NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Since the start of the year I have been working on an article about militarization in the Marianas Islands. It is for a special edition of Micronesian Educator edited by Tiara Na'puti and Lisa Natividad. I'm excited at the prospect of writing it, but my schedule over the past year has been tough, in addition to family drama and other setbacks. I've been coming back and forth to it in my notebooks every month, but until now I haven't been able to really try to finish it. I spent Christmas Day typing up my scattered notes and drafts. The article is an attempt to talk about militarization, military increases, military strategy in a Marianas wide context, and the ways it divides, unities, takes and stimulates. One of the most interesting sections is on the CIA training that took place in Saipan from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The facility was known as the Naval Technical Training Unit or NTTU and it trained anti-communist operatives to destabilize and sabotage r

The start of each UN Committee of 24 Regional Seminar usually begins with a type of plenary or keynote speech/statement. This is usually a prominent political leader or activist from the country or region that is hosting the seminar or a high-ranking elected official of the host government. As this year's seminar is in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, attendees were treated to a speech by the country's Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves. His speech moved in and out of a variety of different topics, although there was one part that struck closest to home for me. Early on in his remarks he discussed his country achieving their independence almost 40 years earlier. He said that while he was a child raised in colonialism, he had grown into maturity through fighting for independence. For many countries, the birth of their nationhood is far in the past and so those who invoke it, do so across great temporal and rhetorical distance. But for a variety of former colonies, your independence

Comedian Samantha Bee bid a fond "adios" to the campaign of Ted Cruz on her show Full Frontal last week. I said "fond" not because of her affecting for Cruz as a politician or what he stood for, but rather because Cruz had been such an incredible mine for political humor. As evidence of this, even in his departure, she was able to tweet at him and mock him in one of the most incisive ways I've ever seen in less than 144 characters. See the tweet below. Ai gof tahdong na tinekcha' enao. Ha botleleha i baba na hinengge-ña yan i gef annok na ti maguaiya gui' gi patidå-ña achagigu. As she said adios on her show, she rattled off a list of the gof na'chalek nicknames that she had given Cruz, which still make me laugh even after hearing them several times. Here is the list, with the video below: "Born Again Tyler Durden" "Princeton's Unwanted Fetus" "Fist-Faced Horse-Shit Salesman" "The World's On

One of my favorite lectures to give in my World History 2 class is the one on Haiti. Especially since the earthquake there earlier this year, I find it truly important to break the silence that surrounds Haiti and its revolutionary history. I was appalled at how through months of coverage over Haiti by media in the United States, the narrative was always the same, tragedy in a third world country. Collapse in a place where collapse and disaster is a way of life. The valiant efforts by the first world in recognizing that suffering and taking steps to alleviate it, to help those helpless souls. Given the scent of human suffering its understandable that they take this angle, but what was left out of their coverage, the historical aspects was also expected but still nonetheless horrifying to watch (or rather to not watch). The media's purpose in this case was to help the people of the US "discover" Haiti. the concept of discovery is always interesting. It has the aura of lea

An email from Michael Moore, along with some Youtube videos about his new movie " Sicko." Gof malago yu' bei egga' este na kachido! Ti sina hu nangga esta ki malangu yu' nu este na kachido! ************************ "Sicko" Is Completed and We're Off to Cannes! May 17, 2007 Friends, It's a wrap! My new film, "Sicko," is all done and will have its world premiere this Saturday night at the Cannes Film Festival. As with "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," we are honored to have been chosen by this prestigious festival to screen our work there. My intention was to keep "Sicko" under wraps and show it to virtually no one before its premiere in Cannes. That is what I have done and, as you may have noticed if you are a recipient of my infrequent Internet letters, I have been very silent about what I've been up to. In part, that's because I was working very hard to complete the film. But