02.27.11

New Form of Sulfur

Posted in General at 1:38 pm by nemo

New Form of Sulfur Discovered in Geological FluidsScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2011) — Sulfur is the sixth most abundant element on Earth and plays a key role in many geological and biological processes. A French-German team including CNRS1 and the Université Paul Sabatier has identified, on the basis of laboratory measurements, a novel form of sulfur present in geological fluids: the S3- ion. The discovery calls existing theories about the geological transport of sulfur into question, and could provide ways of identifying new deposits of precious metals such as gold and copper.

Permalink Comments

Fanning Islamic Fundamentalism

Posted in General at 1:37 pm by nemo

Published on Sunday, February 27, 2011 by the Independent/UK Gorbachev: The US Must Take Blame for Fanning Islamic Fundamentalism
Britain should pull out of Afghanistan, says the ex-Soviet leader
by Matthew Bell
Mikhail Gorbachev, the former president of the Soviet Union, has called for fundamental change to world politics against the background of uprisings across North Africa, saying that the will of the people can no longer be ignored.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/02/27

Permalink Comments

Reflections on the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt

Posted in you've got mail at 1:31 pm by nemo

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/24/reflections_on_the_revolutions_in_tunisia_and_egypt

Foreign Policy February 24, 2011
Why were American tear gas canisters used copiously against peaceful
protesters in Tunis and Cairo, as they have been systematically used for
years against Palestinians and a few Israeli and foreign activists
demonstrating at villages like Bil’in in the occupied West Bank? Why were
the goons and thugs of Ben ‘Ali and Mubarak on such good terms with the
intelligence services of the United States, France and other European
countries? Why was support for “stability” (which really meant support for
repression, corruption, the frustration of popular demands, and the
subversion of democracy) in practice the main, and indeed the only, policy
of the United States and the European Union in most parts of the Arab world?
By Rashid Khalidi

Permalink Comments

China’s Turning Point

Posted in you've got mail at 1:30 pm by nemo

RG mail

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/roach2/English

2011-02-24
China’s Turning Point Stephen S. Roach
inSarNEW HAVEN – In early March, China’s National People’s Congress will
approve its 12th Five-Year Plan. This Plan is likely to go down in history
as one of China’s boldest strategic initiatives.

In essence, it will change the character of China’s economic model – moving
from the export- and investment-led structure of the past 30 years toward a
pattern of growth that is driven increasingly by Chinese consumers. This
shift will have profound implications for China, the rest of Asia, and the
broader global economy.

Permalink Comments

This is no conspiracy, Glenn Beck

Posted in you've got mail at 1:29 pm by nemo

RG mail

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/02/beck-uncut-conspiracy-world

New Statesman 26 February 2011
This is no conspiracy, Glenn Beck
The UK and US Uncut movements are a genuinely popular, if gentle,
insurrection.

Permalink Comments

A Crazy Prophet

Posted in you've got mail at 1:27 pm by nemo

RG mail
Uri Avnery
February 26, 2011
A Crazy Prophet

WHY DON’T the masses stream to the square here, too, and throw Bibi out?”
my taxi driver exclaimed when we were passing Rabin Square. The wide expanse
was almost empty, with only a few mothers and their children enjoying the
mild winter sun. *
Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

Booknotes: Hobsbawm

Posted in General at 1:25 pm by nemo

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/terry-eagleton/indomitable

Indomitable
Terry Eagleton
How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 by Eric Hobsbawm
Little, Brown, 470 pp, £25.00, January 2011, ISBN 978 1 4087 0287 1*

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a
reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way.
What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a
pile of toddlers? Had Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking
new research? Had someone stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing
that it was all a joke?

We are speaking, note, about 1986, a few years before the Soviet bloc
crumbled. As Eric Hobsbawm points out in this collection of essays, that
wasn’t what caused so many erstwhile believers to bin their Guevara posters.
Marxism was already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came
down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution,
the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system –
or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial
proletariat had dwindled, but Marx himself did not think that the working
class was confined to this group. In Capital, he ranks commercial workers on
the same level as industrial ones. He was also well aware that by far the
largest group of wage labourers in his own day was not the industrial
working class but domestic servants, most of whom were women. Marx and his
disciples didn’t imagine that the working class could go it alone, without
forging alliances with other oppressed groups. And though the industrial
proletariat would have a leading role, Marx does not seem to have thought
that it had to constitute the social majority in order to play it.

Even so, something did indeed happen between 1976 and 1986. Racked by a
crisis of profits, old style mass production gave way to a smaller scale,
versatile, decentralised ‘post-industrial’ culture of consumerism,
information technology and the service industries. Outsourcing and
globalisation were now the order of the day. But this did not mean that the
system had essentially changed, thus encouraging the generation of 1968 to
swap Gramsci and Marcuse for Said and Spivak. On the contrary, it was more
powerful than ever, with wealth concentrated in even fewer hands and class
inequalities growing apace. It was this, ironically, which sparked the
leftist rush for the exits. Radical ideas withered as radical change seemed
increasingly implausible. The only public figure to denounce capitalism in
the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same,
another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so
exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines
open on the high streets.

Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik revolution, remains
broadly committed to the Marxist camp – a fact worth mentioning as it would
be easy to read this book without realising it. This is because of its
judiciousness, not its shiftiness. Its author has lived through so much of
the political turbulence he portrays that it is easy to fantasise that
History itself is speaking here, in its wry, all-seeing, dispassionate
wisdom. It is hard to think of a critic of Marxism who can address his or
her own beliefs with such honesty and equipoise.

Hobsbawm, to be sure, is not quite as omniscient as the Hegelian
World-Spirit, for all his cosmopolitan range and encyclopedic knowledge.
Like many historians he is not at his sharpest in the realm of ideas, and he
is wrong to suggest that the disciples of Louis Althusser treated Marx’s
Capital as though it were primarily a work of epistemology. Nor would
Hegel’s Geist treat feminism, not least Marxist feminism, with such
cold-eyed indifference, or consign one of the most fertile currents of
modern Marxism – Trotskyism – to a few casual asides. Hobsbawm also thinks
that Gramsci is the most original thinker produced by the West since 1917.
Perhaps he means the most original Marxist thinker, but even that is
dubious. Walter Benjamin is surely a better qualified candidate for that
title.

Even the most erudite students of Marxism, however, will find themselves
learning from these essays. It is, for example, part of the stock-in-trade
of historical materialism that Marx broke decisively with the various
utopian socialists who surrounded him. (One of them believed that in an
ideal world the sea would turn into lemonade. Marx would probably have
preferred Riesling.) Hobsbawm, by contrast, insists on Marx’s substantial
debt to these thinkers, who ranged from ‘the penetratingly visionary to the
psychically unhinged’. He is clear about the fragmentary nature of Marx’s
political writings, and rightly insists that the word ‘dictatorship’ in the
phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, used by Marx to describe the Paris
Commune, means nothing like what it means today. Revolution was to be seen
not simply as a sudden transfer of power but as the prelude to a lengthy,
complex, unpredictable period of transition. From the late 1850s onwards,
Marx did not consider any such seizure of power either imminent or probable.
Much as he cheered on the Paris Commune, he expected little from it. Nor was
revolution to be simplemindedly opposed to reform, of which Marx was a
persistent champion. As Hobsbawm might have added, there have been some
relatively bloodless revolutions and some spectacularly bloody processes of
social reform.

An absorbing chapter on Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in
England claims it as the first study anywhere to deal with the working class
as a whole, not merely with particular sectors or industries. In Hobsbawm’s
view, its analysis of the social impact of capitalism is still in many
respects unsurpassed. The book does not paint its subject in too lurid a
colour: the charge that it depicts all workers as starving or destitute, or
living purely at subsistence level, is groundless. Nor is the bourgeoisie
presented as a bunch of black-hearted villains. As so often, it takes one to
know one: Engels himself was the son of a wealthy German manufacturer who
ran a textile mill in Salford, and used his ill-gotten gains to help keep
the down-at-heel Marx family afloat. He also enjoyed a spot of fox-hunting,
and as a champion of both the proletariat and the colonial Irish maintained
a unity of theory and practice by taking a working-class Irish woman as his
mistress.

Did Marx see the victory of socialism as inevitable? He says so in The
Communist Manifesto, though Hobsbawm denies that it is a deterministic
document. Yet this is partly because he does not inquire into what kind of
inevitability is at stake. Marx sometimes writes as if historical tendencies
had the force of natural laws; but it is doubtful even so that this is why
he saw socialism as the logical outcome of capitalism. If socialism is
historically predestined, why bother with political struggle? It is rather
that he expected capitalism to become more exploitative, while the working
class grew in strength, numbers and experience; and these men and women,
being moderately rational, would then have every reason to rise up against
their oppressors. Rather as for Christianity the free actions of human
beings are part of God’s preordained plan, so for Marx the tightening
contradictions of capitalism will force men and women freely to overthrow
it. Conscious human activity will bring revolution about, but the paradox is
that this activity is itself in a sense scripted.

You cannot, however, speak of what free men and women are bound to do in
certain circumstances, since if they are bound to do it they are not free.
Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be
socialism that replaces it. It may be fascism, or barbarism. Hobsbawm
reminds us of a small but significant phrase in The Communist Manifesto
which has been well-nigh universally overlooked: capitalism, Marx writes
ominously, might end ‘in the common ruin of the contending classes’. It is
not out of the question that the only socialism we shall witness is one that
we shall be forced into by material circumstance after a nuclear or
ecological catastrophe. Like other 19th-century believers in progress, Marx
did not foresee the possibility of the human race growing so technologically
ingenious that it ends up wiping itself out. This is one of several ways in
which socialism is not historically inevitable, and neither is anything
else. Nor did Marx live to see how social democracy might buy off
revolutionary passion.

Few works have sung the praises of the middle classes with such embarrassing
zest as The Communist Manifesto. In Marx’s view, they have been by far the
most revolutionary force in human history, and without harnessing for its
own ends the material and spiritual wealth they have accumulated, socialism
will prove bankrupt. This, needless to say, was one of his shrewder
prognostications. Socialism in the 20th century turned out to be most
necessary where it was least possible: in socially devastated, politically
benighted, economically backward regions of the globe where no Marxist
thinker before Stalin had ever dreamed that it could take root. Or at least,
take root without massive assistance from more well-heeled nations. In such
dismal conditions, the socialist project is almost bound to turn into a
monstrous parody of itself. All the same, the idea that Marxism leads
inevitably to such monstrosities, as Hobsbawm observes, ‘has about as much
justification as the thesis that all Christianity must logically and
necessarily always lead to papal absolutism, or all Darwinism to the
glorification of free capitalist competition’. (He does not consider the
possibility of Darwinism leading to a kind of papal absolutism, which some
might see as a reasonable description of Richard Dawkins.)

Hobsbawm, however, points out that Marx was actually too generous to the
bourgeoisie, a fault of which he is not commonly accused. At the time of The
Communist Manifesto, their economic achievements were a good deal more
modest than he imagined. In a curious garbling of tenses, the Manifesto
described not the world capitalism had created in 1848, but the world as it
was destined to be transformed by capitalism. What Marx had to say was not
exactly true, but it would become true by, say, the year 2000, and it was
capitalism that would make it so. Even his comments on the abolition of the
family have proved prophetic: about half of the children in advanced Western
countries today are born to or brought up by single mothers, and half of all
households in large cities consist of single persons.

Hobsbawm’s essay on the Manifesto speaks of its ‘dark, laconic eloquence’,
and notes that as political rhetoric it has ‘an almost biblical force’. ‘The
new reader,’ he writes, ‘can hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate
conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force
of this astonishing pamphlet.’ The Manifesto initiated a whole genre of such
declarations, most of them from avant-garde artists such as the Futurists
and the Surrealists, whose outrageous wordplay and scandalous hyperbole turn
these broadsides into avant-garde artworks in themselves. The manifesto
genre represents a mixture of theory and rhetoric, fact and fiction, the
programmatic and the performative, which has never been taken seriously
enough as an object of study.

Marx, too, was an artist of sorts. It is often forgotten how staggeringly
well read he was, and what painstaking labour he invested in the literary
style of his works. He was eager, he remarked, to get shot of the ‘economic
crap’ of Capital and get down to his big book on Balzac. Marxism is about
leisure, not labour. It is a project that should be eagerly supported by all
those who dislike having to work. It holds that the most precious activities
are those done simply for the hell of it, and that art is in this sense the
paradigm of authentic human activity. It also holds that the material
resources that would make such a society possible already exist in
principle, but are generated in a way that compels the great majority to
work as hard as our Neolithic ancestors did. We have thus made astounding
progress, and no progress at all.

In the 1840s, Hobsbawm argues, it was by no means improbable to conclude
that society was on the verge of revolution. What was improbable was the
idea that within a handful of decades the politics of capitalist Europe
would be transformed by the rise of organised working-class parties and
movements. Yet this is what came to pass. It was at this point that
commentary on Marx, at least in Britain, began to shift from the cautiously
admiring to the near hysterical. In 1885, no less devout a non-revolutionary
than Balfour commended Marx’s writings for their intellectual force, and for
their economic reasoning in particular. A whole raft of liberal or
conservative commentators took his economic ideas with intense seriousness.
Once those ideas took the form of a political force, however, a number of
ferociously anti-Marxist works began to appear. Their apotheosis was Hugh
Trevor-Roper’s stunning revelation that Marx had made no original
contribution to the history of ideas. Most of these critics, I take it,
would have rejected the Marxist view that human thought is sometimes bent
out of shape by the pressure of political interests, a phenomenon commonly
known as ideology. Only recently has Marxism been back on the agenda, placed
there, ironically enough, by an ailing capitalism. ‘Capitalism in
Convulsion’, a Financial Times headline read in 2008. When capitalists begin
to speak of capitalism, you know the system is in dire trouble. They have
still not dared to do so in the United States.

There is much else to admire in How to Change the World. In a suggestive
passage on William Morris, the book shows how logical it was for a critique
of capitalism based on the arts and crafts to spring up in England, where
advanced industrial capitalism posed a deadly threat to artisanal
production. A chapter on the 1930s contains a fascinating account of the
relations between Marxism and science – it was the only period, Hobsbawm
points out, when natural scientists were attracted to Marxism in significant
numbers. As the threat of an irrationalist Fascism loomed, it was the
‘Enlightenment’ features of the Marxist creed – its faith in reason,
science, progress and social planning – which attracted men like Joseph
Needham and J.D. Bernal. During Marxism’s next historical upsurge, in the
1960s and 1970s, this version of historical materialism would be ousted by
the more cultural and philosophical tenets of so-called Western Marxism. In
fact, science, reason, progress and planning were now more enemies than
allies, at war with the new libertarian cults of desire and spontaneity.
Hobsbawm shows only qualified sympathy for the 1968ers, which is
unsurprising in a long-term member of the Communist Party. Their
idealisation of the Cultural Revolution in China, he suggests with some
justice, had about as much to do with China as the 18th-century cult of the
noble savage had with Tahiti.

‘If one thinker left a major indelible mark on the 20th century,’ Hobsbawm
remarks, ‘it was he.’ Seventy years after Marx’s death, for better or for
worse, one third of humanity lived under political regimes inspired by his
thought. Well over 20 per cent still do. Socialism has been described as the
greatest reform movement in human history. Few intellectuals have changed
the world in such practical ways. That is usually the preserve of statesmen,
scientists and generals, not of philosophers and political theorists. Freud
may have changed lives, but hardly governments. ‘The only individually
identifiable thinkers who have achieved comparable status,’ Hobsbawm writes,
‘are the founders of the great religions in the past, and with the possible
exception of Muhammad none has triumphed on a comparable scale with such
rapidity.’ Yet very few, as Hobsbawm points out, would have predicted such
celebrity for this poverty-stricken, carbuncle-ridden Jewish exile, a man
who once observed that nobody had ever written so much about money and had
so little.

Most of the pieces collected in this book have been published before, though
about two-thirds of them have not appeared in English. Those without Italian
can therefore now read a number of important essays by Hobsbawm which first
appeared in that language, not least three substantial surveys of the
history of Marxism from 1880 to 1983. These alone would make the volume
uniquely valuable; but they are flanked by other chapters, on such topics as
pre-Marxian socialism, Marx on pre-capitalist formations, Gramsci, Marx and
labour, which broaden its scope significantly. How to Change the World is
the work of a man who has reached an age at which most of us would be happy
to be able to raise ourselves from our armchairs without the aid of three
nurses and a hoist, let alone carry out historical research. It will surely
not be the last volume we shall be granted by this indomitable spirit.

Permalink Comments

As freedom blooms in the East, it’s withering in the West

Posted in you've got mail at 1:24 pm by nemo

RG mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/elizabeth-renzetti/as-freedom-blooms-in-the-east-its-withering-in-the-west/article1921209/

Globe and Mail Feb. 25, 2011
Elizabeth Renzetti
Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

How will America handle the fall of its Middle East empire?

Posted in you've got mail at 1:23 pm by nemo

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100077625/how-will-america-handle-the-fall-of-its-middle-east-empire/

Daily Telegraph February 24th, 2011
How will America handle the fall of its Middle East empire?

Permalink Comments

Money Pollution

Posted in you've got mail at 1:21 pm by nemo

RG mail
The US Chamber of Commerce Darkens the Skies
by Bill McKibben
view.mail.macmillan.com (February 23 2011)
In Beijing, they celebrate when they have a “blue sky day”, when, that is,
the haze clears long enough so that you can actually see the sun. Many
days, you can’t even make out the next block. Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

Neocon Hawks Take Flight Over Libya

Posted in you've got mail at 1:18 pm by nemo

RG mail
By wmw_admin on February 27, 2011
Jim Lobe – Anti-War.com February 26, 2011

In a distinct echo of
the tactics they pursued to encourage U.S. intervention in the Balkans
and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neoconservatives appealed Friday for the
United States and NATO to “immediately” prepare military action to help
bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi and end the
violence that is believed to have killed well over a thousand people in
the past week. Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

02.26.11

Homoplasy

Posted in General at 12:57 pm by nemo

">Homoplasy: A Good Thread to Pull to Understand the Evolutionary Ball of Yarn
ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2011) — With the genetics of so many organisms that have different traits yet to study, and with the techniques for gathering full sets of genetic information from organisms rapidly evolving, the “forest” of evolution can be easily lost to the “trees” of each individual case and detail.

Permalink Comments

Is there a science of evolution?

Posted in Evolution at 12:54 pm by nemo

Is There A Science Of History?

Many of the confusions of the evolution debate arise because of the assumption a science of evolution exists, or could exist.

Permalink Comments

Distorted origins

Posted in General at 12:51 pm by nemo

Cycle, System Return:
The Axial Age

Instead of the New Atheism (as opposed to general philosphic atheism) secularists show study the way the Axial Age religions distort their origins, and create secular versions.

Permalink Comments

Can Xtianity and scientism get along?

Posted in General at 12:46 pm by nemo

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/02/can-science-and-religion-get-along.html?ref=hp

These useless articles always speak of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ when they really mean Christianity and science.

Permalink Comments

But how about also debunking darwinism’s claims

Posted in General at 12:43 pm by nemo

Debunking Islam’s ludicrous claims to scientific prescience
By RICHARD DAWKINS
Added: Saturday, 26 February 2011 at 12:11 PM

After I give lectures, I am often approached by honest and sincere young Muslims who have been deluded into believing that important ideas of modern science were anticipated in the Koran or by Muslim ‘scholars’. I always ask them for examples, and the ones they produce are always pathetic testaments to the power of wishful thinking.

I was therefore delighted to receive, from Islamdebunked, word about a splendid collection of short Youtube films, systematically destroying these ridiculous Islamic claims, with the added bonus of beautiful background music.

http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/596593-debunking-islam-s-ludicrous-claims-to-scientific-prescience

Permalink Comments

In search of the origins of life

Posted in Evolution at 12:41 pm by nemo

In search of the origins of life

Permalink Comments

Bamiyan Buddhas

Posted in General at 12:38 pm by nemo

Bamiyan Buddhas Once Glowed in Red, White and BlueScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2011) — The world watched in horror as Taliban fanatics ten years ago blew up the two gigantic Buddha statues that had since the 6th century looked out over the Bamiyan Valley in what is now Afghanistan. Located on the Silk Road, until the 10th century the 55 and 38 meter tall works of art formed the centerpiece of one of the world’s largest Buddhist monastic complexes. Thousands of monks tended countless shrines in the niches and caves that pierced a kilometer-long cliff face.

Permalink Comments

Tweeting songbirds

Posted in General at 12:36 pm by nemo

Tweeting Teenage Songbirds Reveal Impact of Social Cues on Learning
ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2011) — In a finding that once again displays the power of the female, UCSF neuroscientists have discovered that teenage male songbirds, still working to perfect their song, improve their performance in the presence of a female bird.

Permalink Comments

Quantum information transmission

Posted in General at 12:35 pm by nemo

Atomic Antennae Transmit Quantum Information Across a MicrochipScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2011) — The Austrian research group led by physicist Rainer Blatt suggests a fundamentally novel architecture for quantum computation. They have experimentally demonstrated quantum antennae, which enable the exchange of quantum information between two separate memory cells located on a computer chip. This offers new opportunities to build practical quantum computers.

Permalink Comments

Regrowing heart muscle

Posted in General at 12:33 pm by nemo

Newborn Heart Muscle Can Grow Back by Itself, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2011) — In a promising science-fiction-meets-real-world juxtaposition, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have discovered that the mammalian newborn heart can heal itself completely.

Permalink Comments

Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.

Posted in you've got mail at 12:27 pm by nemo

Paul Krugman: Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/25-4

Permalink Comments

“We’re Broke,” Say the Rich, and the Poor Must Pay

Posted in General at 12:27 pm by nemo

Glen Ford: “We’re Broke,” Say the Rich, and the Poor Must Pay

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/25-5

Permalink Comments

Plutocratic coup d’etat

Posted in you've got mail at 12:24 pm by nemo

John Atcheson: The Plutocrat’s Coup d’Etat, Their Republican Allies and Their Democratic Enablers

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/25-5-1

Permalink Comments

Corporate hacker and wikileaks

Posted in you've got mail at 12:24 pm by nemo

Corporate Hacker Tries to Take Down WikiLeaks – Glenn Greenwald

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/02/25

Permalink Comments

Making recession worse

Posted in you've got mail at 12:23 pm by nemo

Cutting Public Sector Wages Will Make Recession Worse

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/02/25-0

Permalink Comments

GM foods everywhere?

Posted in you've got mail at 12:21 pm by nemo

Shoppers Wary of GM Foods Find They’re Everywhere

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/02/25-3

Permalink Comments

Wisconsin assembly passes bill

Posted in you've got mail at 12:20 pm by nemo

Tempers Explode as Wisconsin Assembly Passes Bill Taking Away Union Rights

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/02/25

Permalink Comments

Behind the Arab Revolt

Posted in you've got mail at 12:19 pm by nemo

RG mail

http://original.antiwar.com/pilger/2011/02/24/behind-the-arab-revolt-is-a-word-we-dare-not-speak/

Antiwar.com February 24, 2011
Behind the Arab Revolt is a Word We Dare Not Speak
By *John Pilger*
Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I interviewed Ray McGovern, one
of an elite group of CIA officers who prepared the President’s daily
intelligence brief. McGovern was at the apex of the “national security”
monolith that is American power and had retired with presidential plaudits.
On the eve of the invasion, he and 45 other senior officers of the CIA and
other intelligence agencies wrote to President George W. Bush that the
“drumbeat for war” was based not on intelligence, but lies.

“It was 95 per cent charade,” McGovern told me. Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink Comments

A larger movement

Posted in you've got mail at 12:16 pm by nemo

RG mail

http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2011/000340.html

February 25, 2011
On Wisconsin and America
By Robert Weissman
We are now having a major dispute about what kind of society America should
be.

Right now, the flashpoint in this controversy is Wisconsin, where tens of
thousands of people are demonstrating every day in an effort to block
Governor Scott Walker’s plan to all but end collective bargaining rights for
public employees.

But the debate is a national one. The Wisconsin showdown is only the first
in a whole series of pending state conflicts. And, over the next few weeks,
a corporate-friendly Republican majority in the U.S. House of
Representatives may decide to shut down the federal government.

Permalink Comments