'Why Ed Miliband (and almost everyone else) defended Nigel Farage as "not-racist"' - JustinTheLibSoc on form, as ever

Kara Walker in conversation with her father, Larry Walker (h/t: AS)

massive MASSIVE tune

Taylor Parkes on Britpop, 20 years after

(h/t: JH)

About a year and a half ago I was mugged (in a public place in the middle of Adelaide on a Wednesday afternoon). Two white teenage males snatched my handbag and left me with a sprained wrist, several bruises and feeling very shaken. When giving my statement to the police the first thing they asked me was to describe the men, were they ‘Abos’, Africans, Arabs or Asians? When I replied that they were white I was asked if I was sure.
(via.)

I dropped into the Mitchell Centre [shopping mall in the City centre] to get something for lunch. It was busy as usual. I was walking down the main ‘mall’ section toward the supermarket. There was a young Aboriginal woman walking ahead of me. A police officer (walking in the opposite direction carrying a plastic bag full of groceries, obviously on his lunch break returning from the same supermarket) stopped her, ‘touching’ her arm to ‘ask’ - “What’s your name?” I didn’t hear her reply but her body language suggested she was certainly intimidated if not frightened. The cop then replied (as if frivolously), “Just checking.” And he carried on walking. All in one stride.
(via.)

For my very dear pal Q, who has shown me a lot of importance down the years, and taught me much

Kurdish musician Yabroni and one of his three daughters (i do not know her name). Father, daughter, and her two sisters all now live in the refugee camp at Harmanli in Bulgaria, having fled their native Al-Hasakah in Syria. (Credit to YouTube user Krassimir Yankov for the upload.)

The World Bank defines extreme poverty, as someone getting by on less than US$1.25 a day. This sounds arbitrary but it’s a baseline. Put aside, for a moment, valid debates about monetised baselines as the paradigm for measuring affliction in this world ruled by economists (and how human development seems to necessarily entail the scouring of our finite planet, and how this is all caught up in fundamentally unjust relations of power in a white supremacist world structured by European-authored imperialism).

The number of extremely poor is currently about 1.2 billion people, says the Bank: nearly one in five human beings.

Anyway, this chart has been doing the rounds as the Bank released a report last week. One in three very poor people (by this measurement) are in India, with its overall population of about 1.2 billion people. The DR Congo sticks out of the countries doing the worst in per head terms, though, if you consider its population; and Tanzania, really. China’s population is about 1.3 billion, Nigeria about 177 million, Bangladesh about 166 million. The DRC’s population is about 77 million and Tanzania about 50 million. (Pakistan’s population is about 196 million currently, Indonesia’s maybe 253 million, and Ethiopia’s about 96 million, whilst Kenya’s is a somewhat more modest 45 million or so. These population estimates for mostly mid-2014 were lifted from the CIA factbook.)

Their going looked like a disaster

'If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything'

In August-September 2005, during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the worst flooded area of “Central City” was, at 4,687 km², [inhabitants / sq km] the city’s largest population density and on the site of a former lake at 1.5 metres below sea level (New Orleans Community Data Center, 2005). The majority of inhabitants were low-income and black, an ethnic minority in the USA with a long history of disadvantage, which added to an already rich melting pot of vulnerability. Social, including political and economic, forces had obliged disadvantaged communities to occupy the most vulnerable areas of a vulnerable city. Those same forces created and perpetuated poverty, which enmeshed in this vulnerability and led to characteristics of place that were, to some degree, defined not just by the people and their poverty, but also by the fact that the people and their poverty developed according to the characteristics of the place. These characteristics of place were further defined by people in other, less poor places, who enjoyed the national advantages of New Orleans’ port and culture without concern for the consequences for other people living in the same city.

from here.

I am beginning with the young. We older ones are used up.

- Adolf Hitler.

Fuck that. Turn the music back up.

RIP Jordan Davis, 1995-2012.

Colin Ward died four years ago today. There's a short interview with libcom's Rob Ray here in Colin's home village of Debenham, Suffolk. (via Will.)

SMH environment editor Peter Hannam writes "2013 Australia's hottest year on record"

Professor Pitman said 2013's likely rank as the world's fourth hottest year is more remarkable because the most significant driver of climate variation - the El Nino-Southern Oscillation in the Pacific - remains in neutral mode.

here

23 degrees Celsius in Melbourne in July

(h/t Bill McKibben on Twitter.)

Like the discipline of slavery, the murders and assaults of the postemancipation South convinced most African Americans to follow racial etiquette most of the time. They accommodated whites' expectations at least enough to stay alive in a hair-trigger environment, an environment in which black life remained cheap and unprotected despite economic development and other changes in the region between Reconstruction and World War II. But accommodation was not the same thing as acquiescence.

- p.47, Growing up Jim Crow (2006), Jennifer Ritterhouse

once childhood is seen as a racialized, gendered and classed position, the notion of childhood as having the possibility of being innocent, in the sense of existing outside of the symbolic and material nexus of political economy, has to be abandoned entirely.

- Karen Wells, 2009

"Exploiting tax-increment financing, City Hall ratified the same principle for Downtown: fiscal windfalls from the appreciation of publicly-subsidized real-estate were ploughed right back into further redevelopment. These fiscal closed circuits sustained high levels of public investment in container docks, terminal buildings, and downtown bank skyscrapers that, in turn, kept happy a huge constituency of pro-globalization interests, including airlines, stevedoring companies, railroads, aerospace exporters, hotels, construction unions, downtown landowners, the Los Angeles Times, Japanese banks, Westside movie studios, big law firms, and the politicians dependent upon the largesse of all of the above.

But the city was subsidizing globalization without laying any claim on behalf of groups excluded from the direct benefits of international commerce."

- Mike Davis, City of Quartz 2nd edn. preface (2006)

Fortress Europe, 2013.

In infinite varieties, another day on earth.

"a concept of monumental emptiness"

- Wolfgang Sachs on development

"a past of struggle against slavery"

Montserratians now reside with uncertainty as a way of life...the vulnerability they experience, as a result of the natural disaster, is to some degree compounded by wider international and global processes. Montserrat is not alone in this, as Possekel points out: 'development achievements of the SIDS (small island developing states) in the Caribbean are also constantly crushed by natural disasters' (1999: 3).

[...]

All of the countries of the Caribbean, with the exception of the French Caribbean, which are politically and economically part of mainland France, and Cuba, which has followed a distinctive path to a different type of development, are in extremely vulnerable positions vis-à-vis globalization.
- Tracey Skelton, 'Globalizing Forces and Natural Disaster' in Globalization: Theory and Practice, edited by Kofman and Youngs (2003 edition)

- A.K. Possekel Living with the Unexpected: Linking Disaster Recovery to Sustainable Development in Montserrat (Springer, 1999).

Article 26
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

Means-tested benefits, confined to the poor, isolate them so that the rest of society no longer has a real stake in defending and improving what is becoming an increasingly stigmatized system associated with failure

- Ruth Lister, 'Assessment of the Fowler Review' (1989)

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

The underlying reason for the emergence of chaos and Islamist violence in Afghanistan in the 1990s was that the West had, after forcing the Russians to leave in 1989, abandoned interest in or activities related to that country.

Nothing could be further from the truth: far from 'forgetting' or 'abandoning' Afghanistan, the West, in violation of the April 1988 UN agreement on a Soviet withdrawal, continued to arm and finance the rebels and in the end brought down the reforming communist regime. In April 1988 the 'West', i.e. the US, Britain and its allies, Egypt and Pakistan, signed an agreement to stop supplying the Islamist guerrillas in Afghanistan in return for a withdrawal of Soviet forces.
The Soviets left by February 1989, but aid to the guerrillas continued with the intention of forcing a collapse of the communist regime in Kabul. The US at the same time pressed hard for a cutoff in Soviet support for the Afghan regime after their troop withdrawal, but this was not successful until the change of government in Moscow following the failed coup of August 1991; then, in a deal brokered by US Secretary of State James Baker, Moscow cut off all aid to its former ally in Kabul.
The regime of President Najibullah, who had held power since 1987, fell the following April.
-number 54 from Fred Halliday's 100 Myths about the Middle East (SAQI, 2005)

The big loser are working-class Cypriots

writing five years ago, more David Harvey, on the 'right to the city', an idea with a surely global purchase (just off the top of my head, examples from Brazil, India and Pakistan spring to mind).

but also

Is the urbanization of China, then, the primary stabilizer of global capitalism today? The answer has to be a qualified yes. For China is only the epicentre of an urbanization process that has now become genuinely global, partly through the astonishing integration of financial markets that have used their flexibility to debt-finance urban development around the world. The Chinese central bank, for example, has been active in the secondary mortgage market in the US while Goldman Sachs was heavily involved in the surging property market in Mumbai, and Hong Kong capital has invested in Baltimore. In the midst of a flood of impoverished migrants, construction boomed in Johannesburg, Taipei, Moscow, as well as the cities in the core capitalist countries, such as London and Los Angeles. Astonishing if not criminally absurd mega-urbanization projects have emerged in the Middle East in places such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, mopping up the surplus arising from oil wealth in the most conspicuous, socially unjust and environmentally wasteful ways possible.

a structural problem; the world economy must find $1.5tn in new investment opportunities each year, just to sustain growth at normal rates

- central David Harvey figure in this Lenny piece ('David Cameron's very own magic money tree')

still with UK left blogs, good stuff on 'power-blindness' from Chris Dillow here (not entirely sure about point number 1 with just world, mind points 2-4 hit the spot - k-punk's Capitalist Realism, anyone?), riffing on something the estimable paulinlancs over at Though Cowards Flinch came up with: appropriate bouquets for Duncan Weldon and Simon Caulkin, and brickbats for Owen Jones, in that piece.
Dillow's final par., sadly, superb.

and since we're link dumping, Roger Scruton on postmodern Tories here, this via my mates Alice and Jimmy. there's some flannel, and misdirections (on equality defining border control, on regulation, for two), naturally, though at least partly bang on re: the Tories historically defining parameters.

Social protection has acquired its prominent place in the Bank's work programme largely as a result of having to deal with the consequences of economic stabilization and structural adjustment. Far from being self-rectifying under adjustment, as had originally been predicted, poverty and vulnerability were exarcebated in many countries and for many groups.

- Anthony Hall, 'Social Policies in the World Bank' (2007)

covenants without the swords, are but words, and of no strength to a man at all.

- Hobbes

the thing exists and no amount of conceptual restructuring can dissolve it.

- J.P. Nettl

The contemporary configuration of the world into political units, nations, peoples and religious communities results from a global process of carving out empires and spheres of influence through direct military interventions and indirect political meddling in the 'internal' conflicts of states that achieved or conserved political independence from the great powers in the nineteenth century.

- John Gledhill

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, said the Cat.
"I don’t much care where- " said Alice.
Then it doesn’t matter which way you go, said the Cat.
"- so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
Oh, you’re sure to do that, said the Cat, if you only walk long enough.

Yasuni, Ecuador: Huge ecological wealth is at risk

Why so few vegetables in Sri Lanka?

Migrants have become the objects of a new, obsessive field of inquiry, like bird watching, based on research and mapping

Jeremy Harding

the triumph of violence depends upon the production of armaments

- Engels

ICG have a new report, Dynamics of Violence in Papua

The BBC, apparently.

@stavvers @mediocredave lol @ the nazis "corrupting" eugenics fucking hell

— BORG OSBOURNE (@_stux_) August 9, 2012

On a recent summer evening 11-year-old Mazlum Akay left his home in Yüregir, a predominantly Kurdish neighbourhood in the southern Turkish city of Adana, to buy sweets at the local corner shop.

Nearby, clashes had broken out between riot police and local youths demonstrating against the solitary confinement of Kurdish militant leader Abdullah Öcalan...the schoolboy was struck on the head by a police teargas cartridge. Eight days later, on 5 August, Mazlum died from his wounds and became the 501st child killed by Turkish security forces since 1988, according to Turkish human rights organisations.
here

HRW in India: The Maoists and government forces seem to have little in common except a willingness to target civil society activists

Yemen: 'multiple crises'.

The WFP reports that half of Yemen's children are chronically malnourished and that one out of ten does not live to reach the age of five.

THIS

11 yr old girl shot with rubber bullets in Madrid today. Markets perky.
— Gavan Titley (@GavanTitley) July 11, 2012

'An alarmingly high number of children under the age of five are dying in parts of Central African Republic'

'"The results show the mortality rate in the overall population is high, and almost 50 percent of the deaths during the survey period were children," says Till Kinkel, MSF’s health adviser for the Central African Republic. "This tells us that, on average, in this area, almost 200 out of every 1,000 children die before the age of five."'

here

THIS

Overspill from Frank's Café blocked a road in Peckham last night. If that had been black kids or Millwall fans imagine the police reaction.
— Robert Peter Vaughan (@vornstyle) July 1, 2012

(for background)

This piece ('What is progressive about David Cameron?') is from early 2010, but the money quote is especially relevant in a week in the UK in which Tony Blair is hawking himself around, talking up his desire to perhaps become Prime Minister again one day.


The question is how did such claims even become vaguely intelligible? How did 'progress' as a discourse become a byword for reaction? The obvious answer is that New Labour made this possible. On every theme I've mentioned above, every objectionable facet of Tory policy, there is a New Labour counterpart - not exact, and not necessarily as extreme, but very real nonetheless.

At the start of July, the refugee health care programme in Canada will change; cuts to services will affect children and adults - more here.

On Tuesday during a speech in suburban Vancouver, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney (Con, Calgary Southeast) was heckled by protestors who cried Shame at him (there are certainly Canadian doctors against him, incidentally).

Kenney labelled these hecklers "extremists".

So, anyone who disagrees with the minister is now extremist?

couple of quotes to excerpt from the Friday 22nd June 2012 edn of the London Mirror (the only mainstream British newspaper to correctly urge a vote for the Labour party at the last UK general election, as opposed to those who wrongly urged votes for the Tories or the Tory-lite liberals) (source: my copy)

Energy prices differ between regions by up to £92 a year - and some of the highest costs are in unemployment blackspots.
Bills which average £1,373 in Merseyside and North Wales, areas of high unemployment, are £79 less in the South East, says a survey by energyhelpline.com, which has condemned the "cruel irony of the postcode lottery".

and in recent days in the UK the NatWest bank has had some sort of electronic/technical cock-up which means lots of payments due in to people's accounts (wages, for instance) didn't go through for a few days, obviously fucking shit up grievously for many, many NatWest customers.

i thought the following vox-pop - in a week in which the UK government (many of whose senior members are millionaires in their own right) has unveiled plans to withdraw housing benefit for those aged under 25 (!) - says it all.

Bob Spearman, from Petworth, West Sussex, said his tax credit payment had not been paid into his NatWest account.
He said: "We, like many other low-income families, live from week to week and the Child Tax credit weekly payment is a lifeline on which we rely."

THIS.

I will never tire of seeing Andrew Lansley, a *politician*, claim that doctors are self interested, over paid and don't contribute enough.
— M D (@MediocreDave) June 21, 2012

South Tel Aviv: a state of fear for African residents.

When you reap the harvest...do not reap to the very edges of your field...Leave them for the poor and the alien.

Leviticus 23

Quote here from Jonathon Porritt (part of a longer essay discussing the environmental movement, but seems to hold very true for any opponent of this appalling UK coalition govt)

Two years into this Government, it's now clear that if the environment was any further down its list of priorities, it would have fallen off the bottom. Any thought on the part of our NGOs that "working the corridors of power" is still the best way of defending the environment is folly. Regrettable though it may be, it's hard to imagine that this Government is going to be influenced by anything other than unremitting, full-on confrontation.

Just came across this cool graphic on the 21st century African land rush twitter.com/lesley_warner/…
— Lesley Anne Warner (@lesley_warner) June 7, 2012

This is all wrong.

British citizens with foreign-born partners are to be given the choice of indefinite "exile"...or face the breakup of their families if they want to remain in the UK, under radical immigration changes to be announced next week, MPs have been told.

The home secretary, Theresa May, is expected to confirm that she will introduce a new minimum income requirement for a British "sponsor" without children of up to £25,700 a year, and a stringent English speaking test for foreign-born husbands, wives or partners of UK citizens applying to come to live in Britain on a family visa.

Immigration welfare campaigners say that the move will exclude two-thirds of British people – those who have a minimum gross income of under £25,700 a year – from living in the UK as a couple if they marry a non-EU national. They estimate that between 45% and 60% of the 53,000 family visas currently issued each year could fall foul of the new rules.

[...]

The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) has sent MPs a dossier of 13 detailed cases of families who would face serious consequences under the proposals, "to provide a snapshot of the reality of the lives of ordinary British citizens and settled people who want their husbands, wives, civil partners and in some cases children to join them in the UK"...The JCWI says that the dossier shows how the ordinary circumstances of life, such as pregnancy, accidents at work, disability, low pay, poor currency exchange rates and nationality laws in foreign countries could penalise people if the proposals make it into Britain's immigration rules.

The dossier also highlights how an extension of the probationary period for those granted family visas could trap more women in violent marriages and suffering domestic abuse in silence because of the fear of being deported if they complain.

"When, if ever, is it acceptable for British citizens to be placed in a position where they are effectively indefinitely exiled from their own country on account of choosing to have a relationship with a non-European Economic Area national?" asks the JCWI pamphlet, United by Love/Divided by Law?

more here.

Kingston, May 2010.

Jamaican strongman Christopher “Dudus” Coke will face a prison sentence of up to twenty-three years in federal court...at least seventy-three civilians died in the process of getting Coke out of Jamaica and into U.S. custody. At the time, the Jamaican security forces claimed that most of the dead were gunmen who died defending Coke inside the barricaded neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens. But for these seventy-three supposed gunmen, the security forces only recovered six guns. Three of the dead were women. One was a U.S. citizen. Most appear to have been unarmed civilians, rounded up and massacred after the neighborhood was already under control.
Coke has admitted to serious crimes. He barricaded his neighborhood to avoid arrest, and deserves much of the blame for the Tivoli killings. But did seventy-three civilians have to die for the arrest of one drug trafficker, no matter how powerful?
The U.S. government knows, but it isn’t saying.

rest here.

MT @gregorydjohnsen: US "is now taking charge of restructuring (Yemeni) army." bit.ly/M5Y42D // Sweet—our record w/this is awesome.

— Gulliver (@InkSptsGulliver) June 4, 2012

KUWAIT CITY, June 1: An unidentified Asian maid who tried in vain to end her life by jumping from the third floor of her sponsor’s apartment in Maidan Hawalli has been admitted to the intensive care unit of the Mubarak Al-Kabir Hospital, reports Annahar daily.
She is suffering from fractures and bruises all over the body. Police are investigating the incident.

Maid commits suicide: The remains of an unidentified Asian who allegedly committed suicide by hanging herself with a rope inside her sponsor’s home in Qortuba, have been referred to Forensics, reports Al-Rai daily.
The death was reported to the police by the sponsor when he found the corpse hanging from a rope.
The sponsor has been detained for customary interrogation.

source

The extraordinary financial power of an emerging class of super-rich has been revealed in a wealth survey highlighting Britain's poshest postcodes.
One London borough has seen such an influx of the fabulously rich that the average household income there has topped £100,000 for the first time.
As a result, Kensington and Chelsea has been named as the richest borough in the land by far.
The wealth league was compiled by Barclays, whose figures suggest the numbers earning more than £100,000 a year in the UK have rocketed in the past two years from 411,000 to over a million.

Despite Kensington and Chelsea's position at the top of the table, the area has wide extremes of affluence and poverty.
The multi-million pound mansions of Holland Park and fashionable Notting Hill stand in stark contrast to the deprivation of the North Kensington tower blocks.

---

Camberwell and Peckham is a borough constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like other such constituencies, it elects one Member of Parliament (MP), using the first-past-the-post voting system.
It is a safe seat for the Labour Party and the current MP is Harriet Harman, the former Acting Leader of the party and former Leader of the Opposition.

The constituency incorporates the areas of Camberwell, Peckham and Nunhead, in the London Borough of Southwark, together with parts of Walworth, East Dulwich, South Bermondsey and a small part of Rotherhithe. It has the distinction of having a higher proportion of poor people than any other constituency in the country in 2000.

"Apple products have become an essential part of how students learn at Flitch Green Academy, a public elementary/middle school located just outside..."

In today's global economy, innovation is the engine of economic growth.

Kong Cho Ha, 2006

It is amazing to me the degree of inequality that exists without people really getting upset

Warren Buffett

Thousands more unemployed people will be forced to work for free or lose their benefits under controversial plans to be announced by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, as the government is warned its drive to get people back into work appears to be floundering.

The scheme, under which the jobless are obliged to accept an unpaid work placement for a month to keep their benefits, will be "significantly extended" within the next two weeks, according to Whitehall sources.

[...]

The number of people claiming housing benefit has also shot past the five million mark for the first time, with more than 90% of new claimants since the 2010 general election being those in low-paid, part-time work.

here.

Class war is fought downwards.

Everything else is defensive action.

How did genocide denial become a doctrine of the internationalist left?, by George Monbiot

London 2012 Games: wise and true.

Before the end of Time will be the end of History. Before the end of History will be the end of Art.

Hegel

"Translating the printemps érable is a volunteer collective attempting to balance the English media's extremely poor coverage of the student conflict in Québec by translating media that has been published in French into English. These are amateur translations; we have done our best to translate these pieces fairly and coherently, but the final texts may still leave something to be desired."

Visit them here.

(via.)

The reality behind Britain's 'austerity myth'

The Ethiopian sniper who defected from the Ethiopian army base on Friday has embraced Islam. All praise is due to Allah twitter.com/HSMPress/statu…

— HSM Press Office (@HSMPress) May 20, 2012

The world's quite simple really

Peter Ryley on Greece

(yes i am very late to this party)

"Slackk loves house music’s rhythm and grime’s sonics"

September, 2010: Tom Lea writes

Wiley’s ‘Ice Rink’ is pretty hard to describe if you’re not actually Wiley. Those sounds are embedded deep in the consciousness of anyone who ever liked grime, but I couldn’t tell you what they are for the life of me, and Wiley would probably tell you to stay out of it.

Maybe Slackk can. Following the lead of many grime producers, he’s turned to the self-facilitating Bandcamp website to release his new single, an uncompromising refix of ‘Ice Rink’. Wiley’s original fired off those harsh sounds in all directions, but Slackk narrows the track’s focus, taking one of the best tracks ever designed for the cipher and re-jigging it for the dancefloor. It’s a simple change, but the results will knock out a club where it stands.

Q. 

What are the biggest assumptions and misconceptions about dance music that a person writing about it must challenge or at least consider?

"That it's not real music. That it takes no skill. That the musicians are untalented. That it is somehow worth less than other forms of music. That you have to be high to like it. That it's just drug music. That's it's going to be over and dead within a few years. That it's gay music. That it's shallow. That it's just disco for the year 2001 (and we all know "disco sucks")."


Tricia Romano


"That dance music is mindless, that dance fans are not listening closely--a dancer is "listening" with every sinew and muscle and nerve ending in his/her body."


Simon Reynolds


I like dance very much. Dance is an extraordinary thing


Matisse

Rather than take steps to correct the humanitarian crisis created by Alabama’s anti-immigrant law, the state legislature appears poised to pass another law as ill conceived as its predecessor.

Time is running out for the state that passed the nation’s toughest anti-immigrant law. This is the last week of the legislature’s regular session and, astonishingly, the effort to reform the state’s anti-immigrant law – and repair the damage it has done – is being led by the very people responsible for the disaster that is HB 56...Other state legislatures have come to see the Alabama debacle as a cautionary tale of what not to do.

[...]

This so-called “reform” bill is nothing more than window dressing – apparently aimed at appeasing the state’s business leaders even though the majority of small businesses and the state’s farmers will continue to suffer. And, in some areas, the bill actually makes the original law much worse.

SPLC here: the full piece is shocking.

The Sewer Rats.

Oliver Craner, marvellous as ever.

Eric Toussaint: 'Europe Gets Shock Therapy like Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s'

The New York Times yet again last week displayed a disquieting pattern of presenting dead Africans on the front page of its great newspaper, while refusing to present dead Americans in the same fashion...The disturbing photo might seem appropriate - unless one considers that the children killed by, for instance, American drone attacks in Yemen or Pakistan, never receive similar photographic display.

rest here

"The US Labor Department has caved in to Big Agriculture and their allies in Congress to abandon the most vulnerable working children in America...Instead of protecting child farmworkers, the Labor Department will look the other way when children get crushed, suffocated, and poisoned on the job."

An utter fucking disgrace.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me

Orwell

in any case, system collapse does not necessarily lead to progressive outcomes

Jim McGuigan

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality...Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor

- Adam Smith

Mega-rich Formula One showman Bernie Ecclestone is describing the situation in Bahrain as peaceful ahead of the forthcoming F1 race there.

Earlier today BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner reported on what appears to be disturbing new footage of Bahraini police targeting and ransacking a Shia-owned shop.

Perhaps Bernie should read this report from Physicians for Human Rights, which documents '34 reported tear-gas-related deaths in Bahrain since the uprising began a year ago.'

He is 100% right in one important sense, of course.

But what he elides in his remarks are a universe of human suffering and voices.

There can be no friendship between the brave and the effeminate. We are regarded as a cowardly people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we should learn the use of arms.

- Gandhi, 1918

I believe that it could be cut through and made into an island in two days. I do not think this is necessary, however, for these people are very unskilled in arms.

- Christoffa Corombo, son of a weaver from Genoa

The politicians want us to live in 1992, but I don't want to live in 1992.

'Bosnian war 20 years on: peace holds but conflict continues to haunt'

As one respondent put it, 'You have to be twice as good as the men.'

- Gill Dunne, 1996

We do know, finally, what "water-boarding" is, though it is not clear what version of this torture the Americans are applying. There is, for example, the version French policemen and soldiers used on prisoners during the Algerian War, as in this account from Bechir Boumaza, a thirty-one-year-old Algerian interrogated in Paris in 1958:

I was taken off the bar [on which he had been hung and subjected to electric torture] and my guards started their football again [beating and kicking him], perhaps for a quarter hour. Then they led me, still naked and blindfolded, into a neighbouring room on the same floor. I heard: "We'll have to kill him, the bastard." ...dirty water and urine, probably...
From time to time one of them would sit on my back and bear down on my thighs. I could hear the water I threw up fall back into the basin.

[...]

The Latin American version, called el submarino, uses a wooden table, an oil drum filled with water, and a set of hooks...as a Uruguayan army interrogator put it, "There is something more terrifying than pain, and that is the inability to breathe."

- Mark Danner, 2004