Now ain't the time for your tears

And you thought it was just a song.

William Devereux Zantzinger, whose six-month sentence in the fatal caning of a black barmaid named Hattie Carroll at a Baltimore charity ball moved Bob Dylan to write a dramatic, almost journalistic song in 1963 that became a classic of modern American folk music, died on Jan. 3. He was 69.

Obviously, the song and the six months he served had a major impact on Zantzinger

In 1991, The Maryland Independent disclosed that Mr. Zantzinger had been collecting rent from black families living in shanties that he no longer owned; Charles County, Md., had foreclosed on them for unpaid taxes. The shanties lacked running water, toilets or outhouses. Not only had Mr. Zantzinger collected rent for properties he did not own, he also went to court to demand past-due rent, and won.
He pleaded guilty to 50 misdemeanor counts of deceptive trade practices, paid $62,000 in penalties and, under an 18-month sentence, spent only nights in jail.
Information on Mr. Zantzinger’s survivors was unavailable. Though he long refused interviews, he did speak to the author Howard Sounes for his book “Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan” (2001) , telling him of his scorn for Mr. Dylan.
“I should have sued him and put him in jail,” he said.

A tip of the Fez to Avedon Carol at the Sideshow for catching this

In case you can't be bothered with waiting for it to come up on the playlist on Radio Woodshed, here's the Dylan song with some other primo protest music.


SeeqPod - Playable Search

crossposted from The Woodshed

US Progressives Delusional ? ? ? ?

Living here in Vancouver, BC, Canada for even a short period of time it is getting easier to see the faults in our local, provincial and national politicians.

It takes a great local journalist to bring one back to reality once in a while.

Today, it was Bill Tieleman of Vancouver 24 Hours turn to do the honours:

Too conservative for Canada?
By BILL TIELEMAN - January 13, 2009


Imagine where a Canadian politician who held the following positions would fit in our political system:

This politician opposes legalizing same-sex marriages.

He has no problem with citizens owning handguns - but proposed limiting their purchase - to one per month.

This politician wants to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan - and to keep them there for years instead of withdrawing them in 2011.

He thinks Robert Gates, U.S. President George W. Bush's Secretary of Defence, has done an excellent job in the Iraq war.

The politician is willing to restrict late-term abortions for women and admits he's not sure at what point a human being gets human rights.

So who did he choose to deliver a prayer before a major political event?

A controversial fundamentalist Christian pastor who has called abortion "a holocaust" and who campaigned in California for the successful Proposition 8, which bans gay marriages.

This politician has described government-run public health care as "an extreme" that leads to high taxes and is "wrong" while supporting private health insurance as the best option.

And despite saying that he has done more than anybody to "take on lobbyists and won" - this politician just appointed one to a top position.

So, where would you place this politician on the Canadian political scene?

An elected representative with these policies that are so obviously way out of line with Canadian mainstream values and popular opinion would likely lead a fringe party far to the right of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, with little hope of political success.

But in the United States - his name is President-Elect Barack Obama.

_______________


Just make sure that you don't get caught up in next week's Obama-mania and miss the fact that the new American president is in many ways far more conservative than any of Canada's political leaders.

Granted, Canadian politicians - stephen harper in particular - leave a lot to be desired at times.

When one compares them to those south of the 49th, however, we're fortunate.

It's up to all of us to make the political picture here even better . . . .

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)

Truth & Consequences

As Dubya slithers from the White House, one vital question remains: Will there be any consequences for him or any of his evil, incompetent cabal of ignorant, blood-fattened henchmen?

The soon-to-be ex-president has asked for some television time to give a farewell address Thursday in which he will do his best to find a silver lining to the hurricane of the last eight years and try to burnish his legacy, using the blood and tears of Iraqi children and American soldiers to polish the turd that has been his presidency. "I've kept you safe" he'll bleat "I've fought the terra!" ignoring the fact that if he'd paid attention his national security briefings in 2001 he might well have really kept America safe and that for the last seven years he's been unable or unwilling to find a six-foot-seven dialysis patient in an area not much bigger than Rhode Island.

Thursday's speech will be all about trying to salvage some sort of credit, and I'm not really interested in listening to that crap. No, what I'm waiting for is the announcement to the press on Sunday or Monday about the pardons. Bush supposedly is generally loathe to pardon people, but I'll give you 10 to 1 that there are blanket, pre-emptive pardons handed out for misdeeds that "may or may not" have been committed in the service of the Bush administration. The only question is who gets one and who doesn't.

As has been pointed out in many places this week, the few decent, competent career civil servants who have survived the last eight years of relentless dimwittery and hyperpoliticization are bound to have amassed container-loads of smoking gun memos documenting the both the petty douchebaggery and massive criminality of the likes of Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Monica Goodling, John Yoo, Douglas Feith, Michael Brown ----oh, the list goes on and on and on. Can Bush afford to leave his people exposed to the possible rigors of justice? Is he confident they won't turn on him? How low on the totem pole will the whitewash brush be applied? Will he pardon the torturers or just their bosses? Or will he throw his underlings to the wolves and scurry off into the sunset with just his inner circle granted immunity?

And if he has the hubris to declare that neither he nor his minions have done anything wrong, will Barack Obama do anything about it?

First I bring you radio, now TV

Life imitates Seinfeld, not that there is anything wrong with that. I wouldn't normally post an entire article like this, but the archives are not always open, and I would want to lose this gem. You think you know the people you work with. You think you know the kind of organization you work for. Surprise!

THROUGH OTAKU EYES

Men's bra stimulates otome (girlish) side in men

Kanta Ishida / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

Asuka Masamune is a high school kendo champion. Everyone acknowledges he is a cool, good-looking guy and a truly manly man. But he has another self, a side that cannot help being attracted to cute and otome-like, or girlish, things.

This is the protagonist of Otomen (Hakusensha Co.), a girls' manga by Aya Kanno. The manga is brilliant in depicting the otome, or girlie, side in a man. But the reality may go further than the fiction.

In November, Web site WishRoom became a top story on Internet news sites and in weekly magazines when the online lingerie company sold 700 bras designed specifically for men--the first product of its kind in the nation--just in the first month after the launch of the lingerie.

WishRoom said it was not certain whether the bra would sell well when it put it out in response to customer requests. But orders for the bra, purposely designed in a very plain style, surpassed its production capacity.

Freelance writer Mari Aoyama, who published a book titled Buraja o Suru Otoko-tachi to Shinai Onna (Men who wear bras and women who do not, Shinsuisha Co.) in 2005, said men started wearing bras as a secret source of enjoyment in the 1960s, when the widespread use of bras among women took hold in the nation. But those who have bought the WishRoom product are believed to be different from the existing core of male bra users. The new product seems to have stimulated demand among men who wanted to wear bras but had not been able to buy them.

E-mail feedback from WishRoom bra users has included comments that wearing the bra puts them at ease, helps them understand the feelings of women, or makes them more gentle to the people around them. Bras may be an annoying item for women,
bringing a sense of confinement, but it must be a rather fetishistic item for the men as it ignites a girl's mind inside them.

Terms often heard nowadays include soshoku-kei danshi ("herbivorous" boys) or ojoman (girlie men). According to Soshoku-kei Danshi "Ojoman" ga Nippon o Kaeru, (Herbivorous-boy"girlie men" change Japan, Kodansha Ltd.), written by Megumi Ushikubo, who specializes in marketing-related themes, the term "ojoman" refers to a category of men aged 20 to 34 who became adults after the end of the bubble economy. They have little interest in sex, like to do cooking and sewing, and prefer pretty (kawaii) things to cool (kakkoi) ones.

Ushikubo said they are a demographic group that cannot be neglected in understanding consumption trends among young people.

Philosopher and Osaka Prefecture University Prof. Masahiro Morioka also explains in his Soshoku-kei Danshi no Renaigaku (Love study of herbivorous boys, Media Factory Inc.) what kind of views the new generation of gentle-mannered men with feminine sensitivities have toward love. He says they are unlike nikushoku (carnivorous) men who chase after women. Rikei-kun, meaning men who study or work in the math and science fields, another term enjoying a popularity in recent days, can also be viewed as a type of soshoku-kei men.

As I have written in this column before, I believe there is a change in sensitivities at the root of the otaku culture in Japan, one that can be described as a fluctuation in masculinity or the so-called otome-nization of boys. The otaku term "moe" (pronounced "mo-eh")--which literally means "budding" and describes the sensation of being blissfully overwhelmed by cuteness or attractiveness, is already a very otome-like idea.

Therefore, it has symbolic meaning that the men's bra was launched right here in Japan. The country of otaku also is the country of otomen. Don't ever call it gross. I even hope men's bras will continue to spread if all it takes is one garment for men
to become gentle to others.
(Jan. 9, 2009)

The funny part about this story is that it appeared in the Japanese media's bastion of conservatism, The Yomiuri Shimbun. I imagine the equivalent would be George Will or Robert Novak enthusing about their favorite pair of stilleto pumps or lace panties and how wearing them made them feel "pretty." Again, not that there's anything wrong with that-- consenting adults, whatever floats your boat and so on. You have to admit, it would certainly raise a few eyebrows to see a columnist at the National Post, New York Times or Chicago Tribune, to say nothing of a staid conservative publication such as the National Review, Washington Times or Wall Street Journal not merely publically embracing transvestitism, but giving it a hearty reccommendation.

Canada backs the Gaza seige

Maps of Palestinian loss of land, 1946 to 2000.

Israel is about the same size as Vancouver Island; Gaza, that little green strip on the coast, is a little more than twice the size of the District of North Van, or a little smaller than Seattle.

.

Yesterday Canada stood alone in voting against a UN human rights resolution "adopted by a roll-call vote of 33 in favour, one against and 13 abstentions" which :

"strongly condemned the ongoing Israeli military operation in Gaza, which had resulted in massive violations of human rights of the Palestinian people, and demanded the occupying power, Israel, to immediately withdraw its military forces from Gaza".

The resolution also called for

"the end to the launching of the crude rockets against Israeli civilians that resulted in the loss of 4 civilian lives and some injuries"

Full UN text here.

Yes it was heavily weighted against Israel, causing European nations and others to abstain from the vote, but Canada's stated reason for voting against it merely repeated the US/Israeli line that Israel didn't start it (italics:mine):

"MARIUS GRINIUS (Canada), speaking in an explanation of the vote before the vote, thanked the Palestine delegation for its consultations, but said the draft text still failed to clearly recognize that rocket fire on Israel had led to the current crisis. It also used unnecessary, unhelpful and inflammatory language.
Canada therefore called for a vote and would vote against the resolution."

According to Reuters : "The resolution, whose wording diplomats said had been softened at the request of Palestinian envoys in an effort to get a consensus in the Council, was opposed outright by Canada."

So what did Hamas want?

Khalid Mish'al, head of the Hamas political bureau, speaking in Damascus on January 11, 2009 :

"Concerning us, we want the immediate and complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the lifting of the unjust siege on Gaza that has led to the current situation.
Our other request is the opening of all border crossings including the Rafah border crossing.
We, with an open mind, will deal with any initiatives and decisions based on these three requests.
Therefore, we will not accept any negotiations for a truce in the light of and under the pressure of a military campaign and siege.
Let the military campaign stop, let the Israelis withdraw, and let the rights of our people be admitted to, let them recognize our rights to live without a siege and closed border crossings, just like other humans, then we are ready to discuss a truce, just like we did before.
We will not accept a permanent truce, because it will take the right of resistance from the Palestinian people. The resistance is against occupation and military campaigns and therefore as long as occupation exists, resistance will too…"

Canada's Dept of Foreign Affairs , via The Star :

"The resolution wholly failed to acknowledge Hamas's continual rocket attacks on Israel that brought about the current crisis, and ignored a state's legitimate right to self-defence," a spokesperson said in an email." [apparently without irony]

Not even CNN is still repeating that one.

The Guardian Nov 5, 2008 :

"A four-month ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza was in jeopardy today after Israeli troops killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid into the territory. Hamas responded by firing a wave of rockets into southern Israel, although no one was injured.
Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, had personally approved the Gaza raid, the Associated Press said. The Israeli military concluded that Hamas was likely to want to continue the ceasefire despite the raid."

Back to Foreign Affairs :

"Canada remains deeply concerned about the ongoing hostilities ... and encourages all diplomatic efforts to achieve an immediate, sustainable and durable ceasefire. But first and foremost, Hamas's rocket attacks must stop so that a ceasefire can be realized."

In May last year, a month before he received the B’nai Brith International President’s Gold Medallion, Stephen Harper said :

"... anti-Israeli sentiment is really just as a thinly disguised veil for good old-fashioned anti-Semitism"

quite as if intelligent people would be unable to tell the difference.

In October 2007 Stockwell Day and Israeli Public Security Minister Avi Dichter signed an interim mutual cooperation agreement on homeland security "to enable cooperation in the fields of combating terror and border security".

Dichter laid out guidelines for a Canadian-Israeli security cooperation similar to the Israel US Homeland Security Pact he signed in February in Washington DC. to the Canadian public security committee. The Canada Israel Declaration of Intent was signed on March 23, 2008.

Cross-posted at Creekside

Obama’s Worst Pakistan Nightmare

THE SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES has a rather disturbing account of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program. Worth the read.

Just last month in Washington, members of the federally appointed bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism made it clear that for sheer scariness, nothing could compete with what they had heard in a series of high-level intelligence briefings about the dangers of Pakistan’s nuclear technology going awry. “When you map W.M.D. and terrorism, all roads intersect in Pakistan,” Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and a leading nuclear expert on the commission, told me. “The nuclear security of the arsenal is now a lot better than it was. But the unknown variable here is the future of Pakistan itself, because it’s not hard to envision a situation in which the state’s authority falls apart and you’re not sure who’s in control of the weapons, the nuclear labs, the materials.”

• • • • • • •

The Pakistani nuclear program owes its very existence to the government-endorsed and government-financed subterfuges of A. Q. Khan, who then turned the country into the biggest source of nuclear-weapons proliferation in atomic history. And while Khan may be the most famous nuclear renegade in Pakistan, he is not the only one. Soon after Kidwai took office, he also faced the case of the eccentric nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who helped build gas centrifuges for the Pakistani nuclear program, using blueprints Khan had stolen from the Netherlands. Mahmood then moved on to the country’s next huge project: designing the reactor at Khushab that was to produce the fuel Pakistan needed to move to the next level — a plutonium bomb.

An autodidact intellectual with grand aspirations, Mahmood was fascinated by the links between science and the Koran. He wrote a peculiar treatise arguing that when morals degrade, disaster cannot be far behind. Over time, his colleagues began to wonder if Mahmood was mentally sound. They were half amused and half horrified by his fascination with the role sunspots played in triggering the French and Russian Revolutions, World War II and assorted anticolonial uprisings. “This guy was our ultimate nightmare,” an American intelligence official told me in late 2001, when The New York Times first reported on Mahmood. “He had access to the entire Pakistani program. He knew what he was doing. And he was completely out of his mind.”

Israel faces UN war crimes probe

Mother and child, Zeitoun, south-east Gaza.

First the Israeli army drops the leaflets warning Palestinians to get out of their homes because there will be an air raid. Then they pack 110 of them, half of whom are children, into a single-storey house in Zeitoun, south-east Gaza, "for their safety". Then they bomb the house. Repeatedly. Then they refuse to allow medical teams to evacuate the wounded.

Israel faces UN war crimes probe
The UN, which has called for an "immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of Israeli ground troops from Gaza" (Security Council Vote 14-0, US abstaining), has called for an investigation.

The Guardian totals it up :

"The UN put the Palestinian death toll at 758, of whom it said 42% were women and children – 60 women and 257 children. Around 3,100 Palestinians have been injured.
Three Israeli soldiers were killed bringing the Israeli death toll to 13, of whom three were civilians.

"There is no safe space in the Gaza Strip – no safe haven, no bomb shelters, and the borders are closed and civilians have no place to flee," said a report from the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs. It said three quarters of Gaza's 1.5 million people had now been without electricity since Sunday, and 800,000 Gazans had no running water.

"The UN relief and works agency, by far the largest humanitarian agency in Gaza, suspended its operations yesterday, after Israeli forces opened fire on a UN-contracted convoy collecting food aid from the Erez crossing in north Gaza. One man was killed and two others injured. Later , a marked UN convoy of two armoured vehicles was hit by Israeli troops when they stopped to try to recover the dead body of a Palestinian UN staff member during a scheduled three-hour ceasefire."

I wonder what was so difficult to figure out about a white truck with a big red cross painted on the roof. Perhaps that 14-0 UN resolution for complete withdrawal from Gaza was to blame.

The Guardian again :

"15,000 Gazans are sheltering in UN schools because they have been forced to flee their homes in the face of the Israeli air and ground offensive, or even ordered out by Israeli troops. The UN has opened 27 of its schools as shelters."

So far Israel has bombed two of them, despite the UN giving the GPS coordinates to the IDF, claiming they were countering mortar fire from the vicinity of the school. However as we read inthe Israeli paper Haaretz :

"UN: IDF officers admitted there was no gunfire from Gaza school which was shelled ... all the footage released by the IDF of militants firing from inside the school was from 2007 and not from the incident itself. "

And what's the reaction in Canada?
Michael "empire-lite" Ignatieff in The Star yesterday:

"Liberal leader echoes Tory government, blames Hamas for `organizing, instigating rocket attacks'

"Federal Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff says Israel is justified in taking military action to defend itself against attacks by Hamas from the Gaza Strip.
"Canada has to support the right of a democratic country to defend itself," he told reporters in Halifax yesterday after speaking to a forum of business leaders on the economy.
"Israel has been attacked from Gaza, not just last year, but for almost 10 years," Ignatieff said. "They evacuated from Gaza so there is no occupation in Gaza."

Horrifying and disgusting, I know, but not particularly surprising and all points we dispensed with yesterday.
Blog reactions to Iggy's tripe were swift : POGGE , PSA at Canadian Cynic, Dr.Dawg, Runesmith, Beijing York
Iggy actually did have more nuancey things to say than CP and the Star suggest, as transcribed by supporter James Morton, but Iggy's pro-Israel lines are the familiar AIPAC quotes that the Canadian press will recognize and parrot.


So where are we getting our Gaza news, apart from a Canadian pro-Israel press and "The Megaphone"?
And where is the outcry from journalists that they have been denied access to Gaza?
If you follow no other links here today, please be sure to click this one at Sudbury Against War and Occupation - Justin Podur : Turn Off the Canadian Media, Please :

"Modern Western armies, like those of Israel, the US, and Canada, think of information as part of warfare. They expend tremendous time and resources mobilizing support for their violence. They do this by controlling information, disallowing independent journalists (as Israel is doing), using embedded journalists, and running a massive public relations machinery designed specifically to deliver arguments and propaganda for the foreign press and for foreign consumption.

There is a special machinery just for Canadians, and a special strategy to sell war in Canada. There was one for the Iraq war, there is one for the Afghanistan war, and one for Israel's wars as well. What is so unusual about the media environment today is that all this expense, all this media machinery, can be circumvented by anyone in its target audience by the simple click of a mouse. So click away."

Good advice and excellent alternative recommendations to be found there.

P.S. Signed the Amnesty International Canada petition yet?
Speak out for peace and the people in Gaza because the ConservaLiberals aren't going to.

Cross-posted at Creekside

Vatican cardinal : Gaza "a big concentration camp"

Reuters : "Pope Benedict's point man for justice and peace issues on Wednesday issued the Vatican's toughest criticism of Israel since the latest Mideast crisis began, calling Gaza a "big concentration camp".

NYTimes : "The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday it had discovered “shocking” scenes — including small children next to their mothers’ corpses — when its representatives gained access for the first time to parts of Gaza battered by Israeli shelling.

The statement said a team of four Palestine Red Crescent ambulances accompanied by Red Cross representatives made its way to Zeitoun Wednesday where it "found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all, there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses.

In response, the Israeli military did not comment directly on the allegation. In a statement, it accused Hamas, its foe in Gaza, of deliberately using "Palestinian civilians as human shields" and said the Israeli Army "works in close cooperation with international aid organizations during the fighting so that civilians can be provided with assistance. "

Presumably this "close cooperation" began just yesterday, the first time the Red Cross was allowed access.
"Israeli soldiers posted at a military position some 80 meters away from this house ordered the rescue team to leave the area which they refused to do."


"....an eye for an eyelash..."

Meanwhile, over at the National Post, Kelly McParland happily quotes Jason Cherniak, "President of Liblogs, a site that aggregates blogs from writers identifying themselves as Liberals", who gives us a short history of Gaza in which Israel is astonishingly blameless.
I will refute each of Mr. Cherniak's remarks with those of someone much more expert than myself : Avi Shlaim, "Oxford Professor of International Relations who served in the Israeli army", writing in yesterday's Guardian . I urge you however to read Prof. Shlaim's short history in its entirety.

Cherniak : "In the summer of 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza. This was a complete and total withdrawal, where even settlers whose families had lived in Gaza for decades were withdrawn to Israel. It was everything the world had ever asked from Israel as far as the Gaza strip was concerned. Israel showed nothing but restraint from the summer of 2005 until December 2008 in its relations with the people of Gaza."
Shlaim : "The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children."

Cherniak : "Eventually, by June 2008, Israel was able to negotiate a cease fire with Hamas, the “State of Calm Agreement”, brokered by Egypt. That agreement fell apart in December 2008 when Hamas once again began attacking Israel with rockets imported from Syria and Iran."
Shlaim : "It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men."

Cherniak : People need to "demand that governments around the world start to take action to save the people of Gaza from their own elected government[Hamas]."
Shlaim : "The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood."

Shlaim writes that Gaza is "an open air prison".
This morning "Israel warned thousands of people in the Rafah zone on the Egyptian border to leave their houses ahead of planned air raids on Thursday."You have until 8am [06:00 GMT]," said leaflets which were dropped by the Israeli military."

Where are they to go for safety? Certainly not UN buildings or schools.

So which description do you personally prefer, Mr. Cherniak : "concentration camp" from the Vatican or "open air prison" from the Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford ?

Cross-posted at Creekside

Sign Amnesty International Canada's Open Letter to Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lawrence Cannon, to take action.

Canadian Jewish women occupy Israeli consulate in Toronto

Well done, sisters!

"Protesters are outraged at Israel's latest assault on the Palestinian people and by the Canadian government's refusal to condemn these massacres. They are deeply concerned that Canadians are hearing the views of pro-Israel groups who are being represented as the only voice of Jewish Canadians. The protesters have occupied the consulate to send a clear statement that many Jewish-Canadians do not support Israel′s violence and apartheid policies. They are joining with people of conscience all across the world who are demanding an end to Israeli aggression and justice for the Palestinian people."
~ news release from Palestinian and Jewish Unity.
.
Here is Judy Rebick's account as related by Michelle at Rabble :

"They went into the consulate in small groups, and pretended they were there on other business. Once they were all in there, they sat down and told them this is a protest.

The officials in the consulate were absolutely irate over it. One of the security guards was "beside himself". He tried to intimidate them, saying, "You're in Israel now!" Judy retorted, "We are NOT. This is not the embassy."
(Apparently only the embassy is considered Israeli territory, not the consulate - they had legal advice going in.)

The security guard tried to drag the youngest woman out, and she resisted. Judy told him to take his hands off her or they'd charge him with assault.The security guard then tried to take the phone away from another woman, and when she wouldn't give it to him, he slapped her across the face. Judy told him that if he touches any of them again, he would be charged with assault. So the Israeli officials decided to let the police deal with them."

Continued at Rabble ...
.
Thank you for this, Judy Rebick, professor; Judith Deutsch, psychoanalyst and president of Science for Peace; B.H. Yael, filmmaker; Smadar Carmon, Canadian Israeli peace activist, and the rest of you.

Cross-posted at Creekside

Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses

English Russia just because something cool happens daily on 1/6 of the Earth surface — that's what their site slogan proclaims. It's an interesting alternate view of all sorts of things Russkie, including an article on abandoned Russian Polar nuclear lighthouses like you see above.

Killer cops strike again

Police respond to a report of a brawl on a train platform in Oakland on New Years Eve. In the process of rousting a group of young men, the cops take one man, who is telling is friends to settle down, lay him down on his belly, and somewhere along the line shoot him dead.

What is really chilling in this video - and there are several others out there on the internet - is the total lack of reaction by the cops to the gun shot. For the most part, they don't even bat an eye. If the shot was accidental, what was the cop doing with his gun out in the first place? The man who was killed, 22-year-old Oscar Grant, was clearly not resisting. Even if, as some have suggested, the officer, Johannes Mehserle, a two-year veteran of the Bay Area transit police, was reaching for his taser not his gun, what the hell was he doing reaching for a weapon at all?

How long will police officers continue to be given the benefit of the doubt when they assault or even murder people -in front of dozens of witnesses in this case- simply because someone challenges their authority or otherwise annoys them?

Mario Pangelina, Mesa's brother who was riding on the same train, two cars behind Grant on Thursday morning, said Sunday he saw Grant beg police not to Taser him because of his child.
"He kept saying, 'Please, please don't Tase me,"' Pangelina said. "He was not acting hostile."
Other witnesses said Grant was lying on his stomach on the station's platform when he was shot.

New Ten Commandments

1. It's just a place. I don't give a fig about it. Anywhere else is just as good. If you don't stop fighting over the Holy Land, I'm turning it into a lake.

2. Prayer is for man. I don't need your grovelling. It's supposed to make you feel better. If it doesn't -- stop doing it.

Click image to read the rest.

I note there is a #11 this time :

If you screw up this time, people, the cats get the next savior I send.

Uh-oh.

h/t rabble

Cross-posted at Creekside

It's Question Time

Again. The EDGE is a site worthy of your visitation. It's the home of The Edge Annual Question — 2009, in this case.

And the question is,

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

The opinions are marvellously diverse: "A NEW KIND OF MIND", "CRACKING OPEN THE LOCKBOX OF TALENT", "LABORATORY EARTH COLONIES", "MOLECULAR MANUFACTURING", "THE DISCOVERY OF INTELLIGENT LIFE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE", "HOMO EVOLUTIS", "WISDOM REBORN", "THE OPEN UNIVERSE", "A FAREWELL TO HARM" and "THE ACTUAL, THE POSSIBLE, AND THE UNIMAGINABLE", among the many.

Gaza : a premeditated humanitarian disaster

Six children were killed when this mosque was levelled, one of several mosques hit, along with schools, hospitals, government buildings, police stations, television stations, prisons and the women's wing of the Islamic University.

Israel has extended its naval blockade of Gaza from six nautical miles to 20 nautical miles, preventing humanitarian aid and protest vessels from trying to break the siege.

Foreign reporters and Red Cross medical emergency teams have been denied access to Gaza.
Power lines have been cut. One and a half million people lack water, fuel, food and medical supplies.

Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, says there is no crisis.

The US has just blocked a UN Security Counsel ceasefire resolution.

Chris McGreal writes in The Observer from Jerusalem about the PR campaign to ensure that Israel's war was seen not in terms of occupation but of the west's struggle against terror and confrontation with Iran.

"Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the UN until a few months ago, was brought in by the Foreign Ministry to help lead the diplomatic and PR campaign. He said that the diplomatic and political groundwork has been under way for months.

"This was something that was planned long ahead," he said. "I was recruited by the foreign minister to coordinate Israel's efforts and I have never seen all parts of a very complex machinery - whether it is the Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry, the prime minister's office, the police or the army - work in such co-ordination, being effective in sending out the message."

Hand in hand went a strategy to remove the issue of occupation from discussion. Gaza was freed in 2005 when the Jewish settlers and army were pulled out, the Israelis said. Israel portrayed Hamas as part of an axis of Islamist fundamentalist evil with Iran and Hezbollah. Its actions, the Israelis said, are nothing to do with continued occupation of the West Bank, the blockade of Gaza or the Israeli military's continued killing of large numbers of Palestinians since the pullout.

Lobby groups, such as the British Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom) in London and the Israel Project in America, were mobilised. They arranged briefings, conference calls and interviews. The Israeli military posted video footage on YouTube. Israeli diplomats in New York arranged a two-hour "citizens' press conference" on Twitter for thousands of people. At the same time, Israel in effect barred foreign journalists from witnessing the results of its strategy.

Continued...

Cross-posted at Creekside

You turn me on I'm a radio

I'm not exactly a country station, but I may be a little bit corny. For those who enjoyed my Christmas foray into internet broadcasting, you can now tune into Radio Woodshed. I'm not going to be broadcasting 24/7 just yet, but I will do a weekly live shift on Sunday nights from 8pm to past midnight EST/ 5 pm to 10 pm PST  (Monday mid-morning to mid-afternoon in Tokyo) and the tunebot that lives in my electronic record collection will be bouncing the bytes for your listening pleasure over most of the weekend.

You can click the link above to tune in, but it might be easier to bookmark The Woodshed and use the link on the sidebar there once this post gets buried under the real Galloping Beaver posts.

XKCD

XKCD is a delightfully oblique comic strip, methinks.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

This photo shows the shoes left at Whitehall for PM Gordon Brown by thousands of protesters against Israel's bombardment of Gaza.

It was done in the spirit of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush.

OK, now does anyone know why thousands of shoes were mysteriously dumped on the Miami Freeway yesterday?

It's a shoe-in. It's the rapture!

Statistics - Gaza/Israel by the numbers

Politics - for the people links to further Gaza/Israel statistics charts at If Americans Knew, who in turn provide links to the sources for their statistics.

And I don't want to hear a word about how "even one death is too many" or "statistics cannot measure the pain" from those in support of colonialist ten to one kill ratios .

Sudbury Against War and Occupation reprints Gaza : The Logic of Colonial Power from Nir Rosen at The Guardian :

"Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.

Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism."

CBC newsreaders : Please take note.

h/t Beijing York @ Resettle THIS! in comments below

Cross-posted at Creekside

Adjusting our distorted image of Hamas

William Sieghart at Times Online :

"Palestinians did not vote for Hamas because it was dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel or because it had been responsible for waves of suicide bombings that had killed Israeli citizens. They voted for Hamas because they thought that Fatah, the party of the rejected Government, had failed them. Despite renouncing violence and recognising the state of Israel Fatah had not achieved a Palestinian state. It is crucial to know this to understand the supposed rejectionist position of Hamas. It won't recognise Israel or renounce the right to resist until it is sure of the world's commitment to a just solution to the Palestinian issue.

"In the five years that I have been visiting Gaza and the West Bank, I have met hundreds of Hamas politicians and supporters. None of them has professed the goal of Islamising Palestinian society, Taleban-style. Hamas relies on secular voters too much to do that. People still listen to pop music, watch television and women still choose whether to wear the veil or not.

The political leadership of Hamas is probably the most highly qualified in the world. Boasting more than 500 PhDs in its ranks, the majority are middle-class professionals - doctors, dentists, scientists and engineers. Most of its leadership have been educated in our universities and harbour no ideological hatred towards the West. It is a grievance-based movement, dedicated to addressing the injustice done to its people."

Continued at Times Online ...

Chris Hedges : Why I Am a Socialist

"The corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism—one that will insist on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars—or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our surveillance state."

Continued at Truthdig.