More essential reads from the past week.
The Politics of Victimization -- Mel Gilles (via Mathew Gross via Jon Husband)
reminds us that it's OK to walk away from bullies and perpetrators of
brutality of every kind. You're not going to change them. "Even if you
do everything right, they’ll hit you anyway. Look at the poor souls who
voted for this nonsense. They are working for six dollars an hour if
they are working at all, their children are dying overseas and
suffering from lack of health care and a depleted environment and a
shoddy education. And they don’t even know they are being hit."
Reminder: Link to the Moving to Canada, eh? blog is on my right sidebar, with some new info.
Peace is not the Same as Justice -- Znet (via Euan Semple)
has the complete text of Arundhati Roy's remarkable and long Sydney
2004 Peace Prize acceptance speech. As long as humanitarian workers
strive merely for 'human rights' in the countries where they do their
good work alongside military and political forces opposed to giving
them justice, they will be viewed with suspicion and even executed as
complicitous. Half a million children have lost their lives in Iraq in
less than a generation, and the Western regimes that propped up Saddam
for so long, and which supported and armed and financed the Shah and
the Taliban and Osama bin Laden when it was convenient have just of
much of their blood on their hands as the despots and terrorists
themselves. "The fire and brimstone of the US election campaign was
about who would make a better 'Commander-in-Chief' and a more effective
manager of the American Empire. Democracy no longer offers voters real
choice." Roy describes the long-standing cozy relationship between
Bechtel, Rumsfeld and Saddam, and the outrageous six billion dollar
lawsuit GE and Bechtel have launched against the government of India
when India refused to honour the fraudulent and despicable Enron
'privatization' contract with India (a contract GE and Bechtel have
bought out). While corporatists sue Iraq for horrendous, crippling
amounts 'owed' to them due to Saddam's deals or Halliburton's wildly
overpriced 'services', the government politicos in their pockets go
around lobbying for European governments to forgive Iraq's debts to
them, so that these inflated corporate accounts can be paid. Roy
explains what peace means "in this savage, corporatized, militarized
world" and concludes "The real tragedy is that most people in the world
are trapped between the horror of a putative peace and the terror of
war. Those are the two sheer cliffs we're hemmed in by." Riveting
reading.
Live simpler, buy wisely, win a Prius
-- Center for a New American Dream offers great links to reducing
consumption and waste and making more intelligent and conscientious
consumer decisions. They also have a contest (open only to Americans,
alas) to select a slogan for their campaign to convince car dealers to
voluntarily improve the fuel efficiency of their vehicles, with the
prize being a very energy-efficient Toyota Prius.
An Annotated Bibliography for Simpler Living
-- The Simple Living Network doesn't try to condense the challenges of
simple, conscientious living into a few articles or checklists. While
there are some free resources on it, what it provides mainly is a
comprehensive, indexed, annotated bibliography of all the books you
should read and study to make this transition in your own life really
happen. [Thanks to Doug Alder for the link]
Save the Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
-- Grist's Amanda Griscom Little (via Salon.com) reports that Bush is
determined to push through his previously-stalled 'energy bill' to
grant billions more in subsidies to his election contributors in the
energy industry, and to ravage what little wilderness his
administration hasn't already destroyed.
Free the Exit Polls
-- Thus far, the major media continue to refuse to release the exit
polls that showed (not just in the morning, but all day long) Kerry
beating Bush by substantial margins in many states that Bush ended up
winning. Statistician Steven Freeman at U.Penn (via Truthout) has
worked with what is available
-- tapes of the exit polls shown on-screen by the major networks and
CNN before they were 'corrected' to conform to the actual election
results -- and concluded that the chances of the exit polls being that
wrong in so many states is 250 million to one. The authors say there
are only two possible explanations: Gross incompetence and deliberate
bias in conducting the exit polls, or massive election fraud. Until the
media cough up the exit poll 'uncorrected' details, we won't know which
it is. [Thanks to R. Dale Asberry for the link]
The always-amazing Tim Dolighan
drew the above cartoon, that appeared today in our community paper. The
toque of the deceased, for those that can't read the small print, says
'Scientist'.
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MADE IN CANADA
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