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Posted on Saturday, 16 January, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Why I hate the luxury cruise industry: Overfed white people from a nearby Royal Caribbean Cruise Liner lounge like beached whales at a fenced and guarded coastal retreat in Haiti within easy view of survivors of a humanitarian crisis in which tens of thousands have died and many more are starving. Photograph: Daniel Morel/AP
So, perhaps this post is a little derivative to the main argument at hand: That Haiti needs donations for earthquake relief. But it seems that Haiti’s financial situation, which keeps it in dire straits, basically stems from the fact that they freed themselves from western slavery a few hundred years ago and the world is still sore about it.
The record of debt certainly can certainly be followed to the Slave Revolt and resulting battles in the early 1800s, and you could look at the ancestry of western concepts about Haiti as originally stemming from French and America’s tantrums at not being able to bring the island nation back under direct control.
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Posted on Monday, 4 January, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
To Shoot an elephant is a new documentary by Mohammed Rujailah and my pal Alberto Arce, and they’re holding a January 18 worldwide screening which you can take part in by downloading the entire film and showing it on the day. The film covers emergency workers, human rights activist and other internationals who were in Gaza during last year’s December-January attack by the Israeli military. The footage is a mashup of edits culled from footage for another film, Erased: Wiped off the Map, which is about the attacks on Gaza. Visit www.toshootanelephant.com, where you can also see the English trailer. Download the film and hold your own screening in your living room or share it with others for screenings elsewhere.
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Posted on Wednesday, 29 July, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Democracy Now! has the exclusive skinny on military spooks infiltrating groups in my occasional stomping grounds of Olympia, WA: My pal Drew Hendricks, along with Brendan Maslauskas Dunn (of Students for a Democratic Society and the Port of Oly anti-militarization group) pieced together documents from FOIA requests to out “John Jacob” who was passing himeself off as an anti-war activist. He was really John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at the nearby Fort Lewis military base.
Newly declassified documents reveal that an active member of Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in Washington state was actually an informant for the US military. The man everyone knew as “John Jacob” was in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis. The military’s role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement inside the United States. The Fort Lewis military base denied our request for an interview. But in a statement to Democracy Now, the base’s Public Affairs office publicly acknowledged for the first time that Towery is a military operative. “This could be one of the key revelations of this era,” said Eileen Clancy, who has closely tracked government spying on activist organizations. [includes rush transcript]
— Democracy Now!
Posted on Wednesday, 8 July, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
A while back I ran this graphic, found at Norman Finkelstein’s website, at the top of this blog. Since then, more details on it have emerged on Norman’s site and on a Facebook group that’s sprung up.
Norman Finkelstein and other prominent activists are asking that people converge on Gaza on Jan. 1st, 2010 to break the siege of Gaza. Go with them, or support someone else who’s willing to go. Events to raise money to send people to Gaza are planned throughout the Fall.
I still have a number of questions about it, but like the concept. A first public meeting about it is set for New York a week from today, so imagine more should be coming out following that. the details are here:
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Posted on Thursday, 25 June, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Every now and again it’s a good idea to turn on your own just to see what it’s like on the other side. It helps to have something to actually disagree with them over. This post goes over my recent days spent arguing with the “liberal” commenterati (obsessive commenters on websites. A google search tells me I didn’t coin this word. Damn) about the protests in Iran. It wasn’t a pretty time, but it was an interesting one. If it’s not a tech. or nerd site I tend to avoid these areas anymore.
In this case, it’s regarding the ever changing situation in Iran. The battle ground in question is the comment area at Common Dreams, a usually progressive left news site. It was a wholly satisfying experiment. I learned a lot about a lot about the nature of comment areas, their addicting qualities and how quickly the conversation sort of descends into self-parody. I learned something about myself: According to these people I must work for the Mossad or CIA.
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Posted on Saturday, 13 June, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
It’s been a while now since Rabbi David Forman published his May 25th critique of The Rachel Corrie Foundation as a guest op-ed on the Jerusalem Post website. Someone somewhere coined the phrase “publishing at the speed of thought” with regards to the ease of disseminating words and ideas online. I think they meant it as a good thing. While I’m an eager promoter of all things online and tech, I have often kept in mind a bit of advice I read elsewhere about blogging, which suggests giving an idea a week or so to process before publishing it all over World Wide Tarnation.
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“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”