whitebeard

Don't curse the darkness, light a candle.

Found in my email. It deserve a look

Dear supporter,

It is now just over two years since my wife, Diane, died and we are closer to changing the law than ever before. Just to recap, my wife had the terminal illness Motor Neurone Disease and wanted to receive medical assistance to die with dignity.  As this is currently against the law in the UK, Diane asked the courts and the Government to allow her this basic human right.  All refused but there is some GOOD NEWS FOR A CHANGE. 

Thanks to your support - a House of Lords Select Committee has been set up to see if law in the UK should be changed.  This is a great opportunity so please help by sending a quick message in support of Patient Choice to the Committee via http://justice4diane.c.topica.com/maacuwHaa8KvUb2ZoBobaeQzaf/

In the past two years, I have met someone very special and begun to get my life back together.  But I will never forget Diane and her campaign.  Too many other people are still suffering unbearably at the end of their lives, so please help by giving just a couple of minutes of you time to send a short message to the committee by 3rd September 2004.  We only have 33 days to change the law and your message really could make a difference.

Once again, thank you for all your help and kind support.

Yours faithfully
Brian Pretty 
Please send a message here
http://justice4diane.c.topica.com/maacuwHaa8KvUb2ZoBobaeQzaf/

Take a look here

posted by: Whitebeard at 13:55 | link | comments |

 

Bloggers are special.

A jumble of slanted, shouting voices have overcome our airwaves, infiltrated our newspapers, filled every corner of our waking lives, and they aren't going to stop. It's affecting all of us. You may have noticed that every argument seems just a little more heated than the last--is it any surprise, when each one of has been listening just a little bit less? It's a sign of more to come.
But now, people are listening to bloggers instead. Blogging is the populist response to the media hegemony: a sea of independent voices.
ChangeThis is aiming to disrupt the media pattern with powerful, rational arguments from leading thinkers. We know that we deserve better than what we've got. We know there's a thoughtful, caring, rational human inside every one of us. We're working with the brightest minds we can find. And we believe that bloggers are crucial to changing the tone of our collective dialogue.
We need you to help us spread the word. And if you've got something to say, we want to help you say it.
To find out more, download our manifesto.
And if you've got a blog, sign up below to get early access to the manifestos we'll be publishing come August.

found here

posted by: Whitebeard at 21:03 | link | comments |

A unified Palestinian leadership

 is urgently needed

By Mustafa Barghouthi
Special to The Daily Star
Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Iraelel's  plan is to turn the Gaza Strip into one big prison ...Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon's plan to continue to build the racist separation wall, which confiscates 58 percent of the West Bank's territory and destroys the prospects of an independent Palestinian state...

This comes along with political traps set in order to paint the Palestinians as being against international law and the United Nations, and to ease Israel's isolation in the wake of the ICJ verdict,...

The current security breakdown does not serve anyone except the enemies of the Palestinian people and those whose only concern is to compete for personal and sectarian gains. What happened in Gaza only expresses the narrowmindedness of those who are busy fighting over positions of power while power itself is in the hands of the Israelis.

The power struggle in Gaza during the current conditions is nothing but a fight for a policeman's role in a prison administered by the Israeli occupation, and this fight in Gaza is being used to distract the Palestinians from their core battle against the separation wall, criminal incursions into Beit Hanoun and the razing of houses in Rafah, Khan Younis and other parts of the Gaza Strip.

Di Mustafa Barghouthi

The article

A glance here

posted by: Whitebeard at 17:53 | link | comments |

Patriot act

“La verdad es —concluye Elena Lappin— que en nombre de la lucha contra el terrorismo (la Ley Patriótica) ha convertido a una democracia libre, abierta, en algo parecido a una fortaleza insular del absurdo kafkiano. Tal vez Kafka fue muy sensato al escribir su novela América sin haberla visitado nunca. Tal vez hoy no le darían visa para entrar”.

Glance here

posted by: Whitebeard at 22:06 | link | comments |

War and mass media against democracy
Interview to Noam Chomsky

Oldenburg: In the discussion about the Gulf War, the German chancellor and the government have been praised for their anti-war attitude, even though Germany allowed US warplanes to overfly German airspace on their way to Iraq and to use NATO infrastructure. Germany also reinforced its own engagement in Afghanistan so that the US could send more of its own troops to Iraq. What do you think were the motives for Germany and other European countries to oppose the US intervention in Iraq?

I don't know enough about Germany to give a serious answer, but it's kind of an interesting question. It is the question that ought to be asked: What were the motives for France and Germany to not go along with the US war? Nobody asks, why Italy agreed to go along, or why Spain agreed. The fact of the matter is that their populations were strongly opposed to this war, in fact, they were more opposed in Italy and Spain than they were in France and Germany. If anybody believed in democracy - unfortunately nobody does - but if anybody believed in democracy, they wouldn't ask this question. There's nothing to ask when a government accepts the same position as the will of the majority of the population, that's what they're supposed to do in a democratic society. But, the question only arises for those who didn't take their orders from Crawford, Texas. You've got some kind of a problem. The ones who disregarded 90 percent of the population and took their orders from the boss, no question. As, to why the German government decided to follow the will of 70 percent of their population, I don't know. But in a democratic society such a question shouldn't come up. They shouldn't have a choice. Yes, that is what they should do or they'd be kicked out.

Oldenburg: Are the differences between "Old Europe" and the US over Iraq an expression of a increasing political and economic rivalry between "Old Europe" and the United States?

The concept of "Old Europe" is kind of interesting for a number of reasons. It was invented by Rumsfeld and then picked up by the world. It is standard in the Western elites. As for the criteria whether a country is in "Old Europe" or in "New Europe," that's very sharp. A country is in "Old Europe" if the government, for whatever reason, took the same position as the vast majority of the population. It's in "New Europe" if it overruled an even bigger majority of the population and took its orders from Washington. "Old Europe" is condemned and "New Europe" is praised and the hope for the future. This is an expression of such hatred for democracy that it's indescribable. And it passed virtually without comment.

The most dramatic case was Turkey. In Turkey 95 percent of the population was opposed to the war and everybody was surprised: By a slim, small vote the parliament voted to go along with 95 percent of the population. Colin Powell immediately told them, they're gonna lose all their aid, Paul Wolfowitz, the great visionary, condemned the Turkish military because they didn't intervene to prevent the government from this horrible mistake. He ordered them to apologize to the United States and recognize that their task is to help America. He's still the great visionary.

Actually, the press reacted quite interestingly. Almost All of them condemned Turkey and, for the first time, they started reporting the Turkish atrocities against the Kurds in the 1990s - they'd never done that before - but, just to show how awful the Turks were for not taking orders they started describing what the Turks had done to the Kurds. Of course, they kept very quiet about the fact that they were able to do this because they got all the military aid from the United States and that this aid went up when the atrocities went up. And, obviously, they (the press) didn't mention that they themselves had been silent about it when they could have stopped it. That never comes up.

...
Potential European independence will be rooted in France and Germany, that's the problem. That's one of the reasons the United States is so interested in EU enlargement. They figure they can dilute the influence of Europe by bringing in those former satellites, which they figure, probably correctly, will be more under US influence. The US wants Turkey in for the same reasons, for the EU to be more under US influence.

The entire interview here

posted by: Whitebeard at 19:29 | link | comments |

I was told

"I was told by some New Zealand sheep farmers that sometimes a particularly smart lamb will learn to undo the latch of a gate, evidently not an uncommon skill, and the sheep farmer then worries that the lamb might teach his less clever companions to do the same."
Masson asked a group of farmers, "What do you with sheep who can undo the latch?"
"We shoot them," came the reply, "so they can't pass on their knowledge."
Found here

Cogitation

"Q. You're married? A. Right. Q. Children? A. Two. Q. How old? A. The boy is two and a half, and the little girl is a year and a half. Q. Obviously, the question comes to my mind... the father of two little kids like that... how can he shoot babies? A. I didn't have the little girl. I just had the little boy at the time. Q. Uh-huh... How do you shoot babies? A. I don't know. It's just one of those things." (Mike Wallace of CBS News interviewing a participant of the US massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. Quoted Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.202)

Here

 

Amira Hass

An exceptionally poignant writer, is Bet Michael - another observant Jew, who has a weekly column at Yediot Aharonot, which enjoys the largest circulation in Israel. What he derives from Judaism and Jewish thought is a deeply moral logic. Sometime during the first year of the current bloodshed he commented about the military and the intelligence boasting that their assessments about Arafat and Arafat's plan to escalate the bloodshed had proven correct. If I am not mistaken, he referred directly to the present Chief of Staff, Moshe Yaalon. He wrote the unforgettable sentence: "He (Yaalon) did not foresee the future. He created this future".
Glance at Monitoring the power

posted by: Whitebeard at 16:54 | link | comments |

Fahrenheit, fahrenheit don't let be B&B quiet! Gran Bretagna: "Fahrenheit 9/11", record di incassi al box office

«Fahrenheit 9/11», il film documentario del regista statunitense Michael Moore, ha battuto ogni record al box office in Gran Bretagna. La coraggiosa satira sull'amministrazione Bush - così la definisce il Guardian - nel primo weekend ha incassato 1,3 milioni di sterline (1,96 milioni di euro). Il documentario che aveva precedentemente stabilito il record di incassi era stato «Bowling for Columbine», sempre di Moore, che aveva incassato 158mila sterline (237mila euro) in un periodo equivalente.

The Guardian, Gran Bretagna [in inglese]

posted by: Whitebeard at 08:23 | link | comments |

"War on terror" is a fraud

and the invasion of Iraq is a crime

The editor of the Daily Mirror, Britain's most famous mass-circulation newspaper, was sacked because he ran the only English-language popular paper to expose the "war on terror" as a fraud and the invasion of Iraq as a crime. He was marked long before the Mirror published the notorious, apparently faked pictures of British troops torturing Iraqi prisoners.

How To Silence An Awkward Newspaper   by John Pilger 

posted by: Whitebeard at 19:29 | link | comments |

 

The Wall and Israel's Aims

If the goal were security, Israel would have built the fence a few km inside its borders. It could then be a mile high, patrolled on both sides by the IDF, mined with nuclear weapons, utterly impenetrable. Perfect security.

Posted by Noam Chomsky at 04:01 PM. Full Post &

Continue reading "The Wall and Israel's Aims"

 

 

posted by: Whitebeard at 09:00 | link | comments |

The International Court of Justice ruled Friday that the major portion of

the barrier Israel is building violates international law.

 

They laugh

 

 

 

http://brasil.indymedia.org/icon/2002/07/230426.gif

posted by: Whitebeard at 23:35 | link | comments |

Against the stupid white men

"62% of the country is female, black or hispanic. What are the chances?"

Courage, american people!

posted by: Whitebeard at 07:31 | link | comments |

The New American Apartheid

Going to Prison Becoming the Norm for Blacks and Latinos
... In fact, while blacks constitute only around 12% of the U.S. population and about 13% of all monthly drug users (and their rate of illegal drug use is roughly the same as for whites), they represent 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession and 74% of those sentenced to prison on drug charges.

One method of measuring the extent of the incarceration of racial minorities is to look at the percent of the adult population incarcerated at least once in their lifetime.  According to a Department of Justice study, in 1970, less than 1 percent of all whites had experienced a term in a federal or state prison, compared to 4.5 percent of all blacks and 1.3 percent of all Latinos.  About 10 years later (1986) whites were still less than 1 percent likely to go to prison, but over 5 percent of blacks and two percent of all Latinos were.  By 2001, the latest estimates available, whites still had a low percent of ever going to prison (1.4%), but almost 9 percent of blacks and over 4 percent of Latinos did.

For white males born in 1974, the chance of going to prison stood at only 2.2 percent, but it was 13.4 percent for black males and 4 percent for Hispanic males. 

The entire article

posted by: Whitebeard at 23:13 | link | comments |

The big boot

of the international community trod on the Palestinian people without even noticing it, as if on an ant.

Two weeks ago, the international community made a shocking declaration.

Giving in to a demand by George Bush, the “Quartet” accepted the “Revised Disengagement Plan” of Ariel Sharon. This means that the United Nations, the European Union, the Russian Federation and the United States confirmed this document. I wonder if any one of the honorable diplomats has read the document with their own eyes.

In the first paragraph of the “plan”, the following words appear: “Israel has come to the conclusion that at present, there is no Palestinian partner with whom it is possible to make progress on a bilateral peace process.”

That is to say, the international community has confirmed that the Palestinian people has no right to take part in the determination of its own fate. Everything will be decided by the Government of Israel alone, with the backing of the United States, whose position will be automatically accepted by the other partners of the “Quartet”.

The European Union with its 25 member-states, the government of the Russian Federation and the organization that represents the entire world have humbly accepted the edict of Bush, the dictator of the world, who is himself a captive of Sharon. Sharon decided long ago that the elected president of the Palestinian people is “irrelevant”, together with the whole Palestinian leadership.

Follows

posted by: Whitebeard at 22:53 | link | comments |

 

 

Forza, Michael

 

posted by: Whitebeard at 19:25 | link | comments |