In 1928, Ho Chi Minh was in Thailand while his Chinese wife, Zeng Xueming, remained in Canton. He sent her this letter:
From the day we parted, already more than a year.
I miss you with such anguish, it needn’t be said.
Borrowing rosy wings, I send a few lines to reassure you.
Such is my desire, and I wish your mother ten thousand good lucks.
Clumsily yours.
Translating, I’ve kept intact Ho’s tone and “rosy wings” image, which indicates a high flying, red colored bird, but also implies rose petals. Though it sounds weird in English, it does convey his sweetness and anguish. Ho’s letter …
Our intelligence community lives inside a beltway bubble of alarming hysteria
by Jason Hirthler / February 8th, 2014
In his 7,000-word State of the Union speech last month, President Obama waited 5,700 words before stintingly devoting a single sentence to the subject of surveillance. He didn’t mention the rogue NSA, didn’t name specific reforms, adding only that the important thing was that “public confidence” in the “vital work” of the intelligence community was maintained. This cavalier approach to the topic of the year belies the administration’s essential disinterest in the public interest. This perspective was reified in the last two weeks by the voices of the American intelligence community. On Tuesday the House Intelligence Committee staged its …
Toussaint, the most unhappy of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt though find patience! Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou has great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.
–To Toussaint L’Ouverture, William Wordsworth ((Quoted in Brian Hickey, “Wordsworth …
In the spring of 1986, Back to the Future, the Michael J Fox blockbuster featuring a time-traveling DeLorean car, was less than a year old. The Apple Macintosh, launched via a single, iconic ad directed by Ridley Blade Runner Scott, was less than two years old. Ronald Reagan, immortalized by Gore Vidal as “the acting president”, was hailing the mujahideen in Afghanistan as “freedom fighters”.
The world was mired in Cyber Cold War mode; the talk was all about electronic counter-measures, with American C3s (command, control, communications) programmed to destroy Soviet C3s, and both the US and the USSR under MAD …
Every year brings the world more climatological science that man-made climate change, or overall global warming, is chronically worsening.
Every year, from Antarctica to Greenland, from the Andes to Alaska, the ice is melting, the permafrost is melting, and very soon the Arctic may have a re-unprecedented ice-free season. Every year, more and more businesses are speaking out on how climate change is damaging their businesses. Insurance companies were in the lead on sounding the alarm on global warming. Just a few days ago, Coca-Cola’s vice president for environment and water resources, Jeffrey Seabright, told the New York Times that “increased …
Those who forget the past are often condemned to repeat its mistakes.
On February 29, 2004 the US, France, and Canada overthrew Haiti’s elected government. The foreign military intervention led to an unmitigated human rights disaster.
In the three weeks after the coup at least 1,000 bodies were buried in a mass grave by the State Morgue in Port-au-Prince, a fact acknowledged by Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Davis, Commander of Canadian Forces in Haiti, during a July 29, 2004, media teleconference call. In the year and a half after the coup, investigations by the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, the University of …
Although they do not teach classes, at most universities and four-year colleges the Presidents of those institutions are remunerated with a six-figure salary and a comprehensive benefits package. Presidents occupy positions within the hierarchy of the university that correspond to those of corporate CEOs in business, and they are compensated accordingly.
For instance, the president of the University of Chicago, Robert J. Zimmer, is paid like a high-powered corporate executive, whereas the adjunct professor who teaches at that same institution may be compensated like an entry level worker at Wal-Mart and accorded similar social status. According to The Chronicle of Higher …
Yesterday’s leak of the flagrant telephone talk between the US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey R. Pyatt has already hit the international media headlines. In short, it turned out that the US officials were coordinating their actions on how to install a puppet government in Ukraine. They agreed to nominate Bat’kyvshchina Party leader Arseniy Yatseniuk as Deputy Prime Minister, to bench Udar Party leader Vitaly Klitschko off the game for a while and to discredit neo-Nazi Svoboda party chief Oleh Tiahnybok as “Yanukovych’s project”. Then Mrs. Nuland informed …
What’s wrong about the demand that the Palestinian leadership recognize Israel as the “Nation State of the Jewish People”?
Well, practically everything.
States recognize each other. They don’t have to recognize each other’s ideological character.
A state is a reality. Ideologies belong to the abstract realm.
When the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, it recognized the state. It did not recognize its communist nature.
When the PLO recognized the State of Israel in the Oslo agreement, and in the exchange of letters preceding it, it was not asked to recognize its Zionist ideology. When Israel in return recognized the PLO as …
I’d like to insert a joke about “freedom is on the march!” here but am too disgusted to do it. I just received a lengthy report from Dr. Muhamad Al-Darraji, President of CCER (Conservation Center of Environmental & Reserves), Fallujah City, Iraq (PDF, Doc). It documents the attacks of the past year on the people of Fallujah by the government of Iraq. The U.S. government has rushed weapons to the Iraqi government for this assault. A petition opposing further U.S. arms sales to the government that decades of U.S. violence left behind in Iraq is here.
A network is a plurality of organic and artificial beings of humans and machines who perform continuous actions thanks to procedures that make possible their interconnection and interpretation. If you do not adapt to these procedures, if you don’t follow the technical rules of the games, you are not playing the game. If you don’t react to certain stimuli in the programmed way you don’t form part of the network. The behavior of persons in a network is not aleatory because the network implies and predisposes pathways for the networked.
A swarm is a plurality of living beings whose behavior follows …
If the spineless Obama will not do it, we must do it—even unilaterally.
— Sir Gerald Kaufman, Manchester, Gorton (Lab)
I’d like to share, especially with American readers, a great moment in the British Parliament on 5 February when the MP for Gorton, Manchester, Sir Gerald Kaufman rose to speak in a debate on the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Here is what he said word for word so that you get the full flavour:
I once led a delegation of 60 parliamentarians from 13 European Parliaments to Gaza. I could no longer do that today because Gaza is practically inaccessible. The …
Foreign Mining, State Corruption, and Genocide in Mongolia
by Keith Harmon Snow / February 6th, 2014
Packed with distortions and outright lies, Mongolia’s privatized former state media called them the ‘enemies of Mongolia’. On 16 September 2013, the leaders of Mongolia’s Fire Nation (Gal Undesten in Mongolian), an environment and human rights coalition, organized a mass protest in front of the Mongolian Parliament. Decades of grassroots organizing to establish environmental protections were at risk: on September 16 the Great State Khural (State Parliament) gathered with intentions to dismantle the so-called ‘Law With A Long Name’ (LLN).
To fine or ticket or not to? THAT is the Question!
by Paul Haeder / February 6th, 2014
[Note: Again, real national-level news from a small town, Spokane, in a small state, Washington. This is published now at Spokane Living Magazine. Great photos by my daughter, Makenna. A community college student in Spokane. What more does the world want than a radical revolutionary who write kick-ass better-than-that-Hunter/freak/Thompson AND also does straight ahead journalism?]
More Bang for the Public Safety Buck: Criminal Justice Commission Pushes a No New Jail Thesis
Leaner and smarter, rather than lean and mean, seems to be the mantra around Spokane and the region when talking about incarceration. Smarter: holding offenders …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / February 6th, 2014
Kirsten Sandberg, chairperson of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, discusses the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child report outlining massive allegations of child abuse coverups and its demands The Vatican take action to hold guilty parties accountable.
A leading Uncle Tom Tamil, Tamara Kunanayakam, will perhaps be once again heading the Sri Lankan government’s case for itself at the 25th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), March 3-28, when a resolution critical of the government for human rights abuses against Tamils will be introduced.
Kunanayakam’s article in Colombo Telegraph is filled with internal governmental intrigue, which makes it difficult to determine her exact status Regardless of her current government position she is a splitting figure in the international geo-political scene.
The Permanent Peoples Tribunal (PPT), the successor of the Bertrand Russell war crimes tribunal …
Most of us have our guard up when it comes to direct-to-consumer drug advertising. We know the butterflies, sunsets and puppies in the TV ads are designed to distract us from words like “blood clot”, “heart attack”, “stroke”, “seizure”, “life-threatening allergic reaction” and “death.” We are aware that more than half the ads tells us why we don’t want to ask our doctor about the new wonder drug.
Unbranded advertising, however, is much more insidious. Instead of selling a drug, it sells the disease driving the drug sales and sometimes doesn’t mention the drug at all.
Note: As we always do here at DV, we open up intellectual and revolutionary space to keen eyes and sharp wits and wicked thinkers. Here, let’s look at a critique of the reactionary Nation magazine’s Feb. 17, 2014 cover “work.” Or rather, cover hack job! Written by M R Klein
The most recent issue of The Nation features a cover story by Bill and Melinda Gates’ foundation booster Michelle Goldberg bemoaning “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars”. Unaccountably chosen for such a place of prominence in progressive left US media, the astonishingly petty article consists mainly of trivial gossip and kvetching by …
Last month the Guardian reported that a team of scientists studying early Homo sapiens in Europe had extracted DNA from the tooth of a male hunter-gatherer who’d lived in what is now the Asturias region of northern Spain around 7000 years ago. They drew some surprising conclusions from the analysis. The man was dark-skinned but blue-eyed. His nearest DNA matches with contemporary ethnicities are with Swedes and Finns, among the palest of peoples.
Scholars had earlier argued that blue eyes had appeared as the result of a genetic mutation somewhere between 10,000 and 6000 years ago. (Before that all humans had …
It is a point of historical controversy whether or not when told that French peasants did not have bread to eat, Marie Antoinette uttered the phrase “Let them eat cake,” an even more inaccessible and scarce food for poor people. But what is certain and should be beyond controversy is that in response to the capitalist implosion that shattered so many lives, Obama and the corporate democrats have demonstrated a policy attitude as cavalier as the French queen. Over the last five years, they have offered neither bread nor cake or anything other than false hope and empty symbols.
(IPS) — When Western intelligence agencies began in the early 1990s to intercept telexes from an Iranian university to foreign high technology firms, intelligence analysts believed they saw the first signs of military involvement in Iran’s nuclear programme. That suspicion led to U.S. intelligence assessments over the next decade that Iran was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons.
The supposed evidence of military efforts to procure uranium enrichment equipment shown in the telexes was also the main premise of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s investigation of Iran’s nuclear programme from 2003 through 2007.
But the interpretation of the intercepted telexes on which later assessments were …
As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hurried to his helicopter ready to take off at the end of a visit to Iraq last year, it was becoming clearer that the Americans have lost control of a country they wished to mold to their liking. His departure on March 24, 2013 was the conclusion of a ‘surprise’ visit meant to mark the 10th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Ten years prior, the US had stormed Baghdad, unleashing one of the 20th century’s most brutal and longest conflicts. Since then, Iraq has not ceased to bleed.
The question is no longer what, the question is when.
Very soon, income inequality in the United States will reach such a critical level it is likely violence will be viewed as an acceptable response to America’s social ills.
Unlike Depression Era bank robbers, assaults will be aimed at soft human targets. After all, who uses cash anymore?
Extortion. Kidnapping. Arsons. A crime wave of epic proportions might well be the only way those running America will come to their senses and realize that no democracy can continue to exist where so much is controlled by so few. The present system of representative …
If an attack were to be launched on America in the very near future, it is my belief that America would not know that attack were about to be launched.
— Otis G. Pike, New York Times, Oct 18, 1975
History is by some marvels of anti-institutional warriors. Now, the names of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden tend to find copy and coverage, leakers and soldiers against tight lipped secrecy. But last month, when former New York Congressman Otis G. Pike died, there was barely a murmur. Obituaries proved few in number. Most were colourless and unreflective.
A new report in Science News magazine (1-25-2014) by Bruce Bower details a re-evaluation of the view that the Rapa Nuians, the native inhabitants of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), were responsible for the collapse of their population and society due to over exploitation of natural resources and the destruction of the rain forest on their island, a view recently popularized by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse (2005).
As Bower reports, the anthropologist Maria Mulrooney has published the results of her studies of the Rapa Nui culture (Journal of Archeological Science, December 2013) based on new radiocarbon dates from archeological …
In light of ongoing global negotiations on pressing environmental issues, it’s time for efforts to curtail the excessive influence of multinational corporations over public policy to be strengthened and scaled up at all levels – especially at the United Nations.
*****
The corporate capture of policy making has dire implications for how we achieve sustainable development in the 21st century, and it must be strongly opposed in the coming years as deliberations on climate change and sustainable development reach important conclusions. Private sector influence over politics at the national level is already widely recognised, but the extent to which …
Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for ‘objectivity’. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.
– Michael Parenti
An exchange in January with Paul Farhi, Washington Post columnist, about coverage of US foreign policy:
Dear Mr. Farhi,
Now that you’ve done a study of al-Jazeera’s political bias in supporting Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, is it perhaps now time for a study of the US mass media’s bias on US foreign policy? And if you doubt the extent and depth of this bias, consider this:
There are more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States. Can you name a …
When West Bromwich Albion’s star player Anelka performed the Quenelle after scoring a goal in a match on 28 December he was immediately lashed by a frenzied storm in a Zionists’ teacup.
The Quenelle is a gesture, some claim, made famous by the French comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. As explained by the BBC it involves touching or gripping your shoulder with one hand while holding the palm of your other hand outstretched and pointing to the ground. “Some describe it as a combination of the bras d’honneur with a bent arm (which means ‘up yours’) and the Nazi salute”.
Two weeks ago in a room in Kabul, Afghanistan, I joined several dozen people, working seamstresses, some college students, socially engaged teenagers and a few visiting internationals like myself, to discuss world hunger. Our emphasis was not exclusively on their own country’s worsening hunger problems. The Afghan Peace Volunteers, in whose home we were meeting, draw strength from looking beyond their own very real struggles.
With us was Hakim, a medical doctor who spent six years working as a public health specialist in the central highlands of Afghanistan and, prior to that, among refugees in Quetta, Pakistan. He helped us understand …
At the black heart of Israel’s 65-year destruction of Palestine is the Jewish National Fund (JNF) which once went by the more germane, Jewish COLONIAL Trust; an opportunistic real-estate jackal that has aggressively engaged in Zionist chicanery throughout the ancestral land of Palestine.
From its inception in 1901, JNF’s mission of the theft of Palestinian land for the Jews-only Greater (Eretz) Israel is racist, colonial, criminal (colonial expansion is a war crime under Article 8.2(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute) and bloody.
