Fuzzy Marx

This is a discussion on Long Sunday about the same odd (it was from a MOD report) political economy post of a few days ago.

I liked this:

"There is Marx. Then there is fuzzy Marx. Fuzzy Marx is not a completely illegitimate way to think. It is distant from the full range of Marxists arguments. But it still employs important insights from Marx's work. So first let's take Marx. Why, according to him, is the proletariat the revolutionary class? It is not because workers are oppressed a lot. Lots of classes in history have been oppressed and had revolutions but have not produced all round liberation of humanity. Workers are the revolutionary class because the revolution they lead is not on behalf of a specific class interest. In Marx's account, the workers have been ground down almost to the level of the lumpenproletariat, and when they have a revolution it is not in order to promote a new, competing economic and political system but to destroy the class system root and branch, along with the state. The bit quoted above does not describe the middle class as propertyless. The report itself points out that the middle class has class interests. Thus any revolution a transnational middle class might take would not be the kind of action that Marx had in mind. But what if we think in a fuzzy Marx way? If we abstract from the mechanics of revolution that Marx predicted, we can still be interested in his overall claim that capitalism is ultimately headed for economic reefs. The question is, whether or not capitalism will finally produce a profound sociological split between the haves and the have-nots. But that split in itself is not enough. It must also be translated into a political force. This is a problem that Marx confronts: earlier class revolutions had been much more tactical and strategic precisely because the classes who led them had specific class interests they wanted to promote. To the extent that the workers had a class interest in 20th-century Europe it was reformist. To the extent that they didn't have a specific class interest to promote they were politically formless. The traditional Marxist picture of the middle class is of a group that flirts both with revolution and with reaction depending on what they are most afraid of at the moment -- workers who challenged private property or a dictatorial state that interfered in private life and the economy. But what might happen to the political thinking of a middle class confronted by globalization but not particularly worried about a workers movement? We don't know."

More here

Blairism

The troubled mindset of Tony

"Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture. His remarks angered community leaders, who accused him of ignorance and failing to provide support for black-led efforts to tackle the problem.

One accused him of misunderstanding the advice he had been given on the issue at a Downing Street summit.

Black community leaders reacted after Mr Blair said the recent violence should not be treated as part of a general crime wave, but as specific to black youth. He said people had to drop their political correctness and recognise that the violence would not be stopped "by pretending it is not young black kids doing it".

Guardian article

full text of speech

Google Earth and the genocide in Darfur

"Google Earth has added a Global Awareness layer to its maps program that lets you learn about the crisis in Darfur. By selecting the Global Awareness layer (in the lower left-hand corner of Google Earth) you can fly over enhanced satellite images of the war-torn region. Sprinkled over the map are icons that link to photographs, data, videos, and narratives of eyewitnesses to the genocide."

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Political economy

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".

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great save

58th Adebayor Header
Uploaded by ArsenalFootballClub

AU students try to arrest Karl Rove

"WASHINGTON (AP) - More than a dozen protesters confronted White House adviser Karl Rove as he tried to leave a speaking engagement at American University, blocking his car and throwing things, officials said."

story first picked up by FOX and twisted somewhat. the papers arent telling the whole story.

I'll wait for a more accurate version of events and post that

UPDATE: from my friend megan who has a cool group blog, directing readers to the AU newspaper version

Joost

i just got my joost invite. The future of TV, as long as you got super high speed broadband, just got a whole lot more fancy. I thought i was on star trek or something. I can't believe i just lost an hour to this stuff. Its great. The picture is like real TV, you get all the good channels, and its all on your PC when you want it. its a bit like tivo, but for the laptop.

me likes

you should sign up.

A true great

Dennis Bergkamp, the first goal says it all

Imperial hangover

What would happen if the UK decided to spend less on arms and imperial misconceptions? Could the money, the trillions, not be used to support education, health, sustainable energy? Surely with all the other big players in the world the US, China, Russia - Britain would do well to stand out of the way, our power is ineffectual and mostly for appearances.

JT gets us thinking about our Imperial Hangover, the shadow that moves the nation and its political leaders like fools.

jeremy taylor: Imperial hangover

"In fact, Britain has long been a second-rank player. It has no business retaining independent nuclear weapons (to use against who?) or renewing its Trident nuclear submarines; it has no business occupying a permanent Security Council seat when countries like Germany, Japan, India and Brazil don't have one; its remaining colonies like the Falkland Islands (and several Caribbean countries — the Caymans, Turks and Caicos, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Montserrat) should long ago have been divested and set up on their own two feet. Britain should be wholly engaged in Europe and the EU, not pretending to be an equal "ally" (i.e. field slave) of the United States.

And the irony is that the "New Labour" government of Tony Blair has been just as gung-ho about this neo-imperialism as Anthony Eden and Margaret Thatcher put together. And even more deceitful."

Grand Theft Auto

interesting article about the boys behind grand theft auto and the billion dollar computer game industry

"That’s where Donovan and the Housers came in. The Londoners had attitude, style, and what Dan Houser later called a “culturally relevant, detail-obsessed approach” to game-making. They moved their core team to New York and assumed the name Rockstar Games. (The group of coders and designers in Scotland was eventually acquired by Take-Two and renamed Rockstar North.) The name hinted at their ambitions. “We admired record labels, obviously, and clothing companies, which were obsessed with details and with an integrity between design, product, and marketing,” Dan told the Design Museum of London in 2003. Rockstar wouldn’t just sell games — it would sell a lifestyle."

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Amazing finale

"Sri Lanka's Lasith Malinga became the first bowler to take four wickets in four balls in international cricket but it was all in vain as South Africa won.

Jacques Kallis's 86 saw South Africa to a last-gasp one-wicket win in the Super 8 match at the Cricket World Cup."

report

Absolute class

man skies down escalator on London underground.

The authorities want to charge him.

What will the charge be?



update: skier makes the guardian

"Arild is a legend in Norway's free ski subculture, a "crazy half-communist" who pursues thrills over fame or money, according to Spelmann. "He works four months a year then spends the rest of his time skiing. He really is an excellent skier and he's done this stuff many times. He's happy. He just does it."

The owl of minerva

"Philosophy never was the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending. Hegel was quite clear on the point in the Philosophy of Right:


"Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering."


The ideal is within the real in a mature form of life. Philosophy reflects on a form of life grown old and it does so as a mode of historical knowing.

The shades of night are falling on modernity and philosophy reflects on the movement of the ideal and the real in this form to understand the world forming.That new world is what Hardt and Negri call Empire."

more here

Why do we fall in love: anthropologist names magic

her name is helen fisher from rutgers

Sunday morning blues

After A While
by Veronica A. Shoffstall

After a while you learn
the subtle difference between
holding a hand and chaining a soul
and you learn
that love doesn't mean leaning
and company doesn't always mean security.
And you begin to learn
that kisses aren't contracts
and presents aren't promises
and you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes ahead
with the grace of woman, not the grief of a child
and you learn
to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow's ground is
too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down
in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
that even sunshine burns
if you get too much
so you plant your own garden
and decorate your own soul
instead of waiting for someone
to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure
you really are strong
you really do have worth
and you learn
and you learn
with every goodbye, you learn...

Cool links

These websites deal in emotions, affects and feelings. They make embodiment digital in a way that stretches the mind.

Play and see yourself

lovelines: From Love to Hate, in Words and Pictures

we feel fine

Lloyd Best

I never knew Lloyd Best in the flesh, only ever had the pleasure of his ideas, which in themselves were gift enough. In the 'Western intellectual canon' its easy to pick out personal heroes, growing up in London, being schooled there and sharing the ideas of a tradition well and truly engrained in the British academy i never learnt about people such as Best and George John, people outside of this 'Western canon,' but people who forged there own equally great line of thought. It was later in my adult life while living in Trinidad when i noted all those Caribbean people i admired, my friends, collegues, family – all adored Best, all spoke with such passion about his ideas, his influence, about his vision of the Caribbean and Trinidad. A vision not just for today or the recent past but also about the possible futures, both good and bad to come. My mother and my aunt were liming partners of Best and can tell a story or three about the intellectual battles they had. My editors and creative influences worked and learned alongside him. i knew i wanted to interview him, or rather just have a conversation for my PhD topic, and i always knew the time was running out. Just this Christmas and the summer before it too i regretfully failed to make the time. In my dissertation work i try to speak using many voices, dialogism as it is called, and one strong booming voice in that plentude of voices - a voice that tells me about creating new political entities in Trinidad, about how to develop the cultural gift of pan, about the economic future, about Trinidad and its people and about so much more, is Lloyd Best. A man whose ideas give me and my work a Caribbean life and space to built from, but who in life i never had the pleasure to meet. Ideas though can live forever, and i guess that means the power of the person can too.

George Lamming on Best

"With the passing of Lloyd Best an irreplaceable light has been put out. Lloyd and I shared a friendship which survived the sharpest of disagreements, but each disagreement deepened my respect for his integrity.

For more than 40 years he put his formidable intellect in the service of one singular cause - independent thought and Caribbean freedom. there was no corner of this archipelago which escaped his political concern, and his politics was the name of an intellectual culture. Best fought to the very end to help us dismantle the imperial boundaries we inherited. We failed because we do not recognise the difference between politics and government; and dare not see our mimicking of a Westminster model as the greatest obstacle to genuine representation.

To find a language of our own creation that would define the Caribbean collective experience was the gospel he preached.''

trinidad express piece

This is good for a laugh

not the most flattering lineup



try it out here

Control of information

"The Bush administration's interference in climate change science has revealed "flaws that have developed in the functioning of our democracy", according to a leading US climate scientist.

The stinging attack on the power of the White House to distort the issue of climate change will come today in testimony to the House of Representatives committee on oversight and government reform."

"The executive branch seems to be exercising greater control in the functioning of our government, in ways that our forefathers probably did not imagine and almost certainly would not approve. This includes White House control of testimony to Congress, White House control of information that scientists provide to the public ... and most decidedly through control of the purse strings."

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West Indies through to super eights

Lara lookin good


match report here

Oh so that's what MDMA looks like

From an intelligent website on 'entheogenics' and documenting the complex relationship between humans and psychoactives

love you guys man

Flash

Even more amazing

Ireland beat Pakistan! unthinkable. This cricket world cup is really going good, what with the West Indies winning their opener, England going down, Gibbs hitting six sixes of one over and now the minnows taking down the big guns. Who needs 20/20?



"There is the run and the scores are now level. Trent Johnston has hit a SIX! He has actually hit the ball out of the ground. Remember this: it is cricket history. Ireland have won."

match report here

Amazing!

Bangladesh just beat India





worldcup match report here

Oh dear...why do i take these quizzes?

You are The Devil

Materiality. Material Force. Material temptation; sometimes obsession

The Devil is often a great card for business success; hard work and ambition.

Perhaps the most misunderstood of all the major arcana, the Devil is not really "Satan" at all, but Pan the half-goat nature god and/or Dionysius. These are gods of pleasure and abandon, of wild behavior and unbridled desires. This is a card about ambitions; it is also synonymous with temptation and addiction. On the flip side, however, the card can be a warning to someone who is too restrained, someone who never allows themselves to get passionate or messy or wild - or ambitious. This, too, is a form of enslavement. As a person, the Devil can stand for a man of money or erotic power, aggressive, controlling, or just persuasive. This is not to say a bad man, but certainly a powerful man who is hard to resist. The important thing is to remember that any chain is freely worn. In most cases, you are enslaved only because you allow it.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

catch it if you can

Travel to the stars p2-3 by *ketchup-suicide on deviantART

Fear

Proteophobia

"Proteophobia often describes the outsider as being in
opposition to rational, non-ambivalent characteristics:

All traits ascribed to the outsiders signify ambivalence. Dirt is, as we know, a thing out of place, something which ought to stay elsewhere, lest it should blur the dimensions which ground the order of things… Unreliability means erratic behaviour which defies probabilities and makes calculation based on the knowledge of rules useless. Laziness stands for defying universality of routine and, by proxy, the very determined nature of the world. A similar semantic load is carried by other most common elements of the outsiders’ stereotype: they are morally lax, sexually promiscuous, dishonest… overemotional and incapable of sober judgement – and altogether irregular and unpredictable… In other words, the outsiders are the gathering point for risks and fears which accompany cognitive spacing. (Bauman 1993: 162)"

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borat

thoughtful and funny article on Sacha Baron Cohen from rolling stone magazine

"I think part of the movie shows the absurdity of holding any form of racial prejudice, whether it's hatred of African-Americans or of Jews," Baron Cohen says.

In actuality, it turns out that Borat is a far more damning critique of America than it is of Kazakhstan. The jokes that Baron Cohen mentions above -- and all the rest about beating gypsies, throwing Jews down wells, exporting pubic hair and making monkey porn -- are clearly parody. But the America that Borat discovers on his cross-country trek here -- rife with homophobia, xenophobia, racism, classism and anti-Semitism -- is all too real.

"Borat essentially works as a tool," Baron Cohen says. "By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism.

Throw the Jew Down the Well' [a song performed at a country & western bar during Da Ali G Show] was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought that it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism. But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tucson. And the question is: Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism.

"I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.' I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic."

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Goal!

Ronaldo 3 - 1 - Manchester United v Euro
Uploaded by philipriv

Work

Cricket world cup starts

West Indies win!

"The West Indies shrugged off any early-tournament nerves with a convincing 54-run win over Pakistan in the opening match of the World Cup at Kingston in Jamaica, with a notable allround performance from Dwayne Smith.

It was an impressive win, not least for their ability to absorb the expectation of hosting their first World Cup. Furthermore, the total they were defending was by no means out of Pakistan's reach. Yet their bowlers - who admittedly are all much of a muchness - hunted in a pack and, unlike Pakistan's, never let the batsmen dismantle their confidence, or their lines."

more

watch the games over the internet here

Anthropologists and world domination

From the chronicle of higher education:

"American military and intelligence agencies have increasingly been turning to anthropologists and other social scientists for "cultural knowledge" about actual and potential adversaries. But many anthropologists are deeply anxious about offering such assistance, fearing, among other things, that their insights might be used simply to help torture and kill people more effectively...

all anthropologists might come under suspicion if some anthropologists were known to be employees of national-security agencies. All scholars doing fieldwork in certain countries might find it more difficult to develop relationships with people who provide cultural information, and they might all be at higher risk of being arrested for espionage."

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The consumerism of universities

From the blog posthegemony

"I'm reading Bill Readings's The University in Ruins (for which see also Dominick LaCapra's review, as well as Peter Cramer's).

Readings argues that the operative principle of the University is now "excellence," a concept that replaces the previous guiding concept of "culture," which itself succeeded the Kantian vision of "reason."

But the characteristic of the University of Excellence is that it lacks any concrete referent: "excellence has no concept to call its own" (24); "excellence is clearly a purely internal unit of value that effectively brackets all questions of reference or function" (27).

Whereas the University of Culture was tied to the nation state and to national culture as its object and the national subject as its product, the University of Excellence is contextless and its students merely "consumers" (53); the university's goal is now that "of producing a subject who is no longer tied to the nation-state, who can readily move to meet the demands of the global market" (49).

At the same time, therefore, ideology is replaced by administration: "the University is no longer primarily an ideological arm of the nation-state but an autonomous bureaucratic corporation" (40). Accounting becomes the sole measure of accountability: "the language in which global discussions are to be conducted is not that of cultural conflict but of economic management" (30).

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Ambrose again

Birthday

“She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez eighty today

liverpool through to last eight

Liverpool beat Barca over two-legs

it was close



but the 2006 champions are on the way home



and arsenal can thank us for getting rid of them. Something the gooners should have done last season

Blurred identities

I love the cyborg. The cyborg is my friend. When I think about them I cannot work out their gender, their race, their class; I cannot place them within a quasi-secular frame of reference, a Freudian metanarative or a Marxist mode of production. Neither is God around to save us, and I say ‘us’ deliberately because the bible never saw a cyborg before. It never saw ‘us.’ Our unities will always be too monstrous and illegitimate for the gender, race, class and religious consciousness forced on us by “the terrible historical experience of…patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism.”

The cyborgs who came to play, laugh with me at the irony of boundaries that collapse, and I whisper at them that I too am one of them. With a phone on my ear, a computer attached to my fingertips and a car as my privatised space; with a white father and black mother, with two passports and four places to call home I realise I have always been one of them. Fixation and fiction with, and of concreteness, has always been alien to me. The idea persons are more separate, than coupled and connected in millions of seen and unseen ways to things beyond-human, has always been a fairy tale.

These cyborgs, my friends, my family, are “wary of holism, but needy for connection.” We understand that singular individuals don’t exist, their minds are not Cartesian brains laid out in rows of vats. Rather, embodiment, identity and desire are forever making and remaking themselves and us – reconfiguring the eternal impermanence and energy of the cyborg mode of being in the world. Wake up! Today you can be whatever you want. Fiction is calling. Recognise your connections that are too strange to accept.

The cyborg reminds me of another body I’ve know. Delueze and Guattari’s ‘Body without Organs’ (BwO), to me, is a vision of embodiment where the fixed, reliable and easily defined discourses of social inscription given to human body parts – eyes, limbs, brains, phallus etc. is overcome, and established knowledge on the body, and hence the positioning of the universal ‘subject’ as a defined and reified entity, challenged.

Whereas the cyborg comes to save us from this universal subject, the BwO was a time before the universal subject that we have had stolen. Both bodies understand there is far more than male, female, black, white, fat, beautiful etc. and that these social ‘facts,’ -– “seductions of organic wholeness” – only allow for either/or binaries and a dialectical opposition to the other that mostly reflects a dominant and non-dominant social position unable to grasp the full extent of everyday life and experience.

Like the cyborg the BwO was never against organs, but rather the organisation of organs into an organism. Both bodies are dissatisfied with anthropological research reliant on normative categories. It is not that subject positions, agency and domination do not exist but rather when considered fixed and as elements of a close system they become repressive. We become prisoners of our own bodies, jailed within a social reality that is a political construction designed to hinder new conceptual frameworks for being, new understandings of not only persons but people – that misleading collective and homogenising noun. The cyborg and the BwO conceive of a “discourse dissolving the ‘West’ and its highest product – the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is the author of a cosmos called history.”

But wait I’m forgetting to tell you where my friends the cyborg come from. Did we make them, are they our children, is theirs a visit from space? The cyborg has no mother, no creation/origin myth – it is not human. It needs no mode of production; it requires no Marxist formulation of labour or necessity. Like me they are the illegitimate offspring of essentialist culture. They were not produced by fixed social positions and heterosexual parents. They are the bastard children of “militarism and patriarchal capitalism”. They have no mother and deny the existence of a million fathers. Will that be enough to let them escape and live free or are they just another reconceptualisation of masculine knowledge? Is bestiality truly “a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange”?

To redefine nature and culture is at the least subversive and at the most radically fatal to this binary. The cyborg is here to destroy the ontological flowerbed “grounding Western epistemology”. They never liked organised gardens anyways. But what of the organisation of labour, the factories, the engineers who make our post-industrial world possible, what will the cyborg do to these gardeners of social reality?

If “labour is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world [then l]abour is the humanising activity that makes man; labour is an ontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation.” As the cyborg jumps up and down on the organised flowerbeds of man’s garden they free those who owe their existence as woman and other to Marxist analytical strategies, to sexual appropriation. They listen to Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-production. Cyborgs make the invisible visible and put in their hands the tools “to mark the world that marked them as other,” as hidden.

The cyborgs arrived here, now, to play a part in much “needed political work.” For as one of the first to greet them said, “another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wide intensification of domination has never been more acute. [And] a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.”

My experience of the cyborgs is that they will help to change the world. That new lines of kinship between humans and non-humans can emerge. That contradictory standpoints, fractured identities, can be broken but we must be careful, for in their million faceless fathers, the cyborg as slave, hides a daunting age – a grid of control on the planet about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war.”

The cyborgs are my friends because I am optimistic. I am not scared of this orgy, The limits of identities are now visible, there is a language with which to discuss them, visions within which we can try to recast how we see ourselves, our worlds, our people. The maps of power and identity written on our bodies are redefined when you, like me, understand we our both cyborgs too. That these are our friends, and that the dualisms of social reality are someone else’s story, not the cyborg’s. I too would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

quotes taken from Donna Haraway's now classic cyborg manifesto

White Trash

"What that says about modern Britain seems pretty straightforward. How else to understand it than as more evidence of our embrace of an increasingly American social model, in which there is opportunity for all - apart from the undeserving rump too feckless to seize it? In short, we've finally acquired our own equivalent of that dread term "white trash". As Lynsey Hanley's superb book Estates - superficially about council housing, but actually addressing much more - points out, at the bottom of the social ladder, class has been supplanted by caste, thanks to a con trick whereby successive governments have "hived off poorer working-class people from affluent society ... when, all the while, they have claimed that we are progressing inexorably towards a state of classlessness".

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Ali G meets the NBA

cheeky monkey

Smuggling

"A former public schoolboy who masterminded a £3m plot to smuggle wooden doors impregnated with liquid cocaine into Britain was jailed yesterday for 18 years. Paul Sneath, 24, of Guildford, Surrey, came up with a "unique" plot using sheets of plywood, liquid cocaine, industrial solvent, and cheese graters.

In 2005, after inheriting £250,000, the Bristol University dropout travelled to Panama where he arranged for plywood to be soaked in liquid cocaine and sealed inside doors elaborately patterned with parrots. The doors were then shipped from Panama to his family home, where his unknowing mother signed for them and paid £798 for the shipping costs.

Sneath then transferred the doors to a lock-up in Dalston, east London, where members of a Colombian gang removed the plywood, shaved it with cheese graters and mixed the shavings with heated solvent. Police caught the gang red-handed before they had a chance to dry the precipitate and chop it into powder. The doors were found to have been impregnated with 17.3kg of pure cocaine, with a street value in excess of £3.2m.

Sneath, who had no previous criminal record, was found guilty of conspiracy to supply cocaine at Inner London crown court."

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Torture in the US

"Something remarkable is going on in a Miami courtroom. The cruel methods US interrogators have used since September 11 to "break" prisoners are finally being put on trial. This was not supposed to happen. The Bush administration's plan was to put José Padilla on trial for allegedly being part of a network linked to international terrorists. But Padilla's lawyers are arguing that he is not fit to stand trial because he has been driven insane by the government.

Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an "enemy combatant" and taken to a navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a cell 9ft by 7ft, with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a "truth serum", a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP."

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Cricket at its best

Ambrose destroys England in 1994. Truly great cricket.

Liverpool beat Barca

Lovin the swing

Second leg still to come

Teaching the machine

“I was trying to explain this stuff in the traditional paper format, and I thought, ‘This is ironic,’ I can illustrate this much better in a video.”

michael wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology and digital ethnographer

William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower:
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

CLR James on Kanhai

"Cricket is an art, a means of national expression. Voltaire says that no one is so boring as the man who insists on saying everything. I have said enough. But I believe I owe it to the many who did not see the Edgbaston innings to say what I thought it showed of the directions that, once freed, the West Indies might take. The West Indies in my view embody more sharply than elsewhere Nietzche’s conflict between the ebullience of Dionysus and the discipline of Apollo. Kanhai’s going crazy might seem to be Dionysus in us breaking loose. It was absent from Edgbaston. Instead the phrases which go nearest to expressing what I saw and have reflected upon are those of Lytton Strachey on French Literature: ‘(the) mingled distinction, gaiety and grace which is one of the unique products of the mature poetical genius of France.’

Distinction, gaiety, grace. Virtues of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, city-states, islands, the sea, and the sun. Long before Edgbaston I had been thinking that way. Maybe I saw only what I was looking for. Maybe."

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Let the party begin

"Amid a delightful cacophony of Caribbean sounds symbolising national rejoicing, the new Kensington Oval was officially unveiled yesterday. It also marked the unofficial opening of the ninth World Cup. The official ceremony is at Sabina Park, Kingston, on 11 March, but there was the definite whiff of a march being stolen. The 2007 Kensington Oval is a tremendous arena, fit for a World Cup final, which it will stage late in April. Yesterday, it was perfectly content with a festival match between a West Indies Legends XI and a Rest of the World XI. It was a treat. The statue of Sir Garfield Sobers outside the ground, unveiled by the great man himself, said it all."

cricket world cup

Super what?

Property

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this imposter. Youare lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!"

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Chagon, Tierney, Neel and the Yanomani

This is most balanced article i've read on the 'Darkness in El Dorado' issues that haunt anthropology.

"Anthropologists cannot simply be observers, as traditional scientific objectivity requires, but must actively take sides in any political struggle involving the peoples they are studying. And in such a struggle the norms of scientific objectivity become subordinate to the political aims."

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confusion

"A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act.

The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists' ability to probe people's minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.

The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way.

"Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there's no way you could possibly tell is in there. It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall," said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University."

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This chair is no ordinary chair

Oh no you didn't

"The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.

The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.

In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover.

Details of the shipments have emerged in a memorandum prepared for the meeting of the House committee on oversight and government reform which is examining Iraqi reconstruction. Its chairman, Henry Waxman, a fierce critic of the war, said the way the cash had been handled was mind-boggling. "The numbers are so large that it doesn't seem possible that they're true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?"

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Jeff Jarvis from CUNY

"The revolution will not be televised. It will be YouTubed."

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immanence

From GU

"Anyone ready for a vegetable Spinoza?

In the West, the clash of civilisations is not between Islam and Christianity, but two other powerful faiths: environmentalism and materialism. Observe the reverence of worshippers at a Ferrari showroom and a farmers' market. A Testarossa or an organic carrot? Both are so eulogised by these rival flocks they could be the Second Coming. 'Greed is good' proved a slogan too powerful for that lesser faith, socialism. Now materialism faces a fresh challenge from a creed with a new motto: 'Green is good'.

Environmentalism is a faith, its converts as fervent as those flocking to Islam. The West might have shaken off God, but not the desire to revere: the planet. Don't believe me? Read Baruch Spinoza. He lived in 17th-century Amsterdam, but is rapidly becoming philosopher a la mode. He even dabbled in kabbalah: how modish is that?

He believed the world is God. So to pray is to worship every hill and valley, every raindrop and sunray, every man and animal - and every law connecting them. It was known as pantheism, but could be called environmentalism. Without Spinoza, would we ever have heard of James Lovelock and Gaia?

Since Descartes, humanity has felt itself separate from a dead, physical world that is ours to play with. Spinoza, by contrast, says we are part of the same, sacred earth. What makes us special? According to Spinoza, nowt. Which is very green. Unlike Prince Charles, Spinoza was a frugal ecologist.

What we call greed, Spinoza called 'human bondage'. He distrusted desire and progress. But he was a democrat who wanted the clergy out of politics. Many greens will also identify with his years of ostracism: aged 23, he was excommunicated by his synagogue for 'abominable heresies'. His great works were published after his death, found hidden in his desk. He is interesting as more than an historical curiosity, however.

He wrote: 'Like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our fate.' A pretty good take on life with rising sea levels. He also felt nature is determined to 'produce an effect in a certain way'. If only Bush had read that before commissioning dodgy reports suggesting climate change is mere chance.

But Spinoza would also ask tough questions of greens: is yours a faith in the planet or merely a lifestyle choice?

So will Spinoza triumph? Capitalism always adapts, hence all the products pushed as 'green'. Spinoza would choose the carrot over the Ferrari. Will we?"

changing sides

Fukuyama says. "When I wrote The End of History, I did not anticipate the degree to which mistakes on the part of American leaders, in their own stewardship of American power, could create such problems and undermine the legitimacy of the broader project. I don't think these are mistakes we'll never recover from ... but there's no question that because of decisions in Washington, the situation has become much worse than it would have been."

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Hair news

i think this is how you take back power from the media coporations. set your own agenda

banksy

Stop the carnival

"People develop a country, not industrial plants, overhead railways or palaces. And Trinidad and Tobago's people are beginning to understand that they have been let down by every post-independence government. Their political parties are discredited or untested. I keep wondering, where will they turn now?"

jeremy taylor: Stop the carnival

Tobago, 1st Jan 2007

Cheesy perhaps, but true for me today

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson
about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, "My son, the battle is between two
’wolves’ inside us all”.

One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow,
regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment,
inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility,
kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and
faith."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his
grandfather: “Which wolf wins?"

The grandfather replies: “The one you feed”.

Arundhati Roy in 2003

"the disparity between the rich and poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through their 'sweetheart deals,' to corporatize the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, coporate globalisation needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies.

Coporate Globalisation – or shall we call it by its name? Imperialism – needs a press that pretends to be free. it needs courts that pretend to dispense justice.

Meanwhile, the countries of the North harden their corders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. After all they have to make sure that it's only money, goods, patents and services that are globalised. Not the free movement of people. Not a respect for human rights. Not international treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change, or – God forbid – justice. So this, all this, is 'empire.' this loyal confederation, this obscene acumulation of power, this greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them."

Scientists ‘pressured’ to play down climate risk

"TWO private advocacy groups told a US congressional hearing yesterday that climate scientists at seven government agencies say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at playing down the threat of global warming."

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Making money kills people

"Novartis filed an appeal in Madras, India, against a decision to prevent it from patenting a new version of leukemia drug Gleevac, whose patent expired.

If the company wins its case, Indian companies could be banned from making generic versions of the drug, sold around the world for about 1-10th of the $2,600 price for a month`s supply Novartis charges, The International Herald Tribune reported.

'Novartis is trying to shut down the pharmacy of the developing world,' Doctors Without Borders` Campaign for Access to Essential Medicine Medical Director Unni Karunakara said at a New Delhi news conference.

'Indian drugs form the backbone of our AIDS programs in which 80,000 people in over 30 counties receive treatment,' he said. 'Over 80 percent of the medicines we use to treat AIDS come from India.'

Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam International have collected nearly 250,000 signatures on a petition asking Novartis to drop the case.

A 2005 Indian patent law lets patents be granted on new versions of older drugs whose patents have expired if the new version can be shown to represent a significant improvement on the original."

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Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition

"The 'cunning of recognition', as Elizabeth Povinelli describes this maneuver of power, does not refuse to recognize past atrocities committed by the liberal state, but acknowledges the horror of these actions--e.g., slavery, genocide, segregation, and apartheid--in order to secure and reinvigorate the future of the liberal nation-state and its core values (Povinelli 2002: 29). In short, liberal forms of multi-culturalism use national rituals of apology for the past mistreatment of subordinated and oppressed members of society not to transfer power or to change society but to re-create the national form.

Racial reforms--from attempts at reconciliation in Australia, to civil rights in the US, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa--function as narratives of national redemption, maintaining (and sometimes inventing) racial cleavages along the way (see Dominguez 1994). What surprise, then, that 'racial reform' has overlapped--if not conspired--with neo-conservative assaults on the welfare state that have gutted the very institutions that were supposed to remedy these inequalities (Baca 2004; see Prashad in this issue). Such co-existence of racial reform with the deepening of racial and class inequality is not as anomalous as some commentators suggest (e.g., Holt 2000: 5-7). Instead, the manner in which racial reforms complement racializing discourse illustrates the politics of nationalism, which requires that we theorize the relationship between the racist content of neo-liberal reforms and the rise of multi-culturalism (Baca 2003)."

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Platini

"The French midfielder has never strayed too far from my thoughts where football is concerned, because he was the most beautiful player I ever saw in the flesh; yes, more beautiful even than Johan Cruyff, Zinédine Zidane or George Best. And although beauty may not save the world, it certainly makes life worth living."

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tick tock tick tock

Mr Bush, in an interview with National Public Radio, said yesterday: "If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq to the detriment of our troops and/or innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly."

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Ishmael

saw it on sweetrastachild

have you ever read ishmael?

Brass festival goes dancehall

changing times

"Brass Festival, as it is traditionally known has been expanded in the 2007 edition to make room for Jamaican dancehall stars Richie Spice and Elephant Man. The latter is due to perform with double Road March winner and reigning Soca Monarch Shurwayne Winchester with whom he has released a special track for the Carnival period. Winchester and his band Traffik will also deliver a full-length concert set at the fete which is this year celebrating, its eighteenth anniversary."

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Jacques Mayol

"A French national born in Shanghais China in 1927, Jacques Mayol was known as the ‘Dolphin Man’ due to his underwater exploits in the field of free diving along with the special relationships he developed with dolphins.

Mayol’s fascination with the sea arose from a close friendship with a dolphin named Clown at the Seaquarium in Miami, Florida, where he was sent from Radio Canada as a journalist to both research an article and produce an audio piece. The director of Programs and Events at the Seaquarium invited him to stay. Mayol accepted and began working on the maintenance of the tanks and the dietary concerns of the various marine creatures. At the same time, he was also given permission to dive in the big tank with all of the dolphins including one destined to become his special friend, Clown.

Clown taught Mayol how to hold his breath longer on every dive, how to behave underwater, and how to integrate himself with the water totally and finally, how to laugh inside. Thanks to these lessons, he also integrated the powers of Yoga and Oriental philosophies with his dive skills, disciplines he first became aware of while growing up in Japan. This emotional and psychological discipline opened the path that led to his record setting 100 meter dive."

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Classic: Liverpool 9 - Palace 0

Trinidad: Four killed to stop cops from testifying

"The cold-blooded murders of Woman Police Constable Elizabeth Sutherland, her husband Ivan and daughter Anika was a warning to all police officers involved in various matters against a known gang leader and his relatives.

Police sources said yesterday that the execution of the Sutherlands and family friend Kevin Serrette on Monday night was a message to officers who had testified in matters against the gang: "Testify against us and die."

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Does Bush even care?

"The war's costs to our nation have been staggering," he said. "Financially. The damage to our reputation around the world. The lost opportunities to defeat the forces of international terrorism, and especially the precious blood of our citizens who have stepped forward to serve."

Then Mr Webb went for the jugular, calling on Mr Bush to embark on a new programme of diplomacy to try to bring the war to an end. "The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military," he said. "We need a new direction."

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Grrrrrrrrrr

Put him on the stand!

Maybe its more bacchanal for many, but for me i think its well passed time that Prime Minister Manning was cross-examined in court. He rules with little scrutiny and is able to destroy characters with little evidence that stands by itself. Manning's decision to impeach Sharma was murky to say the least. I doubt his appearance in court will change much, Manning already has too much power, however it will make his dirty laundry more public. booo to manning. he smells.

read about the issue here

Liverpool beat Chelsea!

Oh yeah!

Liverpool 2 - 0 Chelsea
Uploaded by FootballHeaven

Read better

"I have tried to make a case for the special role of writer-critics, as it is in my interest to do. There is a suspicion that writers who become critics retain too much of the sentiment and mysticism of their craft to be capable of real critical thought - maybe I am evidence of that. But Roland Barthes is a good exception to that rule; he had both a sensuous understanding of the creative artist and an unimpeachable critical skill. Most of all, he understood that the critic's job is a non-cynical truth-seeking exercise, deeply connected to the critic's own beliefs, values and failures. "Each critic," he says, "chooses his necessary language, in accordance with a certain existential pattern, as the means of exercising an intellectual function which is his, and his alone ... he puts into the operation his 'deepest self', that is, his preferences, pleasures, resistances, and obsessions."

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Borat at the golden globes

"This movie was a life-changing experience," Cohen said. "I saw some amazing, beautiful, invigorating parts of America, but I saw some dark parts of America, an ugly side of America, a side of America that rarely sees the light of day. I refer of course to the anus and testicles of my co-star, Ken Davitian."

The fat one sat at his table watching the skinny one and swigging from a bottle of wine. "Ken, when I was in that scene and I stared down and saw your two wrinkled golden globes on my chin, I thought to myself, 'I'd better win a bloody award for this'."

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Walking

Ian Smart on Slavery

"William's work shows that the British moved early in the nineteenth century to abolish first the slave trade and then the hateful institution itself not for humanitarian considerations but purely for economic reasons. The British mercantile capitalists, who had generated immense wealth through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the triangular trade, and the plantation economy, had fallen from grace at home. The new power brokers were the capitalists who controlled the Indian subcontinent. There was no need for slavery in that region of the globe, where dirt cheap and very expendable 'free' labour abounded."

from 'Willie Lynch to the World Trade Center'

MIT Open course ware

Lecture notes, reading lists, discussion aids - MIT has put loads of their courses online. The resource is phenomenal. use or just peruse. Well worth a visit.

Fail better

Throughly interesting piece by Zadie Smith (ex-Hampstead girl too) on failing to write

"Map of disappointments - Nabokov would call that a good title for a bad novel. It strikes me as a suitable guide to the land where writers live, a country I imagine as mostly beach, with hopeful writers standing on the shoreline while their perfect novels pile up, over on the opposite coast, out of reach. Thrusting out of the shoreline are hundreds of piers, or "disappointed bridges", as Joyce called them. Most writers, most of the time, get wet. Why they get wet is of little interest to critics or readers, who can only judge the soggy novel in front of them. But for the people who write novels, what it takes to walk the pier and get to the other side is, to say the least, a matter of some importance. To writers, writing well is not simply a matter of skill, but a question of character. What does it take, after all, to write well? What personal qualities does it require? What personal resources does a bad writer lack? In most areas of human endeavour we are not shy of making these connections between personality and capacity. Why do we never talk about these things when we talk about books?"

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she loves me, she loves me not

here we go again

New years resolution:

hmmm, still thinking,

but more sun, friends and family in my life seems like a good one.

Lets start this blogging thing over again...

Alice Walker

"Walker has no intention of retiring but tells me that, "In the tradition of the world when people reach their 60s, they withdraw. They become sages ... In South Korea they believe that when you turn 60, you've become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness and people should leave you alone and I just think that that's the height of intelligence. It's about strategically understanding that you need to retreat."

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Arundhati Roy

"For all these reasons it is critical that we consider carefully the strange, sad and utterly sinister story of the December 13 attack. It tells us a great deal about the way the world's largest "democracy" really works. It connects the biggest things to the smallest. It traces the pathways that connect what happens in the shadowy grottoes of our police stations to what goes on in the snowy streets of Paradise Valley, and from there to the malign furies that bring nations to the brink of nuclear war. It raises specific questions that deserve specific, and not ideological or rhetorical, answers. What hangs in the balance is far more than the fate of one man."

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Liverpool FC

"Liverpool was one of the few clubs originally formed as a commercial venture. John Houlding, a brewer, was left with an empty Anfield in 1892 after Everton left protesting about the rent. He hired 11 Scots, all professionals, the "team of Macs," to fill Anfield and make money.

Critics of modern football's turbo-capitalism look to an ideal where clubs are member-owned and the money is shared more evenly. Liverpool fans are more immediately concerned not to fall further behind Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal and so far they appear persuaded that their heritage is not being sold. This was poetically expressed last week by one fan on the Red All Over the Land fanzine website:

"If you think old Shanks'd be turning in his grave, think again, get a grip lad, you're wrong. Behave!"

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Scooby snacks

Social Business

The Nobel Lecture given by The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 2006, Muhammad Yunus (Oslo, December 10, 2006)

An excerpt:

"By defining "entrepreneur" in a broader way we can change the character of capitalism radically, and solve many of the unresolved social and economic problems within the scope of the free market. Let us suppose an entrepreneur, instead of having a single source of motivation (such as, maximizing profit), now has two sources of motivation, which are mutually exclusive, but equally compelling a) maximization of profit and b) doing good to people and the world.

Each type of motivation will lead to a separate kind of business. Let us call the first type of business a profit-maximizing business, and the second type of business as social business.

Social business will be a new kind of business introduced in the market place with the objective of making a difference in the world. Investors in the social business could get back their investment, but will not take any dividend from the company. Profit would be ploughed back into the company to expand its outreach and improve the quality of its product or service. A social business will be a non-loss, non-dividend company.

Once social business is recognized in law, many existing companies will come forward to create social businesses in addition to their foundation activities. Many activists from the non-profit sector will also find this an attractive option. Unlike the non-profit sector where one needs to collect donations to keep activities going, a social business will be self-sustaining and create surplus for expansion since it is a non-loss enterprise. Social business will go into a new type of capital market of its own, to raise capital.

Young people all around the world, particularly in rich countries, will find the concept of social business very appealing since it will give them a challenge to make a difference by using their creative talent. Many young people today feel frustrated because they cannot see any worthy challenge, which excites them, within the present capitalist world. Socialism gave them a dream to fight for. Young people dream about creating a perfect world of their own."

Now that's a goal!

Microfinance

'we must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time to come. I believe that putting resources into improving the lives of the poor people is a better strategy than spending it on guns.'
- Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Movement micro-banking system and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner

Class warfare

below is a long article but its worth reading. it is a prime example of the way global capitalism dispossessess the lands, rights and resources of local people in order to increase accumulation of capital for a silent ruling class who already make and are in total control of loads of cash and power. David Harvey calls it 'accumulation by disspossesion.' Anyone that tells me class oppression and warfare is dead doesnt understand how it never went away. Who works? Who sells their labour to survive? Who owns the means of production, the companies, the media, the industries that make money? Class politics is right infront of our noses but we call it inequality or believe the markets will balance it out. Im not saying we all need to be marxists, because i'm certainly not and ultimately Marx's got lots wrong. But the way the world exists today is not to benefit all, or even to make it bearable for most, its about making profits for a small group who have too much money for their own good. The mobility of the middle classes misleads us all into believing everyone has a chance if they work hard. Think about that because it isn't a reality. Nor should forcing an aluminium smelter on people be one either.

anyways: Trinidad vs Smelter
From www.foodetcetera.com (i know food! weird.)

On December 6th, Trinidadians were experiencing an unusual event, a government symposium on aluminum smelters, or more appropriately "all the government will ever allow you to know about smelting"

As expected, the foreign "Aluminum Experts" brought in by pro aluminium forces all sung the praises of smelters and told us how well everything worked out in South Africa or Norway while our local economists, environmental and social experts continued sounding strong warnings against rushing into this kind of development.

We were treated to 8 hours of speeches from "Aluminum Experts" like newly appointed Energy Minister Lenny Saith (the old one is up on corruption charges!) and his brother NEC head honcho Prakash Saith and some imported experts like Alcoa's very own 'medical expert' Dr. Taiwo.

In case you couldn't stay awake through the entire 8 hours, here is what we learned on from all of the 'expert testimony':

None of the paid aluminum experts could make a clear point as to why it is so necessary that Trinidad needs to have Aluminum smelters. They tried to convince us of economic benefits with very little mention of true dollars and cents flowing into the pockets of the average Trinidadian. They tried to convince us that there's no risk to our health and our environment which was quickly countered with a long list of tons and tons of toxic emissions that we can expect from the smelters.

We learned that the smelters planned in Trinidad would be able to supply about 4 months worth of the world's demand of aluminum. That would explain why that both Alutrint and Alcoa are already hinting on doubling the capacity of the smelter in the future.

On the subject of health, we are probably more confused than ever. While one 'energy expert' cites a Norwegian study showing that there was no cancer risk, the next expert quoted a study from the same country showing, yes there was an increased cancer risk. I guess it just depends on who funds your study.

Another revelation that we found interesting was the statement from Prakash Saith that each one of the ten Ammonia Plants we currently have on this Island consumes half a million gallons of water a day, the six or so Methanol plants consume a million gallons each.

So, if you're still wondering why you have six water tanks in the back of your house and your pipe is still dry several days a week, here is your answer.

While on the subject of water, it was also revealed that the government had also already imported pipelines to supply more water to the new industrial estates and the smelters. Yes, the smelters that have NOT been approved by the EMA yet. Chatham is not even approved for an industrial estate but still zoned as agricultural land, but the pipes are here, my dear friends! Do not look for any more water in your pipes anytime soon, we are piping it to the smelters instead. For all you living abroad, only 26% of Trinidadians have a regular water supply.

Aluminum Industry experts like Colin Pratt warned us that we should not assume automatically that downstream opportunities will develop or be successful just because we are building smelters. There has to be proper planning and development of downstream industries and there has to be a market.

In South Africa, we've been told that crime and HIV rates increased in the
area where the smelter was built. We also learnt that short term contracts (temporary construction jobs) results in low term debt (as people shop on credit beyond their means).

Our local experts from the University of the West Indies presented studies that also showed that industrial areas in Trinidad like Pt. Fortin and Pt. Lisas are historically suffering from higher unemployment and poverty rates. For instance, Atlantic LNG in Pt. Fortin, they showed created mainly low income employment. The economists showed low level job creation is not worth the substantial invasion. Trinidad's massive investment of 15 billion dollars in the energy industry generates less than 4% of the employment in the country. All is not well in our industrial wonderland.

We were warned that the Alcoa smelter will have to be subsidized (something even Dr. Saith confirmed) and each one of the 1,000 jobs at Alcoa may come at a price tag of 400,000 dollars that we, the tax payers have to come up with, according to the UWI study group.

Mr. Goddard, the representative of the EMA confirmed that there are concerns about the carrying capacity of the Island, how much industrial pollution the environment can absorb. He simply stated that that maximum safe carrying capacity may have already been reached. He also mentioned that the proposed port is a major concern to the EMA. That port requires a 4 km dredge channel on a coastline that is already under threat.

And there is still no information on the secret agreements signed between Alcoa and the Government. Radio host Anil Roberts asked Prakash Saith "what is the price of gas promised to Alcoa in the agreement?"

Prakash Saith demonstrated that he seemed to have taken lessons in not answering questions from the master of avoidance, Wade Hughes of Alcoa. He answered "no price of gas is mentioned in the M.O.U."

And he is technically correct of course, the M.O.U. specifies a supply of electricity, not the gas to generate that electricity. In Trinidad, electricity generation is a regulated industry and only T&TEC can legally generate and sell electricity. Alcoa cannot build a power plant and generate power for their smelter.

Good old Prakash dropped another Alcoa-ism on Mr. Aboud later. When asked, "are you the chairman of the NEC?" he answered, "no" Well, OK, he is the President of the NEC.

Dr. Taiwo, Alcoa's resident African smelter doctor also went on to assure us how all these smelter health risks can be "managed" these days. He explained that there was a necessity for the Alcoa smelter to have a buffer zone to manage exposure to the population. So, why is there no buffer zone at the Alutrint smelter?

But thank God for Prof. Julian Kenny. As a 'simple biologist', he was able to explain to everybody in the room how illegal, irregular and irresponsible this whole smelter deal really is. To anybody who videotaped Dr. Kenny's presentation, please make copies and give it to your friends.

You can also download the text of his presentation in PDF format at this location: http://www.stcic.org/symposium/Julien%20Kenny.pdf At the Chamber website www.stcic.org, you can also download copies of the presentations of the other featured presenters. The web site however does not list the comments of the expert panel or the audience questions and responses.

The record also got set straight on the point that the late Dr. Eric Williams had envisioned a aluminum smelter in Trinidad. The reality is that Dr. Eric Williams envisioned a regional aluminum industry in competition with Alcoa. He had no plans of selling out our land to a foreign corporation like Alcoa for their own enrichment. Quite a different story than what is proposed by NEC, Alcoa and Alutrint.

One of the highlights of the TV broadcast carried by CCN TV6 was actually a public service announcement showing the virtues of the rainforest (yes, the same rainforest that Alcoa would like to bulldoze for their smelter) The programme showed that rainforests produce many medicines against many illnesses such as cancer, asthma, respiratory illnesses and more, yes, the same illnesses that are associated with the emissions of aluminium smelters. Well, isn't that ironic?

Our Rain Forests are also essential in helping reduce global warming and the greenhouse effect, the same greenhouse effect Alcoa's smelter will contribute to so heavily with as much CO2 from their smelter as 300,000 cars would produce. More Irony? Yes!

Our general conclusion is that this symposium has raised more questions and concerns than ever about establishing aluminum industry in Trinidad. It also raised more than enough questions about the industries that are already there and it has probably convinced more people than ever that the population need to be heard and consulted on this issue and that the unanswered questions in this secret deals have to be answered once and for all.

Yesterday's symposium did not answer these questions, did not shed light (or even heat) on the contents of the secret agreements. Why was Alcoa in the audience instead of on the podium when discussing their smelter? Why do we need secrecy and can't disclose the details agreement made with Alcoa? Where are these gas supplies located that can power the smelters for the next 20, 30 or 50 years? What then?

Friendship and madness

"Deleuze hypothesises that in order to form the basis for friendship with someone, each of us is apt to seize on a certain indication of an individual's charm, for example, in a gesture, a touch, an expression of modesty or a thought (even before that thought has become meaningful). In other words, friendship can result from perception of the charm that individuals emit and through which we sense that another suits us, might offer us something, might open and awaken us. And a person actually reveals his or her charm through a kind of démence or madness, Deleuze says, a certain kind of becoming-unhinged provides the impulse for friendship."

from Gilles Deleuze: key concepts

Feeble England ruin series

"What a waste. A decent Test series was developing over the first four days but it was ruined by two sessions of England negativity. In the winning corner was Australia, whose only weakness is not knowing when to stop attacking. Then there was England. Sad, sorry, insipid England."

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The Origin of language

"language as the foundation of the human community must have arisen in a collective event where mimetic tension is intensified by the multiplicity of the participants. The object desired by all members of the group—say, the carcass of a large animal brought down by a hunting party—becomes the center of a circle surrounded by peripheral individuals who act as the mediators of each other's desire. The originary sign provides the solution to or, more precisely, the deferral of a "mimetic crisis" in which the group's very existence is menaced by the potential violence of rivalry over the central object. The emission of the first sign is the founding event of the human community."

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Foucault

"No, I don't have the least belief that one could consider our society democratic. [Laughs.] If one understands by democracy the effective exercise of power by a population which is neither divided nor hierarchically ordered in classes, it is quite clear that we are very far from democracy. It is only too clear that we are living under a regime of a dictatorship of class, of a power of class which imposes itself by violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional; and to that degree, there isn't any question of democracy for us."

Foucault vs Chomsky 1971

or video of it here

Watch until the end

A funny and smart response to Kramer and the racists at the Fox network

How Cocaine is Made

And why its a nasty drug