'Speaker says advances in genetics pose new human rights challenges'

Daniel Kevles, a professor at Yale University, warns that dramatic advances in genetic science have "revived some of the old issues" surrounding the eugenics movement that flourished in the United States and Europe during the early part of the 20th century.

 

[ ... ]

 

Kevles said many people are stunned to learn that "liberal, democratic Sweden" sterilized approximately 60,000 people between the 1930s and the 1970s.

Between the start of the 20th century and World War II, two dozen American states passed laws authorizing the forced sterilization of "the feeble minded" and others labeled as genetically flawed.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 8-1 to uphold Virginia's eugenics law, with the majority opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. And, according to Kevles, by 1930, California had sterilized some 6,000 people.

Kevles said the racial concerns of the American eugenics movement focused less on fears about blacks than on the waves of European immigration.

"Immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were not thought to be white," he said. He said many Anglo-Protestant Americans worried that they'd be outnumbered and overwhelmed by those they considered substandard humans.

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The World According to Monsanto

On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television (ARTE – French-German cultural tv channel) by French journalist and film-maker Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto - A documentary that Americans won't ever see. The gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.

'No German would allow a non-German ethnicity to call itself Bavarian'

To Mr. Larry Birns, Director of The Council of Hemispheric Affairs

Dear Mr. Birns,

We are shocked and appalled that Mr. Kovach was permitted to use the esteemed Hemisphere Institute to promote his unfounded anti-Hellenic agenda and attempt to promote negative feelings against Greece and the people of Greece. We expect and demand an apology by Mr. Kovach to the Hellenic community at large that he so much insulted.

PAN-MACEDONIAN ASSOCIATION USA ANSWERS ZLATKO KOVACH'S ALLEGATIONS ON Macedonia: Reaching Out To Win L. American

Zlatko Kovach, in his Macedonia: Reaching Out To Win L. American Hearts, proves one more time that he is the product of the continuous brainwashing condition and lies, provided by an education system which emerged from a Balkan nation, under Tito¢s and Stalin¢s tutelage.

Mr. Kovach begins his elaborations, stating: "Macedonia historically and culturally did transcend the country's current borders. In 1912-13, through two brutal regional wars, Macedonia was forcefully partitioned among Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. The Macedonians were subject to qualified genocide and many were driven from their land. It is this reality that Greece tirelessly tries to cover up." Mr. Kovach fails to bring up that during the Ottoman era which lasted for five hundred years and ended in 1912 in that area, there was no use of the term Macedonia (meaning the boundaries of the geographic or ancient Macedonia). Ancient Macedonia was divided in two vilaets, the vilaet of Thessaloniki and the vilaet of Monastiri (Bitola). Skopje was the capital of the Kossovo vilaet and was never included in the so-called geographic Macedonia.

The author of this article is referring to the Slavic element that existed in Macedonia as part of a "Macedonian" nation whose people were wronged and "were subject to qualified genocide and many were driven from their land." He however fails to explain why there was no "Macedonian ARMY" to fight for the rights of the supposed "ethnic Macedonians" during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. In addition during the negotiating talks of the Bucharest Treaty, which determined today¢s borders with Greece¢s neighbors, there were no representatives of any "Macedonian Nation". The 1914 Carnegie Report (Report of the International Commission to Report on the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars) not only did not record the existence of a "Macedonian" army, but neither did it record the existence of any "ethnic Macedonian" civilians.

The Slavs did not arrive in the region until the sixth century AD. Until 1944, the area that is now legally referred to as the FYROM was called "Vardarska Banovina" until the Hellenic name of Macedonia was usurped by Marshall Broz Tito. According to Interim Accord (Sept. 13, 1995) and under the aegis of UN (UN Resolutions #817 of April 7 and #845 of June 18) of the year 1993, the temporary name until both countries, Greece and the aforementioned state, reach a permanent solution about this issue, is "the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", or simply The FYROM. The Interim Accord was signed by BOTH Greece and The FYROM, and its purpose was to find a name for the aforementioned country.

 

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Thirteen years for evil bonfire killer, aged 13

A 13-YEAR-OLD who savagely beat a "helpless" man to death for no reason before throwing his body on a bonfire had enjoyed a trip with social services to Alton Towers just three days before the fatal attack.

The remains of Stephen Croft's badly-charred body was found in the embers of a public bonfire in the early hours of November 6 last year.

Recorder of Liverpool, Judge Henry Globe QC, yesterday told the schoolboy he will be locked up for a minimum of 13 years.

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'The clear purpose of the "special groups" alarm is to implicate Sadr as an Iranian agent'

From: Endless Enemies by Justin Raimondo

It used to be that the Sunni "dead enders," as Donald Rumsfeld called them, were the face of the enemy in Iraq. Then the administration very quickly learned that in order to sell the war to the American people, they had to somehow connect it to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Osama bin Laden, and so al-Qaeda in Iraq – a group that never existed prior to the invasion – was given top billing. But what are these "Special Groups" who have suddenly stolen the limelight?

Supposedly they are armed "rogue" elements of the various party militias that have been funded and trained by Iran, and – significantly – Lebanon's Hezbollah organization, to carry out terrorist activities in Iraq, and, presumably, kill American and Iraqi government soldiers. An elaborate demonology has grown up in the War Party's circles to buttress this shaky and ill-defined concept: go here, here, and here to examine its many twists and turns. This narrative is a variation on the Israeli worldview, which sees all the various Muslim and pan-Arabist groups in the region as essentially tentacles leading back to the same octopus head.

Food riots to worsen without global action - UN

Food riots in developing countries will spread unless world leaders take major steps to reduce prices for the poor, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said on Friday.

Despite a forecast 2.6 percent hike in global cereal output this year, record prices are unlikely to fall, forcing poorer countries' food import bills up 56 percent and hungry people on to the streets, FAO Director General Jacques Diouf said.

"The reality is that people are dying already in the riots," Diouf told a news conference.

[ ... ]

Diouf called on heads of state and government to attend a food crisis summit at FAO headquarters in Rome on June 3-5.

He said the priority was a "massive seed transfer" -- to ensure farmers in poor countries could buy seeds, fertiliser and feed at prices they could afford.

Other necessary measures include creating financial mechanisms to ensure poorer food importing countries could continue to buy the food they need and give a larger proportion of aid budgets to agriculture, Diouf said.

The comments echoed those of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who called this week for a coordinated response to the food crisis which would include reaching a deal on the Doha trade talks and the possible use of market-based risk management instruments to avert food price volatility.

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No peace out West

2008-04-07 | U.S. PLANS MORE NUCLEAR WEAPONS ON SHOSHONE LAND:
INDIGENOUS LEADERS, CITIZENS AND SCIENTISITS AGREE - NO NEW NUKES
Comment Period Nearing end

(Newe Sogobe (Lee, Nevada)

With gold prices soaring sky-high and the general public watching Presidential candidate antics, there's more than just gold rush fever threatening the air and water out West. Under the radar screen, a public comment period closes next week, April 10th, on a proposal by the U.S. Department of Energy to increase nuclear weapons development at the Nevada Test Site. First announced in 2006 as "Complex 2030", the new plan is called "Complex Transformation" and includes details on the proposal to upgrade the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex and recreate the infrastructure to research, develop, and manufacture new nuclear weapons. MORE http://www.wsdp.org/SUBMIT-comments041008.htm

Hat-tip to the Beat Generation

In Mexico, on the Lam With Ken Kesey

I said I was doing nothing, but I’m actually trying to summon somebody: Ken Kesey, novelist, psychedelic prophet, leader of the Merry Pranksters, hero of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” It was here, on this beach, that he took to the waves as I did, back in 1966. He was a hunted man then, on the run from the F.B.I. and Mexican federales, but even he, a man of great aplomb, found time for thoughtful bobbing.

“He’s working on his wave theory. This morning for breakfast he brewed and drank enough weed to put a horse in orbit. He’s been out there for three hours with his eyes closed ... imagining that he’s a piece of kelp or a jellyfish.”

The observer is Mountain Girl, one of several Merry Pranksters who followed Kesey to Manzanillo. She watches from the beach while pondering his oracular musings.

“It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world ... by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.”

One Sun Roaring

The book's price was outrageous--$102.81 in 2008 dollars, more than twice the price of the title under review--but Whalen's publication by a house that during the '60s had also brought out work by T.S. Eliot and Eudora Welty was not. Whalen had always been associated with bestselling poets. He was one of the three poets who read work before Allen Ginsberg debuted "Howl" at the Six Gallery in San Francisco the night of October 7, 1955; he was mythologized by Jack Kerouac as "Warren Coughlin" in The Dharma Bums and as "Ben Fagan" in other novels; he was one of the earliest friends in poetry of Gary Snyder, the anarchist Buddhist nature poet. Until 1969 his own work had circulated much more in the usual manner for poetry than that of his famous contemporaries: broadsides, chapbooks and small-press editions. Between the scarcity and the word-of-mouth publicity, incredibly enough, there came to be loud public demand for a work based entirely on the sensation of coming and going. Here is the entirety of "Early Spring":

The dog writes on the window
 with his nose

[ ... ]

As with the parallel poet cliques at Harvard (the so-called New York School's John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, and later Frank O'Hara) and Columbia (Ginsberg and Kerouac), the young writers at Reed lived to communicate their literary enthusiasms with one another. Welch and Whalen shared an affinity for Gertrude Stein's indifference to the distinction between sense and nonsense. All three exalted in William Carlos Williams's matter-of-fact ornery love of beauty. Williams returned the favor during a visit to Reed in 1950, reading over their work during a private audience and going so far as to remark on the meeting in his autobiography that they were "Good kids, all of them, doing solid work."

Snyder later provided Whalen with several entertaining examples to follow: first as a fire spotter for the US Forest Service, then years later as an expatriate student in a Zen monastery in Kyoto, Japan. If style were really the man, Whalen could just as easily have followed his friend Welch's example and gone into advertising. According to Aram Saroyan's 1979 biography of Welch, Genesis Angels, Welch was the copywriter responsible for "Raid kills bugs dead," a memorable phrase that would fit happily in either poet's oeuvre. In practice, Whalen's predisposition to staying out of the 9-to-5 routine was much more adaptable to his interest in taking up Zen.

TFF offering wide range of movies

Also on the bill today is the short "Pull My Daisy" (1959) from Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. It "celebrates and epitomizes the creative energies of the Beat Generation," according to festival notes. "Daisy," adapted by Jack Kerouac, includes Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel and Sally Gross.

Cast & crew

Merrimack Valley, don your shades: Lowell is soon to be the location of a film shoot for a major motion picture with a star-studded cast, including Jennifer Garner.

The prospect has many locals, officials included, brimming with enthusiasm.

"Jennifer Garner coming into Lowell - that's a 10!" said Mayor Edward "Bud" Caulfield. "We're really excited about it. It will certainly put Lowell on the map."

[ ... ]

Birthplace of Bette Davis and Jack Kerouac, Lowell, of course, is no stranger to fame. The city has been shown in numerous short movies, documentary films, and TV dramas, and tomorrow, it is set to launch its first film festival.

Reformed white-trash brawler on the rise

When Jack Kerouac, then 45, passed through Chapel Hill, Banks hosted a party for the Beat writer at his home that lasted a week. "He was a hero for many of us, and here he was slightly mad and certainly physically ill, alcoholic and dying."

The Beats inspired him - not their writing, but their rebelliousness. "The 1950s was a very buttoned-up time in the US - sexually repressed, socially conformist, politically still under the cloud of McCarthyism. And here came these free-wheeling spirits, breaking down all those barriers."

Banks has written a screenplay of Kerouac's On the Road, for a film to be directed by Walter Salles (of The Motorcycle Diaries fame). He sees On the Road as a story of the loss of American innocence, rather than merely the defining novel of the Beat Generation. "It's set in 1948, which we often forget because it wasn't published until 1957. It's a postwar novel."

Rally for Kerouac homes

Emboldened by a Queens News profile on two unlandmarked Jack Kerouac homes, fans of the beat writer are planning a July get-together to discuss preserving his legacy.

Writer Patrick Fenton said he will take book dealer Marty Cummins and corporate bigwig Jeffrey Cole - who saved a Kerouac home in Orlando, Fla., from demolition - on a tour past Kerouac's Ozone Park apartment and South Richmond Hill house.

Neither was included in the Landmarks Preservation Commission's recent survey of 12,495 Queens structures, and the city never received requests to evaluate them, said commission spokeswoman Lisi de Bourbon.

Clip Job: Breslin on Kerouac in Brooklyn

March 5, 1958, Vol. III, No. 19

The Day Kerouac Almost, But Not Quite, Took Flatbush

By James Breslin

“Man, how come I like your book, but I don’t like you?” This remark was made amid loud jeering while Jack Kerouac played “meet the author” last Tuesday evening for Brooklyn college students.

Every campus Bohemian, Hobohemian, and Subterranean had donned crew-neck sweater, taken pen and notebook in hand, and marched right down to that lecture to find out just what this crazy Kerouac and his beat generation are all about, anyway.

Jack, however, who had left Columbia “because I quite the football team and had to start paying tuition,” declined to make any pronouncements for the academy.

“What’s the beat generation’s outlook on life?”

“It’s an illusion.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s an illusion, not real—man, you ought to know, you go to college!”

Performance ensemble Aurea honors composer David Amram with a series of events beginning Tuesday

A pioneer on the jazz French horn, Amram was the first composer-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein. He also wrote music for New York’s first-ever jazz poetry readings with author Jack Kerouac in the 1950s, and is known for his film scores for Splendor in the Grass and The Manchurian Candidate.

Now the 77-year-old Amram is being honored with a week-long series of performances, lectures and film screenings at Brown University. The event, dubbed “David Amram: Celebrating a Half-Century of Multicultural Artistic Collaborations,” is being sponsored by Brown and the Rhode Island Philharmonic.

The divine sounds of Mr Elling

Elling discovered the beat-generation poets in his adult years, after hearing Mark Murphy quote them in his vocalese and later worked on a project about their legacy. He sees in their work a confluence of jazz and poetry. Jazz is the music of improvisation and improvisation is "a compositional thinking sped way up". It carries the same rules, the only difference is "it is happening in real time, in front of people and it takes a very cultured and trained mind in order to do it very well".

Similarly, Kerouac was trying "to compose coherent free-form poetry but to do it in such a way that it carried real content but to do it as jazz people did, in the moment".

Kerouac would "practise" writing for days to prepare himself to be "in the moment" so that when he sat down to finally write, he would have an open mind to the ideas passing through him. "That's a jazz way of writing," Elling says.

The beat poets also ushered in an awareness and acceptance of Buddhist consciousness to 20th-century America, he says, coining what he calls "a 20th-century language of youth" and their social concerns were precursors to the radical ideas of the 1960s.

Culture in orbit

On Monday, April 7 the Liverpool Culture Company will launch its most ambitious educational project yet - The Orrery.

Inspired by traditional astronomical instruments which show how planets orbit the sun in the solar system, The Orrery has been created to reflect Liverpool's position at 'the Centre of the Creative Universe', a reference to Beat poet Allen Ginsberg's comments following a visit to the city in the 1960s.

Ginsberg a muse for Docolomansky

Students gave Slovak theater director Viliam Docolomansky confused looks when he asked if poet Allen Ginsberg had lectured at Yale.

“The beginning of my work in the theatre was influenced by Allen Ginsberg,” he explained.

“That is why I asked, with the great hope that Allen Ginsberg gave lectures at this university,” he continued, to scattered chuckles when his planned introduction failed to deliver the intended effect.

About twenty people gathered Wednesday in Trumbull College as Docolomansky discussed his philosophies on the nature and purpose of theater. Docolomansky, founder of Farm in the Cave, an award-winning international theatre studio, also spoke at length about his formative experiences as a director at the tea, co-sponsored by the Yale Repertory Theatre and the World Performance Project.

A teenager in Eastern Europe during the fall of Communism, Docolomansky described his first encounter with Ginsberg’s poetry, and later the poet himself, as “an unbelievable experience.” But it was another poet that led to Docolomansky’s ultimate decision to focus on directing instead of music composition, his other passion. After traveling to Andalucía in Spain to study the life of the early 20th-century Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, Docolomansky and several colleagues collaborated on a theater production originally slated to be performed in three months. The production time ultimately stretched eight months, draining away his savings. But Docolomansky was nevertheless pleased with the outcome.

“I could not go back to performing Shakespeare in three or four weeks,” he said.

Buck 65 pokes fun at modern culture through rap

When an artist begins one of the songs from his latest album with a killer new version of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, you know it's probably a record you want to give a listen.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed/Devoid of conviction, conflicted, annoyed," begins one of the songs from Buck 65's latest album, Situation. The song, 1957, is haunting, a catchy beat meshed with brooding lyrics. The whole album is like a present just waiting to be unwrapped, running the gamut from the evocative 1957 to the danceable, frenetic Dang.

But it's the lyrics that really make this album memorable. Buck 65, a poet in his own right, is also a literary enthusiast.

[ ... ]

From his pop-culture lyrics (think Marilyn Monroe marries Arthur Miller) to his pinpoint literary allusions, his songs are like verbal dessert, filled with layers of delicious wordplay and beautiful, frank imagery. "With this record I was thinking a lot about what I see as a major cultural shift that took place 50 years ago," he says. "I think our youth and celebrity-obsessed and depraved culture we live in now has its roots in the late '50s." In fact, 1957 was a hugely iconic year for Buck 65, whose real name is Ricardo Terfry. Not because he was there; but on his Myspace, he rhymes the reasons it was such a monumental year for pop culture, music, and the political atmosphere of North America.

"1957 was the year of the Frisbee, Tang, and the pink flamingo... of Jailhouse Rock...the year Bettie Page vanished...the year the Beat Generation was born...the year of ongoing obscenity trials in the U.S. congress... the year Pandora's Box opened: sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and youth rebellion. 1957 was the beginning of the end," he says.

And when he's not thinking of writing (he's already making big plans, including writing and mixing beats, for his next two albums), he's doing the online equivalent of scribbling in his diary: his blog is updated regularly on www.buck65.com.

Inside the Spiritual Jacuzzi

There is a group in the Dallas area called the Hot Tub Mystery Religion. Its adherents hold to no particular spiritual dogma, borrowing freely from such sources as Jewish mysticism, Roman paganism, Islamic heresy, and experimental art. One of its founders has compiled a recommended reading list for the faithful; it includes a collection of Tantric exercises, a text on Sufism, one of Philip K. Dick's Gnostic science fiction stories, and a novel by the Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton. The group has been known to treat nitrous oxide as a sacrament and to throw Jacuzzi parties -- hence the name.

In raw numbers, the Hottubbists constitute one of the smallest religions in the world: With well under 100 practitioners, it is dwarfed even by Rastafarianism and Scientology. The group is interesting for many reasons, but its social influence is not among them.

Though small and obscure, it is an example of a significant social trend: the blurring boundaries between art and faith. Atheists have long regarded religion as, at best, a collective work of art, but in the last century that view has grown popular with churchgoers as well. Many Christians and Jews today will declare that the Bible is a collection of myths and metaphors, not literal truths, and some will aver that there is more than one path to God. Neopagans and others take this nonliteral and eclectic approach and run with it, freely fusing classical mythologies, tribal spiritual practices, and even popular fiction, all of which would be mutually exclusive if they were regarded as, to borrow a phrase, the Gospel truth. At the far end of the spectrum are those who do not merely regard religion as a human creation but actively identify themselves as its creators. The Hot Tub group actually began as an art project, becoming a more spiritual endeavor only gradually. If it is unusual, it is only because it is so radical. Most people do not feel the need to be the authors of their own religions, though quite a few are happy to be the editors.

Whether this is bad or good depends on your attitude toward orthodoxy. Traditionalists often castigate what they call the spiritual cafeteria, in which ordinary worshippers pick and choose the beliefs and practices that appeal to them, customizing their faiths to fit their lifestyles instead of altering their lives to fit the dictates of their denominations. The cafeteria line includes every Catholic who casually dissents from the edicts of Rome, every otherwise observant Jew who eats food made in nonkosher kitchens, every Muslim who adjusts his prayer schedule to his workday rather than the other way around. Sometimes, these pickers and choosers even mix in their favorite features of other faiths.

[ ... ]

One of the group's early inspirations was Alexander Scriabin, a Russian composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who dreamed of creating a work of art that would occupy every sense, driving the audience into a transcendental state. (The piece, called "The Mysterium," was to be performed in a specially built cathedral in India. It required, among other elements, "an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation" -- not to mention bells suspended from zeppelins.) The Hot Tub group's installations combined music, visual art, food, and sometimes mind-altering chemicals, along with symbols from Sufism, the Cabala, and other sources. Aydt participated in an annual Halloween event called the Disturbathon, which existed somewhere in the hazy territory between performance art and a haunted house. "It involved nudism in a maze-like environment," he recalls, "and there was inevitably some kind of pit."

Sometimes the Hot Tubbists rented big warehouses for the events; other times, they met in an apartment in Euless, Texas. Eventually, Aydt recalls, "It got to the point where our mutual goal was to provide a spontaneously occurring initiatory experience. It went from being an accidental, 'Hey, we all got together and something very strange happened' situation to a more planned, 'Well, if we play our cards right and do certain things, we can induce this same kind of group experience.'" And so a new religion, devoted to "monotheist pagan mysterianism," was born.

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Favre upset that Doomsday projection precedes Hall induction

With the emotional roller coaster that is his transition from a Hall-of-Fame career to the uncertainty of life after football not yet over, newly retired quarterback Brett Favre learned today that his legacy will not be joining those of the game's greats in the annals of NFL history in Canton – not anytime soon, not ever.

[ ... ]

The Green Bay icon claims he went into a state of shock upon learning that the prophecies of the ancient Mayan calendar, as told late Tuesday evening on his favorite television program, The Universe on the History Channel. Assuming the calendar's predictions prove to be correct, the world will come to a cataclysmic end on December 23, 2012, just three months before Favre becomes eligible to enter the Hall of Fame.

"At first I thought, 'Man, that sucks, we're all going to die in a few years,'" Favre recalled of his emotions as he watched the program. "Then I realized the Earth will perish in a ball of atmospheric flames right before I am supposed to get my bust at Canton. That's when I blacked out."

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Breaking Through the News Filter

If it is true that the power belongs to the people in America, and Congress still answers to the people, then what force prevents the people from rising up to demand that Congress answer to the people's will? The answer to that question is that the "silent majority" is only silent because they have been kept in the dark; they do not know the truth about the dire predicament we are in.

 

[ ... ]

 

This is the real unseen war being fought mostly in population centers, where powerful bombs and armor rip through communities to flush-out all the proud patriotic young men who would dare to harbor ideas of self-defense or resistance. This is the cold reality of the war, that we are fighting a war against ideas with heavy bombers and tanks. This is what the self-anointed saints (neocons) describe as a "clash of civilizations." That is the official story line that is fed to the American people by the nightly news, as they create an illusory vision of the war, in order to mislead.

News about the real war that leaks through the media filter undermines the fake publicity war. The revealed contradictions that seem to undermine "the mission" are written off as "mistakes" by reporters (which politicians immediately deny), even though they showed the real war unfolding according as planned. The war planners counted on chaos and sectarian violence to erupt after the overthrow of regimes. The plan had always been to trigger a series of wars of manageable size, by using local gangsters and mercenaries to foment divisive insurrections. The purpose of this strategy was to target local "extremists," the official designation of those who would take up arms against the American proxies.

[ ... ]

The sleeping sheeple are blissfully unaware that world war may be imminent. They do not know that the day after Cheney visited the royal house, the Saudi Shura Council announced "national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards," because of credible threats to Iran's Bushehr reactor. Americans will not hear this from the national news, but they will hear every word of Petraeus' upcoming testimony before Congress, where he will blame everything on Iran once again. This time he may provide the missing catalyst for igniting the war on Iran, since the government has not yet been able to provoke an Iranian misstep to their provocations in Iraq. Somebody has to be forced into fighting back, somewhere, before we can label them "al Qaida" and the use of the really big guns is authorized.

The forbidden reaction of self-defense (which we define as "terrorism") is more likely to come from one of Israel's ongoing military provocations against the feisty freedom-loving Arabs, than from Iran. Our government is deeply involved in supporting these Israeli attacks upon the Palestinians and their neighbors, in the hopes that one of these attacks will bring sufficient Muslim retaliation upon Israel to justify our waging a larger genocidal war against Islam, in defense of Israel. The centerpiece of this strategy is guaranteeing Israel's security. That is the central rationalization for utilizing nuclear weapons to disarm Iran.

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Review: A Blue Hand - The Beats in India

Ginsberg's friends in New York insist he travel to the East and explore the subcontinent with them, but he does not need much encouragement. Ginsberg had already heard the ancient voice of William Blake reciting poetry inside his Harlem apartment. He had looked outside the window and noticed how everything was created by a "living hand," how the sky itself was "the living blue hand."

"From that moment, Irwin Allen Ginsberg became a divining rod in the headlong and holy pursuit of God," Baker writes.

She weaves an intricate if somewhat tedious description of Ginsberg's travels through India and his quest for meaning while accompanied by his lover, Peter Orlovsky, and in the company of poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger.

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World Bank joins food price warnings

From Deutsche Welle :

 

World Bank President Robert Zoellick has called on member nations to act urgently to help avert a global food crisis, saying the rapid rise in food prices could push 100 million people in poor countries deeper into poverty. His warning follows that from the leader of the International Monetary Fund, who said hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of starvation. Steering committees from the two bodies have been meeting in Washington. There have been food riots recently in a number of countries, including Haiti, the Philippines and Egypt. Zoellick called for a "new deal" to tackle the international food crisis. Food prices have risen sharply in recent months, driven by increased demand, poor weather in some countries that has ruined crops and an increase in the use of land to grow crops for transport fuels.

 

House Dems warn DHS on domestic intelligence program

The Department of Homeland Security has not adequately addressed the civil liberties concerns associated with the new National Applications Office (NAO) that would promote the use of intelligence capabilities such as overhead surveillance for homeland security and other domestic purposes, three Democratic Congressmen said this week.

 

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'The passion for football can result in sleepless nights for Italian women'

From: Italy: Direct link between passion for sex and football

In a country where football is a national passion, it's little surprise to learn a loss on the field can affect sexual performance.

Chiara Simonelli, associate professor of the psychology of emotional and sexual development at Rome's La Sapienza university, has found a direct link between a man's sexual performance and the performance of his favorite team.

"If the team close to his heart loses, he's depressed, his desire falls and the sex fades away," she said on Friday at the presentation of the 2008 report on, Italians in Bed.

Tibet: 'U.S. finger in unrest pie' or, 'The counter-propaganda'

So what evidence do we have of US involvement in this latest round of Tibetan violence? History suggests it might be the case. The CIA gave the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama money and support through the 1950s and 1960s. On September 15, 1998, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that during "the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with $1.7 million ($1.83 million) a year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of $180,000 ($193,500) for the Dalai Lama". The CIA trained Tibetan guerrillas in Nepal and in Colorado during that period. This CIA support petered out in the 1970s.

So what is the situation today? Michael Barker, a PhD student at Griffith University in Brisbane who studies social and political movements, says much of the present international campaigning for a free Tibet is financed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is closely linked to the CIA.

Mr Barker, in a paper written in August last year, notes that the NED was established in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan. The role of the NED, which admits to receiving funds directly from the CIA, is to foster democracy throughout the world.

The NED has financed the work of the International Campaign for Tibet, the Tibet Fund and the Tibetan Information Network, the three leading anti-Chinese Tibetan advocacy organisations. In short, the CIA/NED directly bankrolls the apparatus that runs the Dalai Lama's international campaign for a non-violent revolution in Tibet to overthrow the Chinese.

 

[ ... ]

 

The Dalai Lama heads an elite of families and religious figures that once ruled Tibet. And the Tibet they ruled was one of the most backward and inhumane societies in the world. Almost 90 per cent of Tibetans were slaves before the Chinese invaded the country.

As an Indian commentator, Aniket Alam, wrote last week: "Far from any democratic rights, for an overwhelming majority of Tibetans, the rule of the Dalai Lama was one of unending unpaid labour, cruelty and debt-bondage and not some spiritual Shangri-La. Some historians have even asserted that Tibetan feudal oppression was even worse than its Chinese counterpart, while one prisoner in the Dalai Lama's prison in the 1950s called it hell on Earth."

 

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Spying on environmentalists

From: Exclusive: Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups

 

A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

 

Neocon puppet expects another 9/11

From: Bush speaks on the possibility of another 9/11

US President George Bush has said he believes another 9/11 attack on the United States should be considered a strong possibility and warned that such an attack could originate from Pakistan.

In an interview with America's ABC TV, Mr Bush said: "If another September 11 style attack is being planned, it probably is being plotted in Pakistan, and not Afghanistan."

Bush said if the terrorists were planning such attacks, they would be found out.

 

Guantanamo prisoners boycott war trials

The U.S. war crimes trials at Guantanamo Bay are running into a new obstacle: boycotts by the defendants.

Three men accused of being al-Qaida operatives have now chosen to boycott their upcoming trials. More defendants are expected to do the same as the military attempts to prosecute dozens of prisoners at the isolated, high-security U.S. base overlooking the Caribbean.

At pretrial hearings this week, two men, a Saudi and a Yemeni, denounced the tribunals as a sham and said they would not appear for future hearings.

Defense attorneys say they could face sanctions from the bar associations in their home states if they don't uphold the wishes of their clients.

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Native Americans secretly sterilized

Canada's genocide

Location of Mass Graves of Residential School Children Revealed for the First Time; Independent Tribunal Established

Squamish Nation Territory ("Vancouver, Canada")
Thursday, April 10, 2008 11:00 am PST

At a public ceremony and press conference held today outside the colonial "Indian Affairs" building in downtown Vancouver, the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared (FRD) released a list of twenty eight mass graves across Canada holding the remains of untold numbers of aboriginal children who died in Indian Residential Schools.

The list was distributed today to the world media and to United Nations agencies, as the first act of the newly-formed International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada (IHRTGC), a non-governmental body established by indigenous elders.

In a statement read by FRD spokesperson Eagle Strong Voice, it was declared that the IHRTGC would commence its investigations on April 15, 2008, the fourth Annual Aboriginal Holocaust Memorial Day. This inquiry will involve international human rights observers from Guatemala and Cyprus , and will convene aboriginal courts of justice where those persons and institutions responsible for the death and suffering of residential school children will be tried and sentenced. (The complete Statement and List of Mass Graves is reproduced below).

Eagle Strong Voice and IHRTGC elders will present the Mass Graves List at the United Nations on April 19, and will ask United Nations agencies to protect and monitor the mass graves as part of a genuine inquiry and judicial prosecution of those responsible for this Canadian Genocide.

Eyewitness Sylvester Greene spoke to the media at today's event, and described how he helped bury a young Inuit boy at the United Church's Edmonton residential school in 1953.

"We were told never to tell anyone by Jim Ludford, the Principal, who got me and three other boys to bury him. But a lot more kids got buried all the time in that big grave next to the school."

For more information: www.hiddenfromhistory.org, or write to the IHRTGC at: genocidetribunal@yahoo.ca

Issued on Squamish Territory , 10 April, 2008, under the authority of Hereditary Chief Kiapilano.


Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's genocide (documentary)

'Why the British government is seeking legislation to extend the detention of terror suspects to 42 days from the current 28-day limit'

From: Britain monitoring 30 terror plots: interior minister

 

British police and security agencies are keeping tabs on 30 terror plots, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith told a Sunday newspaper.

"There are 22,000 individuals who are being monitored. There are 200 networks involved and 30 active plots," Smith said in an interview with the News of the World.

"We now face a threat level that is severe. It's actually growing," said the interior minister.

Naomi Klein: 'A government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction'

Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush Administration's doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate "post-conflict" plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries "at the same time," each lasting "five to seven years."

 

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Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and then drawing up ad hoc plans to pick up the pieces. In close cooperation with the National Intelligence Council, Pascual's office keeps "high risk" countries on a "watch list" and assembles rapid-response teams ready to engage in prewar planning and to "mobilize and deploy quickly" after a conflict has gone down. The teams are made up of private companies, nongovernmental organizations and members of think tanks--some, Pascual told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in October, will have "pre-completed" contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken. Doing this paperwork in advance could "cut off three to six months in your response time."

The plans Pascual's teams have been drawing up in his little-known office in the State Department are about changing "the very social fabric of a nation," he told CSIS. The office's mandate is not to rebuild any old states, you see, but to create "democratic and market-oriented" ones. So, for instance (and he was just pulling this example out of his hat, no doubt), his fast-acting reconstructors might help sell off "state-owned enterprises that created a nonviable economy." Sometimes rebuilding, he explained, means "tearing apart the old."

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In Searching for New Job, Gonzales Sees No Takers

Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.

He has, through friends, put out inquiries, they said, and has not found any takers. What makes Mr. Gonzales's case extraordinary is that former attorneys general, the government's chief lawyer, are typically highly sought.

A longtime loyalist to George W. Bush dating to their years together in Texas, Mr. Gonzales was once widely viewed as a strong candidate to be the first Hispanic-American nominated one day to the Supreme Court. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he carried an impressive personal story as the child of poor Mexican immigrants.

Despite those credentials, he left office last August with a frayed reputation over his role in the dismissal of several federal prosecutors and the truthfulness of his testimony about a secret eavesdropping program. He has had no full-time job since his resignation, and his principal income has come from giving a handful of talks at colleges and before private business groups.

 

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