 (AP Photo/Jerome Delay) The LA Times today tells the story of 68-year-old Godfrey Meynell , MBE, a British aristocrat who has lived and worked in Yemen and has a lifetime of experience as an activist. Part of the first red double-decker bus full of voluntary human shields to arrive in Iraq, Meynell has taken up residence in a South Baghdad power plant that was bombed during the 1991 Gulf War. Meynell is no fan of Saddam. Meynell to me represents what the voluntary human shield movement is really about. Please read his story and what he has to say. I wish I had his courage. |
February 25, 2003
IF YOU THINK THE VOLUNTARY ‘HUMAN SHIELDS’ ARE NUTS, PLEASE READ THIS
Comments Off
ON HYDROGEN, FASCISM AND POWELL’S VIEW OF VIETNAM
| AlterNet explains why hydrogen is not , at least in the short run, a clean or renewable energy alternative, and may in fact detract from important renewable energy programs already getting traction.
In the International Herald Tribune, 80-year-old Norman Mailer weighs in with a warning that the U.S. has already attained a “pre-fascistic atmosphere” and that, alas, fascism, not democracy, may be the natural state for nations. Robert Scheer brings to our attention this remarkable excerpt from Colin Powell ‘s 1995 autobiography: “I recently read Bernard Fall’s book on Vietnam, ‘Street Without Joy.’ Fall makes painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten ourselves into. I cannot help thinking that if President Kennedy or President Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book, they would have returned to the White House Monday morning and immediately started to figure out a way to extricate us from the quicksand of Vietnam.” |
Comments Off
MEANWHILE, IN OTHER NEWS
| The U.S. supreme court just sent the case of a black Texas death row inmate back to a lower court, ruling that the judge and the lower court unfairly allowed systematic racial bias in jury selection to go unchallenged. Three guesses who the only dissenting judge was?
The Economist reports a breakthrough in fibre optics (subscriber-only story) called Photonic Crystal Fibres (PCFs) , which may enable tremendous advances in the miniaturization of testing equipment, increased efficiency and longevity of fibre cabling, and the manipulation of single atoms. In the search for blame for accounting regularities of Royal Ahold NV , the world’s third largest retailer, which resulted in restatements of at least $500 million and the collapse of Ahold’s share price, the BBC says the problem may lie in loose regulations governing foreign operations of Dutch parent companies. Many companies base their global or European operations in the Netherlands for tax reasons and to simplify regulatory requirements. The discrepancies involve overbooking of promotional allowances (amounts kicked back to the retailer by suppliers for promotion of their brands) in U.S. and possibly South American operations. |
Comments Off
CAN WE TALK?
 CNet is praising new blogging tools that will allow bloggers to phone in an audio clip to their blog (audioblogging) and/or post wirelessly (moblogging or mobile blogging). Since one of the critical elements of blogs is links, I’m not sure how either of these will work. Anyone tried this? |
February 24, 2003
THE NEWS THAT’S NOT (APPARENTLY) FIT TO PRINT
From this week’s report by the World Food Program, as reported by Relief Web :
It goes on and on and on – pages and pages covering, this week alone, 16 countries whose people are lurching from crisis to crisis, dependent for their very survival on international volunteer agencies and the United Nations. Perhaps if Fratboy Deserter and his cronies were forced to spend a year working with the front lines of the NGOs that do all this desparate, last-resort, endless and thankless work, they’d realize why the world thinks there are more important priorities than bombing Iraq. Some other news that won’t make the front page (or in some papers, any page) so that mainstream media can focus on ratcheting Americans up to new levels of fear, xenophobia and isolationist and unilateralist fervor:
And that’s the news. |
February 23, 2003
THE WORLD WE WANT
 Philosopher Mark Kingwell ‘s inspiring and well-written book, The World We Want: Virtue Vice and the Good Citizen , was written during the euphoric first days of the new millennium, just before Bush stole the election and his coalition of psychotic right-wingers, greedy elitists and religious crazies began driving America into mass fear, paranoia and self-righteous totalitarianism. These were the days before 9-11, when idealists dared to dream of a world of empowered citizens, egalitarianism and global cooperation.
Here is Kingwell’s astonishing analysis of the anti-globalization protesters in Seattle and Milan: Notice how everything he says here is prescient of the motivations of last week’s anti-war protesters:
Kingwell defines citizenship as making our desire for justice active. And in making an argument for what I called common sense in a recent post, he says:
And, if he’d written this remarkable book in the age of Bush, he might well have added: And so, just as instinctively, is an unprovoked and indefensible war against the citizens of another country. |
Comments Off
TWO THINGS I DON’T UNDERSTAND
Can someone please tell me the answers to these simple, naive questions:
|
February 22, 2003
WE HAVE A COMEDIAN IN OUR MIDST
| Not posting to Friday Five this week. Unlike last week when the questions were really interesting , and several Sloggers ‘fessed up , this week’s questions are kind of silly. Besides, I’d never be able to top Mercurial’s brilliant and hilarious responses . |
DO NOT ENTER
 Atrios has picked up on the story , reported only in the Canadian media, of a professional woman of Indian descent and Canadian citizenship and residency, a loan officer at a major Canadian bank, who was harassed and barred entry to the U.S. during an O’Hare stop-over of her vacation flight home from India to Canada. She was threatened with jail for having a passport the INS thought “looked funky”, and denied consular assistance. The INS officer “cut the front page of Cruz’s passport and filled each page with ‘expedited removal’ stamps, rendering it useless. She was photographed, fingerprinted, barred from re-entering the U.S. for five years and immediately ‘removed’. Not to Toronto, but to India, where she had just spent several weeks visiting her parents. It took four days, and help from Canadian officials in Dubai and a Kuwaiti Airlines pilot, to get her back home.”
As a Canadian who spends a fair bit of time in the U.S. on business, I am distressed at the flagrant and arbitrary violation of this woman’s rights, but I am equally concerned that such stories, which are not uncommon and which are obviously of concern and interest to Americans (Atrios’ post has attracted dozens of very emotional comments), are ignored by the U.S. media, usually because, like the fascinating investigation into the friendly-fire deaths of Canadians in Afghanistan, they are not deemed “newsworthy”. There are two important principles here that seem to be violated with regularity in America these days, and which represent an alarming slippery slope for a country that prides itself on being ‘democractic’ (despite the 2000 election):
Other countries that have allowed these principles to be compromised, notably some fledgling Latin American ‘democracies’, have quickly found themselves living in countries that are no longer free. It’s a sobering thought that one day the colour of the U.S. on the freedom map might be the same as that of our allies Columbia and Saudi Arabia. I love the U.S. and Americans, but if it comes to that, I may no longer be allowed in, or, having been born in the U.K., may have to change to a job that doesn’t require me to meet and work with colleagues on U.S. soil. Somebody please tell me I’m just being paranoid. |
Comments Off
February 21, 2003
I’M A STRANGER HERE
| Listening to some old anti-war songs trying to get some inspiration to write a poem for Rayne’s & VO’s special edition on Sloggers on War , when I came to this one, written in 1973 by the Five Man Electrical Band (a Canadian group). The song was released on an album called Sweet Paradise , no longer in the catalogues. When I heard it, I started to cry: This song is as pertinent to the world today as it was thirty years GO. The song is called I’m a Stranger Here. The words in black are sung by a Martian-sounding guy, and the brash response in blue by the smug citizens of Earth:
well I’m a stranger here on this place called Earth we’ve got the aeroplane, we got the automobile, I think your atmosphere is hurting my eyes we got the rivers and the mountains and the valleys and the trees The melody is excellent for a ’70′s anti-war song, and the instrumental guitar riffs between the ‘voices’ of the conversation are awesome. Since it’s out of circulation, I can’t imagine anyone objecting to me making it available to Sloggers, so until/unless someone objects to the posting, here’s a link to it in .mp3 format (3.4MB). Might even make good background listening while you read the special edition of VO. |
