by Howard F. Stein / November 6th, 2009 ()
“Downsizing” by HF Stein
What is happening
Has not happened,
And if it has,
We do not want to know.
People I worked with yesterday,
Today are suddenly whisked away;
No one asks where they go –
Or even really wants to know.
There is no blood to show
For all their disappearance;
They just are
Not around any more.
The signs all
Read the same –
On the highways, in the stores,
On the elevators, …
by Marryam Haleem / November 6th, 2009 ()
“That was the happiest day of my life,” said the young Palestinian, “I was freed that day.”
“Come on,” I laughed as we walked down the dusty Gazan street, the Mediterranean sun beating down hard on our faces, “it couldn’t have been that bad. I mean, we all dislike school to some degree, but it has its nice things too.”
His grave eyes looked wholly unconvinced, “the day I graduated from university was the best day of my life,” he firmly repeated. And then he added, more to himself than to me, “I wish I could erase all my memories of my …
by Jasmin Ramsey / November 6th, 2009 ()
Critics have praised the film as a realistic, Academy Award-worthy piece of filmmaking. But is there really anything realistic about it?
As the year winds down and Hollywood gets busy creating Oscar buzz, one unlikely contender is The Hurt Locker, the widely praised Iraq movie that premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and was released in the U.S. in June 2009.
“Just when I thought I’d seen enough of Iraq war movies, along comes (Hurt Locker),” an Access Hollywood film critic told USA Today in September. “If any movie about Iraq is going to break through to the academy, this …
by Tom Burghardt / November 6th, 2009 ()
President Barack Obama instructed Justice Department attorneys to argue last week in San Francisco before Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker, that he must toss out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Shubert v. Bush lawsuit challenging the secret state’s driftnet surveillance of Americans’ electronic communications.
This latest move by the administration follows a pattern replicated countless times by Obama since assuming the presidency in January: denounce the lawless behavior of his Oval Office predecessor while continuing, even expanding, the reach of unaccountable security agencies that subvert constitutional guarantees barring “unreasonable searches and seizures.” EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston wrote:
In …
by Stuart Littlewood / November 6th, 2009 ()
The Israeli embassy in London has finally made its excuses for the “senseless outrage” of preventing Berlanty Azzam, a fourth-year student of Bethlehem University, from continuing her studies and robbing her of her degree. She was arrested at an Israeli checkpoint and deported to Gaza blindfolded and handcuffed, and dumped there in the dark late at night.
Re: Ms Berlanty Azzam (I.D. 801158791)
Ms Azzam is a Gaza resident who is staying in the West Bank illegally. Ms Azzam held a permit to stay in the West …
by Stephanie Westbrook / November 6th, 2009 ()
When I read of the tragedy at Fort Hood in my home state of Texas, where a soldier killed 13 of his fellow troops and wounded 30, I couldn’t help thinking of my brief experience at the base.
It was the summer of 2006. I was in Crawford, Texas, home to Bush’s ranch and Camp Casey, the activist campout organized by Cindy Sheehan who lost her son in Iraq. It was the second year for Camp Casey. But this time, Bush had chosen to spend his holidays elsewhere, leaving us with more free time.
Fort Hood, the largest army base …
The Anti-Empire Report
by William Blum / November 5th, 2009 ()
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
— Voltaire
Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?
Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.
Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that …
by James Keye / November 5th, 2009 ()
Belief is essential. The “faith community” sees this as axiom, and as creationists and other fundamentalists enjoy pointing out, science folks are just people who “believe” in science. But there is a great difference between belief in a statement as a ‘fact’ and belief in a method for adapting. Absolutely, belief is the underlying form of the designs with which one behaves in the world, the question is: must there be one way to do a thing or are there reliable and neutral methods to test many conceivable ways so that our understandings and actions adapt continuously …
by M. Shahid Alam / November 5th, 2009 ()
At the outset of the classes I teach, I always address the question of bias in the social sciences. In one course – on the history of the global economy – this is the central theme. It critiques Eurocentric biases in several leading Western accounts of the rise of the global economy.
This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the …
by Gilad Atzmon / November 5th, 2009 ()
“Why would any writer make up stories about the Holocaust?” asks Melissa Katsoulis on mainstream British media outlet The Independent.
Katsoulis has recently published a book about the history of literary hoaxes. She is interested in particular in a unique fictional genre; namely ‘the Holocaust hoaxers’.
On the one hand, she confesses that “special privilege must be given to those increasingly few witness-writers who survived the Second World War in Europe.” She is even willing to accept Elie Wiesel’s peculiar take on ‘truth and fiction’, that “some stories are true that never happened.”
On the other hand she says, “those memoirists …
