Anarchoblogs

I say that because the title of the article---a reference to people equating women with meat---has nothing to do with the actual content of the article. Or at least nothing nearly as sensational as you'd believe. The article is about a change in the stimulus bill that...wait for it....didn't cut contraceptive funding...but instead left contraceptive and family planning under Medicaid where it is

Some pictures are worth more than a thousand words.

Palestinian boy Mohammed Kutkut, 14, right, covers his face as he sits next to the name sign of his killed friend Ahed Qaddas in the Fakhoura boys school in Jebaliya, northern Gaza strip, Saturday, Jan. 24, 2009. Three friends of his class where killed when the Israeli army shelled Jebaliya in the past weeks. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

Also see this Guardian video, where 10-year-old Mona Samouni describes the killings of 48 members of her family.

And a similar video below, but only in Arabic, French and Spanish.

I think there is a lot of confusion outside of the progressive world about this. Howard Zinn has declared that people can't be neutral on a moving train while Michael Parenti has said that reality is political. My guess is that folks read things like this and declare that progressives aren't really independently minded, but that's actually the reverse of what's being said. Looking at the world

The always interesting Robert Darnton has an interesting piece in the New York Review of Books entitled Google & the Future of Books, in which he essentially argues for a reigning of copyrights, combining the ideas of a shorter term (28 years after creation is what Darnton believes is the platonic ideal, as opposed the current 70 years after author's death) with some wishy-washy democratic platitudes that I can't seem to shake much concrete meaning out of.

It's an interesting essay, though he makes a very common mistake, in automatically associating intellectual property rights with free market ideals:

But we, too, cannot sit on the sidelines, as if the market forces can be trusted to operate for the public good. We need to get engaged, to mix it up, and to win back the public's rightful domain.

In a perfectly free market, clearly there would be nobody to enforce intellectual property rights. Though as Boldrin and Levine explain, content creators still have a significant advantage over the imitators, and innovation in an IP-less world doesn't look like it would suffer.

From The Department of Some-of-My-Best-Friends-are-Jewish:

A one-day conference on ‘Justice for Palestine’, scheduled to take place on Thursday, January 29 @ The Theatrette, NSW Parliament House in Macquarie Street, Sydney, was cancelled following the publication of anti-Semitic remarks by the principal organiser, Maqsood Alshams (former Honorary National Coordinator of the ‘Coalition for Justice for Refugees’, currently Project Director with the ‘Asia Pacific Human Rights Institute’). The conference was titled “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, and organised by the Institute and the “Edmund Rice Centre in association with Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning - University of Technology Sydney and Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney”. The cancellation appears to have been triggered by the withdrawal of two speakers — Antony Loewenstein and Peter Manning — and, one assumes, the negative publicity attached to Alshams’ outburst.

Alshams, after having first declared that “Only Me, You and Us together can turn today’s dream into a reality tomorrow. And let us get it done!”, initially defended his right to a private argument (Rights activist apologises for anti-Semitic comments, Erik Jensen, January 28, 2009), but later apologised to the motherf—– bastards. Alshams explained that he was “intoxicated and angry” when he wrote the email messages to Richard Benkin, “a human rights activist based in Chicago” and “Sydney management consultant”, Anna Berger (Rights activist apologises for anti-Semitic comments, Erik Jensen, January 28, 2009).

Speaking of motherf—– Jewish bastards, one rather notorious example is Noam Chomsky. See “Exterminate all the Brutes”: Gaza 2009, chomsky.info, January 19, 2009.

On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.

That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee…

What a bastard.

He’s not alone of course. Antony Lowenstein is a right bastard, and so is the IAJV: Independent Australian Jewish Voices.

On a lighter note, Old Jews Telling Jokes (”A new (old) joke every Tuesday and Thursday!”).

The story about Obama's half-brother in Kenya getting busted for smoking pot has gotten a lot of play, but the Guardian's article is the first I've read where the author had enough sense to ask why rather than just who, what, where, and when:

Although Kenya is strict about drug possession, there does not appear to be any current police campaign to crack down on usage. The officers who arrested George did not disclose why they searched him, although they are often conducted in the hope of extracting a bribe.

And this certainly isn't the first time that George Obama's been used for his fame:

Last year, during the election campaign, the Italian edition of Vanity Fair claimed to have "found" George Obama, after meeting him at his step-grandmother's home in Kogelo, western Kenya. The report claimed - controversially - that he lived on a dollar a month, and that he was ashamed to be an Obama.

While he is poor and lives in ramshackle accommodation, George is in the same position as well over a million other people who live in Nairobi's slums. Before the US presidential election, he said that he saw no reason why Barack Obama should support him financially; he was content with his life and could provide for himself. That did not stop Jerome Corsi, the right-wing US author of The Obama Nation, from travelling to Kenya in the hope of presenting a $1,000 cheque to George. Fortunately for Corsi, whose stunt was unlikely to have gone down well in Huruma, he was quickly deported.

1 February 2009

Lately it’s seemed to me that there’s a growing awareness that in the United States, the core of central authority is rotten. It still stands, but if you tap on it you can hear that it’s hollow.

I’m not just talking about the government, but the foundations of our economy (not the bedrock, which will endure, but those foundations that we gave names like “security” and “credit” and “trust” and we slapped down on the swamp — you can still see bubbles of swamp gas coming up from where they’re sinking). And not just economic institutions, either, but many different central institutions of authority.

Here’s a chilling example. For two decades Marcia Angell was an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine — they might as well call themselves The Prestigious New England Journal of Medicine for how often they are referred to that way. Angell recently wrote an article for The New York Review of Books about rampant corruption and growing conflicts-of-interest in the medical-pharmaceutical establishment. Her conclusion:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines.

Let that sink in.

Also, the news media is dissolving like an autodigesting mushroom — reporting on its own collapse with its last remaining reporters and talking heads. It’s being replaced by a much less-institutional, much less-centralized, much more bottom-up style of reporting, with a different model of trust.

These are just a few examples, and I’m sure you can think of more.

This morning, while reading the descriptions of the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc in Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World, an encouraging metaphor suggested itself to me. I imagined a ripe seed attached to its parent plant, in a tight and populous cluster like that of the cattail for instance. When the stalk dessicates and withers and no longer can maintain a hold on its seeds, the orderly cluster disintegrates and the seeds disperse — a catastrophe! and yet exactly what nature intended, and the only way the individual seeds can fulfil their own destinies.

David Schenck recently gave an introduction to war tax resistance at the SUNY Social Justice Conference. A video of his presentation is available on-line:

Gerald DePyper continues to try to light a tax resistance fire under the American “pro-life” movement and has inaugurated a new web site, Pro-life strike / abortion boycott, with a program for “serious, sacrificial action” in conscientious objection to taxpayer funding of abortion. His opinion:

After over 35 years, the weakness of the pro-life movement seems to be in our comfort level. With few exceptions, pro-life warriors live a fairly comfortable life. But comfortable warriors don’t fight very effectively. Embarking upon a strike or tax resistance movement would dramatically elevate the risks and lower the comfort level. It would require those involved to put their lives and their livelihoods on the line. It would help us to embrace the term “Church Militant”, and truly view ourselves as soldiers in Christ’s army of love.

The strength of our pro-life witness is an important part of what’s at stake. If we fight from a position of comfort, few will care. Likewise, if we pray from a position of comfort, such prayer is cheap. But if we risk our lives and livelihoods, people will notice, and many hearts will be moved. Our words will be more convincing and our prayers more powerful if the cost is dear.

All over the news today are pics of Iraqis with purple fingers who voted, so many different pictures that it's actually become somewhat funny to me. The purple finger thing, the featuring of it, started off as a propaganda device used by the Republicans to try to justify the invasion of Iraq. Because people were able to vote, therefore progress had been made over Saddam Hussein and we were