Category: World

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Obama: brilliant, charismatic, smiling, friendly face of the American Empire.

I just listened to:

Democracy Now

Highlight:

As Obama Visits Afghanistan, Tavis Smiley on Rev. Martin Luther King and His Opposition to the Vietnam War:

AMY GOODMAN: Tavis, let’s go, in your special, your PBS special that’s airing on Wednesday night, to your colleague, our colleague, Cornel West, the professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton University.

CORNEL WEST: Here he was shouting, a voice, prophetic voice in the wilderness, and he knew the sleepwalking was increasing. What he didn’t know was that the sleepwalking would get thicker and thicker during the age of Reagan. And what he didn’t know, that there was a black man on the way to the White House in 2009, and was hoping that there would be some awakening connected to his legacy of focusing on poor people and working people and jobs and homes and studying war, no more, not because a president would be pacifist, because it upset me when I heard my dear brother Barack Obama criticize Martin on the global stage, saying that Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s insights were not useful for a commander-in-chief, because evil exists, as if Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t know about evil.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was fighting terrorism. He was an anti-terrorist who was fighting Jim Crow and James Crow. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew something about evil, more so than many of us, including our beloved president. But he also knew that if you don’t break the cycle of domination and bigotry and hatred and try to exemplify some alternative, then that cycle would be reinforced in such a way that you would be a pro-war president, pro-war citizen, and not giving peace a chance.

….

CORNEL WEST: Well, I think that they’re in very different lanes, and they have very different callings. Barack Obama presently is the brilliant, charismatic, smiling, friendly face of the American Empire. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the courageous, sacrificial, smiling, friendly face that was crushed by the American Empire. The latter is a prophet. The former is politician.

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Hurt Locker, Green Zone – Offensive

I felt conned after seeing Hurt Locker. It seemed unrealistic, to the point of silly. The soldiers may be in the wrong war at the wrong time but they are not that stupid. But it ignores the Iraqis, do they even exist? It totally ignore the US is there killing civilians by the thousands. Obscene. Like the movies Nazis made. Pilger puts it well.

The Oscars con game | SocialistWorker.org:

What nonsense. Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath, high on violence, in somebody else’s country, where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie.

I also saw the The Green Zone. It was not as bad, but bad. Strangely it was attacked and praised for being anti-American. But it’s more subtle than that. For example, (from Wikipedia)

Andrew O’Hagan in The Evening Standard called Green Zone “one of the best war films ever made” because “it does what countless newspaper articles, memoirs, government statements and public inquiries have failed to do when it comes to the war in Iraq: exposed the terrible lies that stood behind the decision of the US and Britain to prosecute the war, and it does so in a way that is dramatically brilliant, morally complex and relentlessly thrilling.”

That is true but for anyone following the actual info coming out from the UN it was always obvious that this was a lie. Did anyone in power actually believe this? I doubt they manufactured false Intel for soldiers, that would be like believing their own lies. The movie gives more credibility to the lie than it deserves, it doth protest too much. As in Avatar, who is the hero of this invasion and its so-called expose? An American boy.

The movie (probably more so the book) Wag the Dog was right onto it, what year was that? 1997

Both these movies need to be seen on the light of such stories as this one from Donna Mulhearn – who went there as a human shield. (see later post)

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Worse than nothing at all

Worse than nothing at all | SocialistWorker.org:

Helen Redmond examines the health care proposals that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party want to push through Congress in the name of “reform.” March 19, 2010

 THE DEMOCRATS’ mad rush to pass health care legislation–any health care legislation, no matter how awful–is center stage in Washington politics. And they got a step closer to their goal this week with the capitulation of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the last of two House Democrats who previously voted against health care “reform” legislation because it doesn’t do enough to actually reform the system.

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Indefensibe truth covered by a layer of lies.

The ambitious comprehensive radical work of Richard Moore.  He starts from his work with software and becomes a something like a marxist.  How come he’s not a Marxist?  His book is called Escaping the Matrix.  The movie too was a great metaphor for the basis / superstructure of society.

Richard’s book on his site, and on Amazon:

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about rkm:

From a systems perspective I was intrigued by a certain oddity: the USA, the world’s leading power, seemed always to be bungling. American foreign and domestic policies frequently resulted in the opposite of their stated objectives. I began to notice that other, unstated objectives were being accomplished instead. These unstated objectives in many cases made perfect geopolitical and economic sense from a Machiavellian perspective—but a sense that would not be publicly defensible. Increasingly, I discounted the interpretive aspects of news reporting, and focused instead on the raw underlying events being chronicled.

I began to perceive a degree of consistency in the behavior of governments, politicians, and institutions, that was far greater than what one would sense from news reports, pundits, and official statements. The rough contours of underlying strategies and goals emerged which made seemingly chaotic phenomenon—such as US foreign policy—not only understandable but rather predictable.

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How to get some sanity

I listen to Democracy Now more than any other news or current affair program. I find it gives me a better picture of the world than I can get from any NZ source. Left, not liberal, not sectarian. Amy Goodman – a hero!

I wish more people would listen to it. I found myself chatting casually about the plight of Haiti over the years because US interference and people though I was espousing conspiracy theory. Ordinary left thinking New Zealanders!

I’ll post up how I listen to Podcasts. The great thing is I walk & listen, good for my body. Good for the dog. Multitasking.

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Manufacturing Depression

Democracy Now! 1 March 2010

There are several stories in this hour long program, one about earthquakes, one about race in a Californian university, and one about depression. The last one tells me what I know as a psychotherapy to be true. Not that antidepressants don’t always work, but that why they work is a big muddle, it could be the placebo effect or just time. And the price for this dubious result is to pathologise millions of people, to get them thinking about the psyche in a medical & unhelpful way.

All for huge profit.

The DSM 5 is a scandal and will make the problem worse!

All part of a 150 year trend… that bit was new to me.

Video of the Depression story on Democracy Now

Every health professional should watch this video, listen to this last story in this episode of Democracy Now, or read the book by Gary Greenberg, Amazon:

Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease

Manufacturing Depression?:

The primary point that Greenberg expressed in the interview is that we are taking a normal human experience and turning it into a disease. He makes it clear that he has no problem with relieving the suffering of depression with drugs, but he questions whether we have turned normal blue moods into a disease in order to justify medicating away sadness.

A satisfying read online is where Greenberg is interviewed on the Well. Quote follows.

Continue reading “Manufacturing Depression”

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This is an interesting take on an interesting article.
And look at the blog title! I am adding some wheight here to my exploration of Phronesis.

I quite like what Cheryl Rofer has to say here, I’d like to read more!

For all that for no good reason at all I think the Empire is doomed. Or maybe a good reason is that there is opposition to it, it is crumbling from within, its addiction to oil is leading it to rock bottom.

Can it complexly adapt? It has a long history of doing just that. But like us all it will die one day.


Phronesisaical: Complexly Adapting Commentators:

Sunday, February 28, 2010 Complexly Adapting Commentators I read Niall Ferguson’s article in Foreign Affairs (subscription required) the other night in dead-tree version, after I had turned my computer off. It looked like shooting fish in a barrel, so I thought about blogging it, but a number of things intervened, and my general feeling of bummed-outness at the level of Ferguson’s argument kept me from doing it.

But Ferguson has a short version of the article in today’s Los Angeles Times, and David Ignatius likes it. DougJ and the Balloon Juice crowd have said most of what I would have. I’d like to add one thing, though. When we physical scientists work up a hypothesis, one of the things we have to show is that it’s the best hypothesis. We have to look around to see if other hypotheses fit the evidence. And there’s another hypothesis beyond Ferguson’s extremely flawed one that predicts societal crashes. If you have a finite amount of investment to support yourself, say your savings for retirement, and if you spend faster than the investment produces income, things will look pretty good for a while, and then will rapidly crash. It’s the inverse of the compound interest effect: you’re using mostly interest for a while, but as you start using capital, you get less interest, and you use more capital, and you fall off a cliff. The money disappears in no time at all. That model implies different causes and remedies than does Ferguson’s, so it would be useful to test both of them against the facts and against whatever they are supposed to be. And, as the Balloon Juice crowd shows, Ferguson doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We’re bound, unfortunately, to hear more stuff like this on complex adaptive systems; they’re part of today’s intellectual hit parade and can be made to explain or support pretty much anything. As we see, the phrase and the excitement Ferguson produces from it appeal to Ignatius. Several of the spot-on BJ comments:

This is an interesting take on an interesting article.

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