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Beetham Gardens by Miquel Galofré
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“Institutionalised homophobia exposes the hollowness of our aspirations to “first world” status. It punctures the Trini delusion of cosmopolitan...”
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“There are various ways of dealing with the fact that all lives, including those of the people we love, have an end. The end of human life, which we...”
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Treated myself to a banana split for breakfast before my last day of school and oh my god it was too good - banana filled with...
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The question is how we react to this great prejudice against women. The rule of law and social activism certainly are crucial. But no matter how...
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“Be of service. You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is...”
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Word x 100 !!! Via @imanisublime #PR #cancer #truth #woc
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Homosexuality has a long history in Africa, says anthropologist Patrick Awondo, contrary...
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“I think marriage in general is not a healthy institution in our society. If people want civil rights, then that’s what I feel we should be fighting...”
In the Guardian today, former British soldier Joe Glenton, who served in the war in Afghanistan, writes under the headline ”Woolwich attack: of course British foreign policy had a role”. He explains:
“While nothing can justify the savage killing in Woolwich yesterday of a man since confirmed to have been a serving British soldier, it should not be hard to explain why the murder happened… . It should by now be self-evident that by attacking Muslims overseas, you will occasionally spawn twisted and, as we saw yesterday, even murderous hatred at home. We need to recognise that, given the continued role our government has chosen to play in the US imperial project in the Middle East, we are lucky that these attacks are so few and far between.”
This is one of those points so glaringly obvious that it is difficult to believe that it has to be repeated.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s letter to the editor of the NYTimes on the U.S.’ war on humanity.
(via theyoungradical)
What is the world’s most powerful and violent “ism”? The question will summon the usual demons such as Islamism, now that communism has left the stage. The answer, wrote Harold Pinter, is only “superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged”, because only one ideology claims to be non-ideological, neither left nor right, the supreme way. This is liberalism.
In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill described the power of empire. “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,” he wrote, “provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity of whom “implicit obedience” was required. The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville also believed in the bloody conquest of others as “a triumph of Christianity and civilisation” that was “clearly preordained in the sight of Providence”.
“It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the armongers,” wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, “but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its openended nature - its conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] selfrighteous fanaticism.” He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which Blair promised to “reorder this world around us” according to his “moral values”. At least a million dead later - in Iraq alone - this tribune of liberalism is today employed by the tyranny in Kazakhstan for a fee of $13m.
Apple Rejects App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes.
An update every single time a US drone strike kills someone in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan.
(via mehreenkasana)
(via socialuprooting)
In large part, the shooters and arsonists who are behind many, if not most of these events in America, are white men. In large part, these men have either come of age in the shadow of September 11. They have watched the media, heard Department of Homeland Security officials, and followed as mostly white male (and some female) politicians have given the anxious go ahead to wage an enormous war against Muslims abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan) or at home (in the form of the War on Terror). Several of them have served in a military that follows the orders of two U.S. Presidential administrations by training their men to shoot, invade, drop rockets from helicopters, and drones controlled remotely from Syracuse, NY and other air force bases in the United States.
These white men have learned their lessons well, whether in the military or from hours of media news: the frustrations of a scared (white) America can be dealt with waging a war using guns, bombs, chemicals, and drones. They have learned that it is ok to kill those who you believe to be behind threats to your comfort. They have internalized the message that those you fear can be addressed without words, without dialogue, but with violence, with power, with coercion. They have learned that some religions are automatically evil and that those who adhere to those religions must be destroyed. And these white men reflect an ideology of violence that has permeated America in the name of the War on Terror. Sadly, that ideology, perpetuated by our white men and women in power, carried out by American soldiers, and endorsed by a lapdog media, isn’t fading away. It’s becoming bigger, stronger, and more murderous.
These men are not mad or crazy. They are the well-trained students of American foreign and domestic policies. They have learned well the United States’ message: that violence and mayhem are the answer. We need to change the scripts, and confront the fallout of a decade of the War on Terror—and other excuses for state-led violence quickly
“war is “always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some ways the society itself.” Keegan’s view of war overlapped with that of Margaret Mead, who saw war as not a “biological necessity” but as an invention. War, Keegan proposed, stems primarily neither from “human nature” nor economic factors but from the “institution of war itself.” War, in other words, is a self-perpetuating meme.”
Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.
Money quote:
With transit countries facing some of the highest homicide rates in the world, so great is the frustration that the leaders are demanding that the United States and Europe consider steps toward legalization if they do not curb their appetite for drugs.
Drug use has not meaningfully declined at any time in the recent past, or at any time over the course of the past 30-40 years that Drug War policies have been in effect. Prohibiting non-violent, recreational conduct does not work. It just drives it underground and produces as much or more violence and anti-social behavior as would exist if we simply left people to make their own choices about whether and what drugs to use, or not to use.
Prohibition and punishment doesn’t work. Harm Prevention works. It’s time to decriminalize, legalize, and save lives, both north and south of the border.
Memorandum to President Obama from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) on the subject of Avoiding Another Long War; January 4, 2012
As professionals with collectively hundreds of years of experience in intelligence, foreign policy, and counterterrorism, we are concerned about the gross misrepresentation of facts being bruited about to persuade you to start another war.
We have watched the militarists represent one Muslim country after another as major threats to U.S. security. In the past, they supported attacks on Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya and Afghanistan, as well as Israel’s attacks on Syria and Lebanon — nine Muslim countries – and Gaza.
This time, they are using an new IAEA report to assert categorically that Iran is building a nuclear weapon that allegedly poses a major threat to the U.S. Your intelligence and military advisors can certainly clarify what the report really says. As you know, the IAEA makes regular inspection visits to Iran’s nuclear facilities and has TV cameras monitoring those facilities around the clock. While there is reason to question some of Iran’s actions, the situation is not as clear-cut as some allege.
Mohamed El Baradei, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient and former IAEA director-general, said recently, “I don’t believe Iran is a clear and present danger. All I see is the hype about the threat posed by Iran.”
He is not alone: All 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded “with high confidence” in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program as of 2003.
We are seeing a replay of the “Iraq WMD threat.” As Philip Zelikow, Executive Secretary of the 9/11 Commission said, “The ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The unstated threat was the threat against Israel.”
Your military and intelligence experts can also provide information on unpublicized efforts to derail Iran’s nuclear program and on the futility of attempting to eliminate that program – which is dispersed and mostly underground –through aerial bombing. Defense Secretary Panetta and other experts have stated that an air attack would only delay any weapons program for a year or two at most.
Former Mossad head Meir Dagan said that an air force strike against Iran’s nuclear installations would be “a stupid thing,” a view endorsed in principle by two other past Mossad chiefs, Danny Yatom and Ephraim Halevy. Dagan added that “Any strike against [the civilian program] is an illegal act according to international law.”
Dagan pointed out another reality: bombing Iran would lead it to retaliate against Israel through Hezbollah, which has tens of thousands of Grad-type rockets and hundreds of Scuds and other long-range missiles, and through Hamas.
We are already spending as much as the rest of the world combined on National Security and $100 billion per year on a Long War in Afghanistan. The Israel lobby has been beating the drums for us to attack Iran for years, led by people with confused loyalties like Joe Lieberman, who once made the claim that it is unpatriotic for Americans not to support Israel.
Another Long War is not in America’s or Israel’s interests, whatever Israel’s apologists claim. Those are the same people who claim that Ahmadinejad said he would “wipe Israel off the map.”
Persian specialists have pointed out that the original statement in Persian actually said that Israel would collapse: “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time.”
What we have is a situation where Israel’s actions, for example in sending 300,000 settlers into the West Bank and 200,000 settlers into East Jerusalem, are compromising U.S. security by putting us at risk for terrorist retaliation.
We have provided Israel with $100 billion in direct aid since 1975. Since this is fungible, how has funding settlements contributed to our security? You agreed to provide $3 billion in F-35s to Israel in exchange for a 90-day freeze on settlements. What you got was 90 days of stonewalling on the peace process and then more settlers. What more do we owe Israel?
Certainly not a rush to war. We have time to make diplomacy and sanctions work, to persuade Russia and China to make joint cause with us.
James Madison once wrote that “Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded…War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. …No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
We are currently winding down what you labelled a “dumb war;” we should not undertake another dumb war against a country almost three times larger than Iraq, that would set off a major regional war and create generations of jihadis. Such a war, contrary to what some argue, would not make Israel or the U.S. safer.
Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Phil Giraldi, Directorate of Operations, CIA
Ray McGovern, US Army Intelligence Officer, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA
Coleen Rowley, Special Agent and Minneapolis Division Counsel, FBI
Ann Wright, Col., US Army Reserve (ret.), Foreign Service Officer, Department of State
Tom Maertens, Foreign Service Officer and NSC Director for Non-Proliferation under two presidents
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council
David MacMichael, former history professor and CIA and National Intelligence Council analyst
War on Iran.
Moi: If anyone in Washington has an ounce of sense, we will avoid this sure-fire disaster.
I hope they avoid it too but the posturing gives me the impression the US government will got to war with Iran in 2012 - probably with support from Europe. The current movement of troops and equipment to Israel may also be considered a warning sign. Let’s not forget 2012 is going to be economic disaster for most nations so Disaster/Military capitalism will be rolled out to distract and accumulate.
(via amodernmanifesto)
