Julian Assange and democracy

The U.S. seems sadly determined to end its experiment with democracy and freedom of speech. Bruce Luske thinks it will end formally when Sarah Palin is finally elected president. In my opinion the process began some time ago, but now with all the bululu over the Wikileaks its demise is coming closer.




You can’t conduct democracy in secret.

We should be thanking Julian Assange, but instead we act like soap-opera protagonists where everyone has a secret past that (s)he will fight to the death to keep in the closet. We are prepared to accept all sorts of dirty tricks to keep everything hush-hush.

The dirty trick of the day is to accuse Assange of sexual misconduct. Good grief! They have tried this one before, for example with Al Gore, who was accused of the same offence to neutralize his campaigning for the environment and later acquitted. Luckily Gore has not lost his authoritativeness as one of our moral voices.

Assange was accused of sexual misconduct by Swedish prosecutors as he was seeking legal protection for his web site in Sweden. As we have seen, it’s an old trick. A prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for him late Friday. Dean Takahashi comments, “Then, a day later, a higher-ranking prosecutor rescinded the warrant, saying there were no grounds to suspect Assange of rape. The prosecutor who took over the case yesterday had more information and that was why the earlier prosecutor was over-ruled, according to a spokeswoman for the Swedish Prosecution Authority. “

Now, in addition Wikileaks informs us that Amazon will no longer host their page.

More democracy.

I suppose Assange knew the risks when he started all this, just like soldiers know what may happen to them. That’s why more people with troubled consciences and awareness don’t blow their whistles. But Obama and Hillary were once the people who said they would save democracy. How they are deceiving us now! Both by working in secret and striking out at the whistle blowers.

GW Bush must be so proud of them. Who among us are outraged?

"Bloddy Sunday" and Mr. Julian Assange

he British have just given us all an important lesson. They have admitted that the infamous “Bloody Sunday” was a crime committed by their troops against a civilian population.

The U.S. has a long way to go. We have made an institution of state secrets to the point that we allow the most atrocious crimes to go unmentioned. The CIA and the military hide the most horrible skeletons and produce the most terrorific weapons. In their arsenals there are poisons, diseases, and robots that kill from far away. They murder people, imprison them without trial, and make them disappear.


Source of Mr. Assang's
protrait

A very heroic man Mr. Julian Assange, the founder of “Wilileaks”, has had to hide because they might kill him for telling the truth. One of his whistle-blowers, Mr. Bradley Manning, is now in jail for releasing a video of the U.S. army gunning down innocent people from a helicopter in Iraq.

What would happen if suddenly the President were to open the windows and let the sunshine in? They say it’s the best disinfectant. The government has become like a twisted old man writhing in his lies. Can you imagine the sense of release that all Americans would feel?

Of course, after the initial pain of facing the trauma.

Electronic resourse:
Ornate letters: http://retrokat.com/medieval/leil.htm

A good example!

Source of this picture, "Pictures of the week",
Time Magazine


This is what they should do to all of them. The ones pictured here are illegal weapons that were destroyed in Nairobi, Kenya.

Afghanistan and negotiation

source of image

The Afghan hostilities must be re-formulated. They have become known collectively as an interminable war that needs an “exit strategy”. The problem is that it has been mainly conceived in terms of armed conflict.

It must be accepted, however, that in addition to armed attacks, the coalition has been involved in much constructive activity: the building of schools and hospitals, health-related prevention programs, the inclusion of women in education and political participation, and the institution of a certain democratic, elective and governing political process.

But one crucial element is lacking: negotiation with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda. They exist as a loosely knit amalgamation of discontented men and women, and they won’t be bombed (or wished) out of existence. There are a number of associated groups, probably also weakly-linked clusters of individuals, that acknowledge and identify with the same angry sentiments. Often they have violent and intransigent strategies and beliefs, and they have an undeniable influence in the modern Muslim world. It is important to talk to their representatives.

When you don’t talk to the “enemy” you attribute more power to it than it really has.

There is even evidence that Al Qaeda was invented as a concrete organization; it was part of a U.S. strategy in 2001 to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence. However, what Al Qaeda lacks in any solid organizational reality, it retains as a highly-charged emotional and conceptual rationalization for angry and violent gestures against what must also be called a non-existent enemy: The West. This is all a terrible case of objectifying a number of fantasies. The dead on both sides, however, are very real.

In the dark Bush-years of U.S. politics, any conversation with an American leader was considered a “reward” to be administered like M&Ms in Skinner-type behavioral experiments. This lead to the isolation of the administration’s personnel and the aggrandizement of their own self images.

Negotiation is a tool. You don’t negotiate with people you already agree with; it is an activity you carry out with people who believe differently and who have dissimilar interests, even when you believe the “other side’s” way of thinking is dark and dangerous. In fact, the importance of finding the middle ground increases when divergences are the greatest.



Nik Gowing, a well known reporter, interviewer, and debate leader on the BBC, recently lead one of the “World Debate” sessions with a discussion of the Afghan conflict. He was accompanied by diverse representatives and stakeholders of this multi- faceted struggle.

He ended with a comment that I will paraphrase from memory:

We have to rename what is happening in Afghanistan; it should no longer be called a war. It needs another qualifier.

Dennis Kucinich and peace

n an article titled "Give Peace a Chance", Mat Bivans mentions a bill in Congress to establish a Department of Peace in the United States Government. The bill was introduced by Dennis Kucinich . The New York times (I don’t have the reference) referred to it as a proposition emanating from the “radical Left”.

Good grief!! Why is peace a radical idea? Why is it associated with the Left? Don’t the Republicans want peace, too? Someone should ask them directly.

From whence the fear of the U.S. Democrats?

ince when does bipartisanship signify democratic process? The electorate chooses which representatives it wants in Congress, and the winning majority certainly doesn’t have to cajole the minority party into agreeing with those principles that the voters used when they picked them. Frankly I do not understand the Democrats! See this article by Peter Grier.

And then there's the one about Saint Peter...

This is a wonderful Saint Peter I photographed in a local gallery in the high Miranda hills to the south of Caracas. The lady who takes care of the exhibits puts different things in the hand that holds they keys to heaven. This time it’s some kind of branch; sometimes it’s a flower or even a feather: a bit of humor for such a serious subject. I think the Saint has the trace of an ironic smile. Or maybe it's a wry grimace.

Republican hypocrisy

Source of Ben Sargent cartoon, from the NY Times


Democratic members of Congress act as though they need the Republicans to tell them it’s ok to act. The Republicans didn’t need that kind of approval when they were in power under Bush’s presidency. It’s time for Democrats to be on TV explaining the health bill to the public and to be in regular contact among themselves doing the same thing.

After that, those congress members who are prepared to deny health care to the nation should renounce their own very complete and comfortable coverage.

Also, all the complaining about how much health care costs is hypocrisy: nobody complained in the Bush years when cash was piled onto ships with bulldozers to be shipped off to Iraq, and nobody demanded accountability for its later use. And the disaster that came from years of unsupervised banking and stock-market practices certainly has not been not cheap to remedy. When Republicans recommend thrift and belt-tightening exercises they really mean they want to continue their highly questionable free-access to limitless resources. I do not want to give the impression that I think previous profligate economic practices justify present ones. Rather, I believe it is important to uncover the lie behind Republican fiscal posturing.

Bipartisanship is not dead; it never existed. The Republican message is based on fear-mongering and outright lies. If the gentlemen and gentle ladies from the other side of the Congress don’t become more aggressive they will be destroying a unique opportunity for inclusive action and history will not be kind to them.

Nominal presidents

am listening now to an interview that Charlie Rose is conducting with the historian Garry Wills.

The interviewee is reviewing the history of executive secrecy that developed in the States after WWII that came out of the invention and use of the atomic bomb. With that secrecy, came huge potential for presidential power. In fact, after armistice in the middle 1940's, Congress never again exercised its constitution right to declare war (or to deny the President’s request to wage one); since then it has always been a personal, presidential decision.

The United States are very close to having a consecutive succession of temporarily elected monarchs. Remember that old TV program “Queen for a day”? Well there are now nominal, four-year kings.

Mr. Wills remembers how Congress didn’t even know that the States was bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam conflict. Present-day members of Congress deny knowing about the Bush-era “extraordinary renditions” and the astonishing violation of human rights that happened in Guantanamo.

But the President’s power is, as mentioned, largely nominal, sort of like that Queen Elizabeth II. He is a front-man for a huge and controlling apparatus of hidden decision-makers. The President may come to power with a reform agenda, as in fact Obama did. But once in his four year term he has to face unelected career-men like military and intelligence personnel who are very hard to contradict. Presidents come and go; the generals and agency heads often stay on for the next term.

So election promises fade away and the professionals keep a tight hold on the ship of state. As Mr. Wills commented in his interview, if Obama pulls the soldiers of fortune out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and if he puts limits on agencies like the CIA, they might start to open closets where they keep their skeletons. And since the States depends on them now, what if he needs them later, before he can reassemble a proper citizen army? (And imagine the uproar if he would ask more Americans to die in these undeclared wars for just a soldier’s wages!)Not even the Roman emperors dared to do that.

References:
Ornate letters: http://retrokat.com/medieval/leil.htm

A praying mantis visits me....

There once was a lady from Mantis
Who used computational tactics
She climbed to the screen
Deep meanings to glean
And to gain additional practice.

St George and the dragon

Fuente of Paolo Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon

I just saw a wonderful movie on Film and Arts that was new to me: The Ebony Tower with Laurence Olivier, Roger Ress, Greta Scacchi and Toya Willcox.

Olivier is an aging painter, Breasley. I must admit I sympathized more with his character than I did with Ress’, in which he assumes the personage of a younger artist and art critic called David. The young man visits the old one at his country house somewhere in France. I won’t go into the inevitable romance because the interesting part of the film was the encounter and contrast between Breasley, a figurative artist and the much younger and abstract painter David.

Breasley is totally non-intellectual, and his work seems to flow from the French-Celtic woods he chooses to live in with his two young nymph-muses. The movie representations of his work were in fact interesting. I didn’t recognize them, but they may have really been pieces taken from someone’s work. (It didn’t occur to me to check for that in the final credits.) David cannot understand Breasley; he even prudishly disapproves of his rakish fantasy life.

I had the feeling I should have sided with David, but I couldn’t. I rather understood Breasley’s sarcastic comparison of his house guest with Uccello’s St George where the knight seems to charge courageously at the princess’ over-large house-pet that she holds on a leash. His attempts at “liberating” her become ridiculous. The dragon is, of course, Breasley and the supposedly enslaved princess is Diana, one of the girls who accompanies the old man.

Helen Thomas, again

Helen Thomas, my heroine, has again published an important article: Obama, The War President (Published on Monday, February 8, 2010 by The Albany Times-Union, New York). View this link: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/08-10

How much of love

I found an old file full of things I wrote years ago, back in the days when one used a typewriter and paper. Here is one of them:



How much of love
Can be grown in a field
Of sun-warmed, red tomatoes?
Living, liquid life
Transformed
Into abstractions, rational relations,
Love of men,
Mankind,
Mathematics,
A washed dinner plate.

External things which are only
Phenomenologically true, perhaps, but nonetheless are
Hardly the crystallized works of a dead
Artist’s thought. Or the insubstantial
Hallucination
Of an amazed psychotic.

And then, too, remember that
Undefined warmth that puts sway in the hips,
As real as a tomato patch
And as insistent as the need to sing,
Ripened red by the same sunshine.

In the beginning was hardly the word.
In the beginning
(as always is)
Was the multitude of precious things.

Curious George

I found this very curious video of Werner Herzog reading his own existential/ pessimistic version of "Curious George". Enjoy.

Source: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/

The price of ignorance

This video was taken from this address;

The problem is that it is almost indistinguishable from real news. On CNN and FOX one sees crying women demanding the return of "their country", a place that is never defined but seems to refer to where social exclusion continues to be practiced.

This is the price for not having educated a large part of the population.



Referencias:

Video: http://www.commondreams.org/video/2009/09/08
Letras ornatas: http://retrokat.com/medieval/leil.htm

Goodbye, Teddy Kennedy

Fuente


Perhaps the best of all three Kennedy brothers has left us. I can only say how sorry I am. This marks the almost-end of the great democrats, the last of those who thought that personal and collective liberty could coexist. How very sorry I am!!




Fuente

This cartoon by Zanetti, was published in the New York Times (on line). It had a different message: it decried the occult danger represented by the banking system. I modified it, first in PowerPoint to change the words, and then in Adobe Photoshop to fix some design problems. Now it denounces the dangers of Fascism that seem to be appearing again, the old phantom that once ran through Europe, but now seems more universal and more deadly.

Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas is one of Washington's most ethical and esteemed reporters. She is a Hearst White House columnist and currently writes for the Boston Channel, WCVB TV.

Murder is murder

This posting is about universal civil rights and how U.S. citizens must regain respect for international law. The news-media's capacity for double-think (term taken from Orwell’s novel, 1984) is fully developed in 2009. All of us, seem to be able to accept without apparent cognitive dissonance these two events:

1. In Raleigh, North Carolina “Federal authorities are searching for an eighth alleged member of a North Carolina group that authorities say plotted "violent jihad" overseas, prosecutors said Tuesday…. Seven other men have been arrested on charges of supporting terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder abroad" (CNN, 29th of July, 2009). I underline that this plotting is considered to be a crime.

2. “ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The United States conducted two drone missile strikes in Pakistan's South Waziristan region Wednesday, killing at least 45 people, in the latest example of expanded direct American support for Pakistan's military offensive against key Pakistani insurgent leaders” (Saeed Shah, Wed Jul 8, 2009). I understand that this killing is considered acceptable by the U.S. government and new media, even patriotic.

First of all, I want to declare that I believe all assassination to be unlawful, immoral, and inefficient as a method of social control. I do not condone either side. But people’s capacity for choosing sides and saying that the same conduct is OK when “we” do it, but criminal if “they” do it is perplexing to say the least. According to the news sources I have seen and read, if you are Moslem and want to kill people, well, you should be tried and sent to jail, or even killed outright by a drone. But if you are part of the U.S. “war effort”, it's a patriotic thing to do.

In my book, murder is murder, even when the objective is a known criminal. Civil rights is one of democracy’s chief historical conquests: everyone has a right to his/her day in court. Kings and generals do not have the right to “hit” or “put people out” –to use the latest euphemisms for homicide.

In addition to all the killing, another result of all the violence in Pakistan, in which everyone (insurgents, U.S. drone-bombing, and local armed forces) participates, is:

“Pakistan is experiencing its worst refugee crisis since partition from India in 1947, and while the world may be familiar with the tent camps that have rolled out like carpets since its operation against the Taliban started in April, the overwhelming majority of the nearly three million people who have fled live unseen in houses and schools, according to aid agencies” (Sabrina Tavernise, June 17, 2009.

This is not right.

References:

1. CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/07/29/north.carolina.terrorism.charges/index.html
2. Saeed Shah, McClatchy Newspapers, Wed Jul 8, 6:33 pm ET, http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/3268368
3. Sabrina Tavernise, June 17, 2009, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/world/asia/18refugee.html
4. Ornate letter: http://retrokat.com/medieval/leil.htm

Michael Jackson: a shamanic figure

Image of a sculpture in Campeche, Mexico

I admit that I’m getting to this topic a bit late when everyone else has mercifully begun to think about other things. But I’d like to ask about the explosion of feeling caused y Michael Jackson’s death.

The first days afterward, CNN didn’t talk about anything else at all, even the wars, the massacres and all that was going on in Central America. The BBC was a bit less monothematic, but even that channel dedicated hours and hours of broadcasting time to it. Internet congestion was total.

Why? There hasn’t ever been this much outpouring of grief for one person. If we compare the concentration of broadcasting time over MJ with that given to the deaths of other figures (for example: María Callas, John Lennon, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Monseñor Oscar Romero, Salvador Allende, Augusto Pinochet, Mao Zedong) we have to admit that it has been disproportional. And I do not doubt that he was an excellent singer and dancer.

In his lifetime he attracted hostility and legal aggression, almost always related to some sort of moral repudiation. Again, why?

Here is a possible answer: he was a mythic, even shamanic figure. He wasn’t a man or a woman, an adult or a child, a father or a son, a black or a white, a hero or an “abnormal”. His “moon-walk was out of this world. We could only adore him or hate him.

The shamans break up our comfortable world views. They cause terror when everything we have hidden on the other side of the looking-glass shows up in the real world outside its oniric borders.

But we need the shamans because every-day life isn’t enough. We need more than work, homework, paying bills, shopping at the grocery store and the like. We need to penetrate normal-life barriers

Maybe Michael Jackson offered that. It is interesting that fantastic figures like Harry Potter and the Hobbits are so attractive. But they are clearly fictional. Michael Jackson was real.