NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Ti hu egga' i Commander and Chief forum gi NBC yan MSNBC pa'go. Tinane' yu' ni' mamana'na'gue. Hiningok-hu meggai gi internet put håfa masusedi. Ti makopbla si Trump. Machanda si Hillary. Ti nahong i minagahet gi sinangan-ñiha. Lao, impottante nai na ti ta po'lo na parehu este na dos. Ti chumilong i hinasson-ñiha. Ti chumilong i minalate'-ñiha. Buente ti ya-mu i idehå-ña pat i sinangån-ña si Hillary, lao ti puniyon na gaitiningo' gui'. Lao ai adai si Trump. Annok na ti meggai, ti nahong i tiningo'-ña put este na asunto siha. Ti listo gui' para u presidente. ********************** Clinton: No US Ground Troops in Iraq, Syria; Trump: Steal Iraqi Oil by Juan Cole Informed Comment September 8, 2016 The NBC Candidates Forum continued the shameful corporate coverage of the Great American Meltdown that is our election season. That season has given us a Faux Cable News that runs clips of only one side and p

A 2014 study by The Guardian/UK shows that in 50 different colonies/territories since 1860, 88% of the time they chose independence as their option. Very very few chose to become integrated into their colonizer, it was almost natural to seek their own fortune and destiny, even if it might lead to a time of difficulty. The study looked at places such as Samoa, East Timor, Mongolia, Iceland and Iraq. Given the way in which independence is often imagined in places such as Guam that remain colonies today, it is intrigued to see how normal seeking independence was in the past, but how today it feels so fearful. Most people would argue that the resistance that people in Guam feel today is tied to the island being too political immature or the island being too small or too far away from the centers of power. All of these points make some sense, but not enough to really build up the type of fear that people experience when discussing the notion of Guam becoming independent. As the United N

I wrote an entire dissertation about some of the blind spots and forms of hypervisibility that Guam is cloaked in. I based my theoretical framework on the idea that Guam is something that is largely invisible to the world, but also at the same time fairly secure in its identity as something military belonging to the United States. Guam is often regarded as a place that affords the United States strategic flexibility. I built off this to argue that the island's political status, it being a place that flickers in and out of existence on the one hand, but is rarely questioned as being something the US clearly has the right to militarize and control, gave the United States far more than just strategic possibilities, it gave them larger political abilities. Strategic labiality was a phrase I sometimes used, where the ambiguity of the island provides the US with far more than just a small island, a sliver of real estate in the Pacific. My dissertation was easy to write, because of the

My life as the program coordinator for Chamorro Studies means that my life boils down to one exciting project after the next. One thing that I love about Chamorro Studies here at UOG is that while it is an academic program in an academic institution, it is also community driven. So many of the projects that I have taken on over the past year were initiated by people in the community who wanted to have their stories recorded, wanted to have something documented, wanted to see something that is very necessary be created in the community. One project that I am hoping to expand upon in the coming year is the story of the 731st MP Company, which was a National Guard reserve component unit that served in the First Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm. They were the only unit of their type from the Pacific region to be deployed and they served with great distinction. I have been working with their command officer when they were deployed Joseph Hara Salas about telling this story and interviewing

Published on Wednesday, June 5, 2013 by Common Dreams Bradley Manning Is Guilty of “Aiding the Enemy”—If the Enemy Is Democracy by Norman Solomon Pfc. Bradley Manning (Portrait by Robert Shetterly) Of all the charges against Bradley Manning, the most pernicious—and revealing—is “aiding the enemy.” A blogger at  The New Yorker , Amy Davidson, raised a pair of big questions that now loom over the courtroom at Fort Meade and over the entire country: *  “Would it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government?” *  “In that case, who is aiding the enemy—the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?” When the deceptive operation of the warfare state can’t stand the light of day, truth-tellers are a constant hazard. And culpability must stay turned on its head. That’s why accountability was upside-down when the U.S. Army prosecutor laid ou

When I left Guam in 2003 to start graduate school in the states I knew I wanted to research and write about Guam and Chamorros, but wasn't sure what angle to take exactly. My tagline for my research while in grad school was "everything Chamorro, anything Guam" and sometimes "everything Guam and anything Chamorro." Decolonization was something I was becoming more and more interested in in scholarly terms, even if it was something I had already been advocating and working on in an activist context. Would I do something more cultural? Something in your typical social movement, social science way? Would I do a historical project and come up with my bounded bundle of time and go from there? I ended up taking a more philosophical route and I'm grateful that my committee was willing to let me engage in that way. I ended up using my "data" and my evidence in a more philosophical way, or the way that philosophical essays and arti

Published on Monday, February 4, 2013 by TomDispatch.com The Paranoia of the Superrich and Superpowerful Washington’s Dilemma on a “Lost” Planet by Noam Chomsky [This piece is adapted from “Uprisings,” a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire , Noam Chomsky’s new interview book with David Barsamian (with thanks to the publisher, Metropolitan Books). The questions are Barsamian’s, the answers Chomsky’s.] ********************* Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the Middle East as it once had? The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the Western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the Arab Spring is limited, but it’s not insignificant. The Western-controlled dictatorial system is eroding. In fact, it’s been eroding for s

Torture and Zero Dark Thirty   David Bromwich 1/19/13 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/torture-zero-dark-thirty_b_2512767.html  Zero Dark Thirty is a spy thriller about the tracking and killing of Osama Bin Laden. Good police work did it, the film says, and it aims to show what (in the extraordinary circumstances) good police work amounts to. Action movies have been the director Kathryn Bigelow's métier, and Zero Dark Thirty is tense and well-paced. It has the kind of proficiency one associates with, say, The Hunt for Red October . It does not mean to compete with a film like The Battle of Algiers . There is no question here of taking up a complex historical subject and exploring it with a semblance of human depth. Rather, the movie accepts the ready prejudices and fears of its American audience, and builds up pressure for two hours to prepare the thrill and relief at the raid on Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad. The first two hours skip forward s