need you, Martin. We still need you.

03:36 AM - link

photography

Photography by Alec Soth

  thanks to Conscientious

03:15 AM - link

campaign 2004

The voting has begun. The sound you hear is the rubber hitting the road.

Who Gets It?
By Paul Krugman

Earlier this week, Wesley Clark had some strong words about the state of the nation. "I think we're at risk with our democracy," he said. "I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame." In other words, the general gets it: he understands that America is facing what Kevin Phillips, in his remarkable new book, "American Dynasty," calls a "Machiavellian moment." Among other things, this tells us that General Clark and Howard Dean, whatever they may say in the heat of the nomination fight, are on the same side of the great Democratic divide. Most political reporting on the Democratic race, it seems to me, has gotten it wrong. Some journalists do, of course, insist on trivializing the whole thing: what I dread most, in the event of an upset in Iowa, is the return of reporting about the political significance of John Kerry's hair. But even those who refrain from turning political reporting into gossip have used the wrong categories. Again and again, one reads that it's about the left wing of the Democratic party versus the centrists; but Mr. Dean was a very centrist governor, and his policy proposals are not obviously more liberal than those of his rivals. The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren't.

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Here is an excellent site that acts as a bullshit detector for the campaign press.

The Campaign Desk
Critique and analysis of 2004 campaign coverage from Columbia Journalism Review

  thanks to daily KOS

The best site for following the Iowa caucuses has been dailyKOS.

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photography

El Nuevo Mundo
The Landscape of Latino Los Angeles

  thanks to life in the present

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This is a good overview of the history of what Israel has done to the Palestinians.

The Geneva Bubble
Ilan Pappe on the prehistory of the latest proposals

What catches the eye, not only in this preface but in the document as a whole, is that while the refugees' right of return is an obstacle that has to be removed if peace and reconciliation are to be achieved, the Jewishness of Israel - i.e. the Jewishness of the original state with the annexed blocks of settlements in the Occupied Territories and greater Jerusalem - is not an obstacle at all. On the contrary, what is missing according to this logic is Palestinian recognition of the new greater Israel. And what is offered to encourage the Palestinians to recognise the state built on the land from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and that was taken from them in 1967? What is the generous offer the Israeli peaceniks loudly urged their counterparts on the Geneva campaign not to pass up? A mini-state, built on 15 per cent of what used to be Palestine, with a capital near Jerusalem and no army. On close reading, the authority and power vested in the aforementioned state bear little relation to any notion of statehood we might derive from global reality or political science textbooks. Far more important, the Geneva project would leave the refugees in exile. The small print says that the Palestinian refugees would be able to choose either to return to what's left of their former country or stay in their camps. As they will probably choose to wait until the international community fulfils its commitment to allow their unconditional return under Resolution 194, they will remain refugees while their compatriots in Israel continue to be second-class citizens in the remaining 85 per cent of Palestine. There is no acknowledgment of the cause of this conflict, the 1948 ethnic cleansing; there is no process of truth and reconciliation that will make Israel accountable for what it did either in 1948 or afterwards. Under these circumstances, neither the Palestinians nor the Arab world at large will feel able to accept a Jewish state.

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This is a very touching piece.

The power of apology

Thus the chances for long-term peace and reconciliation would be greatly advanced if the Israeli government were to finally face the truth. As remote as peace seems today, halting the 55 years of cover-up and apologizing would place peace negotiations between the two people on an entirely different ground. At this stage, the dream of return to Palestine is for many Palestinians a shield against despair, and recognition of the right to return a matter of great principle. A sincere Israeli apology would be a milestone toward reconciliation that no Palestinian could ignore.

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Here are some interesting responses to an interview with Benny Morris I posted a few days ago.

Right of reply / The judgment of history
Last week's interview with historian Benny Morris ("Survival of the fittest" by Ari Shavit, Haaretz Magazine, January 9, 2004) has generated a deluge of readers' responses. Here are some selected comments.

Their faces say it all
A regular day at the checkpoints of the West Bank - the sick, the elderly, parents, children, teachers, merchants, truckers. Go home, you can't cross, go to bed, come back tomorrow.

To the edge and back

When the Knesset met for a political session the next day, it became clear again how little impression Abu Ala's warning had made on Israel. Most speakers ignored it. The prime minister's remarks contained not the slightest reference to Abu Ala in particular or demography in general. Only Shimon Peres was bitterly sarcastic. "Yesterday the prime minister said he wasn't worried about the demographic problem. I'm bursting with envy. How can you not be worried? Between the Mediterranean and the Jordan there are now 5.1 million Jews and 4.9 million non-Jews. Will they vanish in thin air? Will they disappear? Are you planning a transfer?" Sharon sat there slumped in his chair. In answer to these questions, many members of Sharon's coalition are thinking, and increasingly saying: yes, yes, and yes. But what of the more moderate right, those who do not advocate such cruel or apocalyptic solutions (or at least not consciously)? These rightists, it seems, are still fighting the wars of the past on the battlefields of demography, waxing nostalgic over the great victories of yesteryear, basking in the illusion that what used to be, will go on forever.

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Controversial move
Qurei's recent comments have retrieved from the annals of history the controversial one-state solution. But is his intervention serious?

Indeed, the prospect of a bi-national state, however remote it may be, has become Israel's greatest fear, as expressed in a plethora of recent conferences, seminars and statements by leading Israeli intellectuals and politicians warning that Israel is losing its demographic majority. Ironically, this is the same argument used to justify the construction of the wall; the very act that sparked renewed interest in the one-state solution. Hard-line right-wingers who are gaining ground, as was apparent in their huge demonstration in Tel Aviv on Sunday night, don't hesitate to propose brazenly fascist scenarios to "solve the Palestinian issue once and for all". Their proposals include ethnic cleansing, apartheid and even genocide. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, despite his purported commitment to the US-backed roadmap for peace, favours separation, but one on his own terms. In real terms, this separation means confining the 3.6 million Palestinians into cage-like enclaves. Palestinian fears are not exaggerated. Even Israeli peace groups such as Peace Now realise that Sharon's Israel is slowly but definitely pushing the Palestinians to the brink of "a Warsaw ghetto", if not to the "edge of Treblinka", as one Peace Now leader put it recently. While the international community continues to reiterate idle statements about the need for both sides to fulfil their obligations as spelt out in the roadmap, the grim reality haunting Palestinians simply continues to grow more nightmarish. Hence, Qurei's desperate and frustrated statements. This frustration is also prompting many intellectuals and public opinion leaders to demand the dismantlement of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Detractors argue that the reason for the PA's very existence is to realise the goal of Palestinian statehood; but as achieving that goal is becoming increasingly unrealistic, the PA is losing (or has already lost) its raison d'être. One of the main proponents for dismantling the PA is Hani Al-Masri, a PA official and regular columnist in the Ramallah-based Arabic daily, Al-Ayyam. In his column on 13 January, he wrote that Palestinians would have seriously to study the idea of terminating the PA as its very existence allows Israel to continue to impose unilateral measures in the West Bank. "In this case, we will have no choice but to abandon the choice of establishing a Palestinian state on the territories occupied in 1967 and revert to the option of establishing a secular, democratic state in the entirety of Palestine where Jews, Muslims and Christians live on equal footing."

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portraits

Pixel Character Festival

- Download the PSD TEMPLATE - Using the Photoshop pencil tools, try to create characters resembling yourself such as: body, face, hair, favorite clothes, body height, etc, and save it as .gif (less than 2KB)

  thanks to plep

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the end of space science

This is just too depressing. Putting some sorry astronaut's ass in space so he can look out the window is trumping actual science.

U.S. allowing Hubble telescope to degrade

The Hubble Space Telescope will be allowed to degrade and eventually become useless, as NASA changes focus to President Bush's plans to send humans to the moon, Mars and beyond, officials said.

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Why Hubble is being dropped
Without doubt the Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most important telescopes ever built. Its clear view of the Cosmos, above the turbulent and distorting atmosphere, has changed our understanding of the Universe in which we live.

get your war on | 30

  thanks to allied

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poster art

Performing Arts Poster Collection

  thanks to The Cartoonist

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war against some drugs

The Demonized Seed
As a Recreational Drug, Industrial Hemp Packs the Same Wallop as Zucchini. So Why Does the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency Continue to Deny America This Potent Resource? Call It Reefer Madness.

Herer's question is essentially the same one hemp advocates in the U.S. have been asking with mounting consternation for the past decade. They are asking it now with new urgency in response to the Drug Enforcement Agency's latest foray against hemp, an attempt since 2001 to ban all food products containing even a trace of hemp, even though the foods are not psychoactive. The California-based Hemp Industries Assn. and seven companies that make or sell hemp products won a reprieve for the industry in June, when the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the DEA's efforts "procedurally invalid." But the matter remains in litigation, and the hemp issue continues to confound policymakers. California's Legislature passed a bill on behalf of hemp not long ago that, in its final, watered-down form, could hardly have been less ambitious. Assembly Bill 388, approved in 2002 by wide margins in both chambers, merely requested that the University of California assess the economic opportunities associated with several alternative fiber crops. But because one of the crops was cannabis hemp, then-Gov. Gray Davis vetoed the measure, leaving California uncharacteristically behind the curve on a progressive issue that many other states and nations have embraced in recent years. If all or even most of the oft-cited claims for hemp are true, the substance may know no earthly equal among nontoxic renewable resources. If only half the claims are true, hemp's potential as a commercial wellspring and a salve to creeping eco-damage is still immense. At worst it is more useful and diverse than most agricultural crops. Yet from the 1930s through the 1980s, many countries, influenced by U.S. policies and persuasion, banished cannabis from their farmlands. Not just marijuana, but all cannabis—the baby, the bath water, all of it.

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Feds Bust Medical Pot Patients In Courtroom

California medical marijuana activists are outraged over the arrest last week of two medical marijuana patients who face potential life sentences on federal drug charges after being turned over by local authorities. David Davidson, of Oakland, California and his partner Cynthia Blake, of Red Bluff, California were arrested in a state courtroom in Corning, California on January 13 as they were seeking to dismiss state charges of marijuana cultivation and distribution. Davidson and Blake, both 53, have doctor's recommendations to grow and consume medical marijuana under California's 1996 Compassionate Use Act (Prop. 215). While their defense attorneys were meeting in the judge's chambers to discuss the case with Tehama County assistant district attorney Lynn Strom, Strom announced that she was dropping the state charges because Davidson and Blake were being arrested in the courtroom on a federal indictment.

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pinholes

DIRKON – THE PAPER CAMERA

During the 1970s, magazines published in Communist Czechoslovakia were controlled by the state, like the majority of other enterprises. Very few good magazines were available and were difficult to get hold of, so people would borrow and exchange them when given the opportunity. This also applied to magazines aimed at young people, which was probably one of the reasons why almost everyone from my generation, when we get on to the subject of pinhole cameras, has fond memories of the cut-out paper camera known as Dirkon*, published in 1979 in the magazine ABC mladých technik? a p?írodov?dc? [An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists]. Its creators, Martin Pilný, Mirek Kolá? and Richard Vyškovský, came up with a functional pinhole camera made of stiff paper, designed for 35 mm film, which resembles a real camera. It may not be the most practical of devices, but it works!

  thanks to The J-Walk Weblog

Be sure to check out the rest of the site which has been put together by David Balihar from the Czech Republic.

pinhole.cz

Self-portrait