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WAR ON DEMOCRACY
John Pilger's 2007 documentary explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. Pilger claims that the film "...tells a universal story... analyzing and revealing, through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its venerable myths. It allows us to understand the true nature of the so-called "war on terror". According to Pilger, the film’s message is that the greed and power of empire is not invincible and that people power is always the "seed beneath the snow".
Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries and who he claims are profiting from the war in Iraq. He investigates the School of the Americas in the U.S. state of Georgia, where General Pinochet’s torture squads were reportedly trained along with tyrants and death-squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina.
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This is a film that should be shown in History classrooms throughout the states and the world. Pilger aptly displays the American government’s involvement in manipulating Latin America’s leadership over the past 60 years or so.
The focus on Venezuela for the first 40 minutes of the film is an interesting change from what we see in mainstream media. An unabashed socialist, Chavez has thrown out American control in Venezuela, and has gone a long way in convincing his neighbors to do the same. However, the beauty of this film is much more than its discussion of Venezuela. Pilger goes through the history of several countries other Latin American countries weaving them into the bigger picture, thoroughly explaining many of the important details. Its rare to find such a comprehensive history of US involvement in Latin America. Pilger tries establish how the system has evolved from physical control to financial control in today's era. Pilger has mastered obtaining great interviews. For example, in this film he the interviews the head former head of CIA involvement in Latin America as well as interviews an American nun who was tortured in Guatemala in 1989.
Add to the list Georgia and Ukraine. When will "we the people" wake up?
INITIATE CONVERSATIONS WITH YOUR NEIGHBORS, CO-WORKERS AND FAMILY MEMBERS. PARTICIPATE IN EDUCATING THOSE THAT COME IN CONTACT WITH YOU. John Pilger's 2007 documentary explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bol... more -
Albert Einstein: My Credo
Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore. In our daily lives we only feel that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own. I am often worried at the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them.
I do not believe in freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's words: “Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills” accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of freedom of will preserves me from taking too seriously myself and my fellow men as acting and deciding individuals and from losing my temper.
I never coveted affluence and luxury and even despise them a good deal.
My passion for social justice has often brought me into conflict with people, as did my aversion to any obligation and dependence I do not regard as absolutely necessary. I always have a high regard for the individual and have an insuperable distaste for violence and clubmanship.
All these motives made me into a passionate pacifist and anti-militarist. I am against any nationalism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as did any exaggerated personality cult.
I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.
Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.
The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.
In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.
-This article is a speech by Albert Einstein to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin, in the autumn of 1932. This short speech appears in the Appendix of White and Gribbon p. 262. Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing ... more -
A Dangerous Crisis of Invisible Refugees
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is on track to meet its 2008 goal of taking in 12,000 Iraqi refugees by the end of next month. That's the good news about the worst refugee crisis in the Middle East in 60 years.
The bad news is that 12,000 people represent a tiny fraction of the vast exodus of Iraqis driven from their homes by the violence and ethnic cleansing unleashed by the 2003 U.S. invasion. Estimates of their number vary. The widely used figure of 5 million is about one in five. To get that into context: relative to the size of the population, it would equal the forced displacement of almost 60 million Americans.
Why does a crisis of that magnitude barely register in public discourse in the U.S. and make few headlines? For one, the refugees are virtually invisible. There are no Darfur or Rwanda-style refugee camps that produce television images of shock value. More important, the refugees have not fit into the political agenda of the governments in Washington and Baghdad. The narrative is that Iraq is returning to normal.
At the height of the bloodshed, in 2006, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said 50,000 people a month were fleeing from their homes, either to safety across the borders or inside Iraq. While violence has sharply subsided since, political and sectarian divisions remain and there has been no mass return. Only a trickle have been granted permission to settle in the U.S. - a paltry 134 a month in 2007...
by Bernd Debusmann
Complete article: http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersComService4/idUSI... WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is on track to meet its 2008 goal of taking in 12,000 Iraqi refugees by the end of next month... more -
Are cluster bombs immoral?
The moral center of humanity slowly asserts itself. Only the most powerful are too afraid to join.
You may have missed the news: At the end of May, 111 nations, including, at the last minute, Great Britain, showing the world the power of an unleashed conscience, agreed to an international ban on cluster bombs, surely one of the cruelest and, given the nature of war today, most unnecessary weapons in modern arsenals.
Among those not endorsing the treaty and MIA at the conference in Dublin where it was debated were Russia, China, Israel and, to the surprise of no one, the United States of George Bush, that increasingly isolated moral rump state of which so many are so ashamed. Indeed, the treaty is widely seen as a “diplomatic defeat” for the U.S., so identified is the Bush administration with the sanctity of its WMD.
The official U.S. stance on cluster bombs is that they have “demonstrated military utility,” which trumps “the humanitarian concerns of those in Dublin,” which the U.S. nonetheless shares with such passion that, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates explained in a recent policy memo, “by 2018 the military will no longer use cluster weapons with a failure rate greater than 1 percent. In the interim period the U.S. will deplete its existing stockpiles of cluster munitions with a greater than 1 percent dud rate by exporting them to foreign governments that agree not to use them starting in 2018.”
Certainly there is a hellish ingenuity to the cluster bomb, which was designed for use on an open field of battle. A “mother canister,” as it is called, opens in mid-air and releases hundreds of grenade-size bombs that “spew deadly shrapnel over very large swathes of land” when they hit the ground, as explained recently in the Salt Lake Tribune by former munitions researcher Dick Devlin.
And Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer adds: “If they exploded high enough to let the bomblets scatter properly, a few well-placed cluster bombs or shells could destroy dozens of soft-skinned military vehicles and blunt the attack of an entire mechanized infantry battalion. A few hundred could stop an army corps.”
Of course, we don’t use cluster bombs to disable massing infantries. We haven’t fought that kind of war in over 50 years. We use them now in counterinsurgency warfare, against primarily civilian populations, in such places as Kosovo (U.S.), Afghanistan (U.S., Russia), Lebanon (Israel) and, of course, Iraq (U.S.). We use them, in other words, to shred innocent bystanders.
Stigmatizing war
by Robert C. Koehler
July 18, 2008
Read complete article: http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/13/2008/31... The moral center of humanity slowly asserts itself. Only the most powerful are too afraid to join. ... more -
Dov Charney, American PERVERT
Dov Charney is most likely one of the WORST businessmen in the world. In my opinion, he has little/no morals and even less class. "American Apparel" must be a huge misnomer as neither his clothing nor his behavior reflect American (or even any) social standards.
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"American Apparel operates nearly 200 stores around the world, and Montreal-born founder and CEO Dov Charney is enjoying his company's success. "It's sickening money, man," he told YoungEntrepreneur.com (he's 39). "We're minting money."
On a May 13th conference call, Charney said first-quarter sales were at $111.6 million, up 52% from the previous year. Interesting, considering that American Apparel manufactures their goods exclusively in the United States - unlike most U.S. companies.
But Charney was happy to discuss American Apparel's business forecast for the coming year during a face-to-face interview with Claudine Ko from the now-defunct Jane magazine - but only while masturbating. The writer also reported that Charney demanded, and received, oral sex from an employee while she looked on.
Not altogether surprisingly, Charney is now facing his fifth lawsuit in three years: Jeneleen Floyd, who worked in the product-placement department at the firm's Los Angeles headquarters, alleges that Charney stormed into her office and demanded that she pretend to masturbate for him. When she refused, a (male) colleague happily complied; not to be outdone, Charney joined him."
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PLEASE, after reading the entire article, tell the world what you think!
-ENR Dov Charney is most likely one of the WORST businessmen in the world. In my opinion, he has little/no morals and even less class. ... more -
Turtle Island Project Director Some rich view Indigenous Peoples as "expendab...
TIP Dir. Rev. Dr. Lynn Hubbard:
I think we have here two different forms of religion. Ands its this religion of my ancestors that I participate in that I think really has been the problem. I think we have to come to understand that religious consciousness evolves just like anything else does. It's not just the material world that evolves but also our cultural world evolves and the realm of the concept evolves. We are going now, as a people - there was a time from prehistorical religions to historic religions. the religions of the book Judaism, Christianity, Islam to this historic period. Now I think that is transending to this transrational understanding of spirituality. And as part of this transrational understanding of spirituality is an appropriation of this knowledge and spirituality of Earth-based cultures. I think we have to be open now to what John Trudell called ‘spirit making and escape.’ I love this idea. My spirit needs to make an escape from my religious consciousness. The racial and cultural genocide that still goes on today inside this country . Judaism is an inherently ethical religion except you have to be a Canaanite. You may get your ass kicked or your head cut off but basically it's OK. But sky Gods and cultures that worship sky Gods are traditionally barbaric - Read the Old Testament - Wow! Talk about patriarchy. But we are in a war. It is not a war of my choosing.But we are in a war I truly believe that - a war fore our hearts and our minds. We have to continually fight.It's multi-generational. We fight against great principalities and powers. It's amazing. If you stick your head up out of the foxhole just a little bit and you start speaking on behalf of the poor. Those bullets are flying. I said something about a corporation. I said we created these corporations and political structures that aren't moral entities because you have to say things like: ‘I'm sorry. I made a mistake.' You have to admit your humanness. When's the last time your heard a politician ever admit a mistake unless they were forced to? ‘I did not have sex with that woman - I did not inhale - yes I smoked but I did not inhale' And I said corporations are liked this too - they are not moral entities because they cannot do these things like apologize. Well, good Lord that's attacking a sacred cow - there's a guy in my congregation who just went ballistic - who quit the church because he had spent his entire life benefiting from, working for, a non-moral entity. I did not say all corporations were liked this - I just said some corporations are like this. Well that's all you have to say. Rev. Hubbard said Americans and all people who call Earth home need to protect the environment. He said we have lost the sense of the sacred - a lesson that can be learned from Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples. I understand this because I feel desperate. What John Trudell was talking about is the same way. We've lost our way. We do not have any spiritual sense because we have lost any sense of the sacred. A great historian of the religions Mircea Eliade who was at the University of Chicago where I for many years - I did his funeral. Mircea Eliade had this notion that in order to have a hierophany, an experience of the sacred, you have to have sacred space. If this Earth is not sacred to you, which it isn't to Mickey Mouse, then you can't have an experience of the sacred. I deal with people every day in my congregation who have lost or are losing any sense of the sacred. And it's not only - like you were saying this relationship between Earth and women - and the earth and man. If you do not have power in a capitalistic society, you become part of and you are thought of in terms of the Earth. Women who have less economic power, children who don't have any power at all unless somebody gives it to them, Indigenous communities, you are all thought of as expendable commodities. TIP Dir. Rev. Dr. Lynn Hubbard: ... more -
Southern Hospitality?
The New York comedy group, Rash Behaviour, is invited to perform at the Charleston, S.C. Piccolo Spoleto Arts Festival. However, when an openly gay actor performs an openly gay character in front of 3,000 people, some audience members get offended and put the group in an interesting position to decide how far they will go to stand up for themselves, for the arts, and for freedom of speech. The New York comedy group, Rash Behaviour, is invited to perform at the Charleston, S.C. Piccolo Spoleto Arts Festival. However, when... more
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http://discardedtodivine.org/
Some one should contact these people and do a story on them. It is very cool. Recycling clothes, having a fashion show and feeding people.
Basic and very cool.
TJ Some one should contact these people and do a story on them. It is very cool. Recycling clothes, having a fashion show and feeding peo... more -
Surrender F-9 Report
Confessions of an F-9 Addict who worked for GeneDome Corperation. Go deeper into the mystery that has so many on the net talking. Is it real? Could it be. Why haven't we heard of this anywhere else? Is there a black out of info? Confessions of an F-9 Addict who worked for GeneDome Corperation. Go deeper into the mystery that has so many on the net talking. Is i... more
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Moral
