Friday, January 22, 2010
Saturday, January 2, 2010
What a picture! Kabul.
The link will take you to a closer view which shows the presence of
roads and settlements.
Is there anywhere in the USA comparable to this? It is quite a remarkably
beautiful place.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Friday, January 2, 2009
Free Gaza Movement Actions
Contact info & other stuff about her can be found on her website.
http://www.hedyepstein.com/
Fox 2 News video.
http://www.myfoxstl.com/myfox/pages/InsideFox/Detail?contentId=8172270&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=5.2.1
Some of the articles I have read from the UK & other places suggest that this current conflict was initiated by Israel, not the other way around. There are also vigils being held around town by IOW.
Here also is a petition offered by Ramsey Clark. And thank you to all who can help.
Urgent Appeal for Israel to Immediately Cease Its Murderous Bombing, Siege and Threatened Invasion of Palestinian Gaza!
To: President George W. Bush, President-Elect Barack Obama, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State Designate Hillary Clinton, Vice President Richard Cheney, Vice President-elect Joe Biden, Congressional leaders, U.N. Secretary General Ban, U.N. General Assembly President d'Escoto-Brockmann, members of the U.N. Security Council, U.N. member states, the President, Prime Minister, Cabinet and Opposition leader of Israel, and Major media representatives:
For 60 years, Israel has persecuted the Palestinian people with impunity in defiance of United Nations General Assembly and United Nations Security Council Resolutions, orders of the International Court of Justice, International Law and fundamental human rights.
Throughout the years, Israel has proclaimed itself the victim as it grew richer, more powerful and more violent, while
| URGENT! The International Action Center is mobilizing for demonstrations across the U.S. to stop the attack on Gaza, and we are networking with activists across the globe who are taking to the streets against U.S./Israeli war crimes. To view a roundup of the growing number of international actions, see: http://www.iacenter.org/palestine/gazademos123108. Please consider making an emergency donation at http://www.iacenter.org/donate to help with the costs of organizing and mobilizing. |
A consistent tactic of Israel through all the years has been to divide Palestinians against their most effective organizations. Through most of the recent years Israel has attacked Fatah. Now it is Hamas that Israel attacks. But there is only one Palestinian people and there can be only one Palestinian State. This has been the guiding principle of the PLO. Israel's policy has always been to destroy the possibility of a Palestinian State. Its criminal assault on Hamas is in truth Israel's continuing assault on the possibility of a Palestinian State: divide and conquer.
Now in the waning days of the disastrous Bush Administration, the government of Israel with its Prime Minister under criminal indictment, is testing whether world opinion will permit it to escalate its isolation and impoverishment of Palestine and selective and systematic assassination of Palestinian leadership in Gaza to a genocidal, indiscriminate assault and invasion of Palestinian Gaza, knowing full well its acts will inflame passions throughout the Middle East and Arab and Muslim worlds risking conflict of disastrous magnitude in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, even between India and Pakistan.
Beyond crushing Gaza's capacity to resist and imposing its final solution on Palestinians, Israel is seeking confrontation that will lead to war with the U.S., the European Union, and NATO fighting for Israel against Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan to impair their ability to prevent expansion of Israel's domination of the region while the "only one President at a time" the U.S. has, George W. Bush, will support Israel, finding all fault with Gaza.
In these dangerous and difficult days and hours the undersigned call upon the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, NATO members, and European countries independently, the governments of Asia, foremost China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan, the nations of Africa, and the Americas to demand an immediate ceasefire throughout Israel and Palestine and the assurance of peace. All borders to Gaza, Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, must be opened for humanitarian relief and a complete arms and trade embargo on Israel until it fully complies with all the requirements of permanent peace.
We call upon all the people, the ultimate power in every nation when organized and energized, to take to the streets where they live and demand that their governments do all in their power to cause Israel to stop its war of aggression against Palestine and for all parties to pursue peace and for Israel, the U.S. and other nations who have provided material support for Israel's aggression to be held accountable for the deaths, injuries and damage Israel has inflicted.
We call upon governments and humanitarian agencies to provide all needed emergency relief to Palestine - medical care, food, humanitarian supplies, shelter; and on all the media that truly seeks peace, justice and respect for the equal dignity of every child, woman and man on earth to headline the demand that Israel stop its aggression immediately. All parties must engage in continuous negotiation with all Palestinians until a one state solution is agreed or the state of Palestine as mandated not later than October 1948 in UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (1947) is created, fully implemented, and Palestine thrives.
Sincerely,
Initiated and signed by
Ramsey Clark, winner, 2008 U.N.Human Rights Award and Founder, International Action Center
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Political Compost
My brain has been busy lately-- well not always. Some of the time I have spent online doing some shopping. And I was actually having some positive thoughts about injecting a tiny bit of my own money into this lousy economy, if not locally, at least some of it for good causes, including for gifts. And I had come across a couple of awe inspiring items, one of them a work of art.
Meanwhile, as usual, I did a cursory survey of the current news, and could have sworn that I read somewhere that the Chicago Tribune was going bankrupt, which is sad, while not surprising, since most print media are suffering from the web takeovers and the general dissatisfaction with the conventional news outlets, which are dominated by corporate interests and have been losing some of their journalists, leaving the country with a Fourth Estate lying on its back with all fours up in the air, almost a comical sight if it were not so tragic.
Then I heard on The News Hour that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojavitch had been arrested for corruption―OMG!! This is so close to home, the second bad governor in our neighbor state, one right after the other, and a story that is blasphemous in its assault on democracy. This kind of stuff is starting to get annoying.
While washing the dishes, the scary thought occurred to me that some of the downfalls happening around the country in local and state governments are all symptomatic of an increased vulnerability to the cynical takeover of our most cherished and hard won values, and we have brought it all upon ourselves. I am beginning to expect to see more and more of these people in positions of power falling over like dominoes, one after the other. And what is this like for the young people who are struggling to survive in a broken economy, with fewer options for education or decent jobs, as so many corporations have shifted to international robbery? And the people holding office have shifted to shiftier behavior.
Meanwhile, stories out of the African Continent are more and more demoralizing, with disease related to lack of clean water, and conflicts elsewhere related to tribal identities, which in the past were purposefully stirred up by dominating invaders. And violence has been springing up in Asia again, some of it directed at English speaking immigrants. The world is a mess, partly perhaps as a result of global economic woes, but chiefly, it seems, as a result of Western political domination. "Humanitarian" has almost become an oxymoron, if not for just a few sane persons, now mostly living on another continent than our own. The United States has slid down off its mountain top into the ocean, where the pollution was already thick with death before we got this far down.
So my personal resolution to write in a more optimistic vein fell down there with the rest of the country. Into that morass of self pity.
In the grocery store, which I went back to today, having forgot a few key items yesterday, I find that it sometimes takes me a minor heft of courage to pass by the corn chips. And in that spirit I am going to corral myself back to the hopeful again.
Despite the frustrations of living "below poverty level," with some troublesome challenges, I am looking forward to the coming New Year. We still don't know when the slide we are in will slow down enough for us to start climbing back up again, or even if we will be so blessed. But we have already heard the greatest wake-up call in perhaps the entire history of human civilization.
Perhaps this moment in time is the greatest opportunity ever for writers to register their thoughts, their fears, their outrages, their hopes and prayers. More and more of us are writing to be heard, with the free blogosphere out there now, meaning that a cacophony of opinions are sometimes waging a war for the available ears. But, wow! Together we have composted more political garbage than ever before even thought possible.
In some ways it should not surprise us that the rotting organic matter can give off an odor. If done properly good compost doesn't do that, but we are beginners at this new, heretofore unheard of avocation, a kind of collective outcry to get the rotten apples out of the barrel so they can be recycled into new life forms. We don't want to attract wild rodents, but we are just beginning to learn how to protect the resources we have, which is a totally new thing for a profligate society.
If we look in the right places we find many, many like-minded people who are more experienced at such things, some of them in alternative political parties or parallel social and issue oriented movements. Eventually we will get to the point that we will be sharing responsibilities with each other in whole new ways. And those "short-timers," waiting for us to fire them, who are so resistant to the prevailing reality, will begin to out themselves, tripping over themselves. They are already making themselves the butt of more and more jokes, until we are all profiting from their horrible mistakes by seeing opportunities to laugh. Laughter and crying are close allies of the human spirit.
A sense of humor is the greatest of all gifts. We can keep it in our pockets, more valuable than money, more readily available than food or water in trying times such as these.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Twelve Points in favor of Impeachment
2. Holding the current administration accountable is required to safeguard the United States Constitution.
3. The press has publicly recognized the fears of some members of Congress related to their inside knowledge of administrative policies that skirted legality. Not only was a sovereign nation illegally invaded and war illegally waged, but also illegal torture was used against persons who had not been given Rights which are sacrosanct to Americans as well as to civil society in the World. Lies were used to produce more lies and violence was initiated without warrant or due process
4. Congress now must act, since the truth has emerged, in order to effect a remedy. This will require courage. Courage is a quality admired by the populace.
5. Failure to pursue all legal means necessary to reign in the powers of the Presidency will result in damage beyond knowing to our nation. The failing economy is only the beginning of the decline that could ensue.
6. The outcome of pursuing every legal remedy, including impeachment proceedings against both persons known as the President and the Vice President, preferably simultaneously, will be to relieve our nation of its now damaged reputation in the eyes of the world and to restore confidence of its citizens in the government.
7. Assuming a political stance of looking forward rather than back as a way of protecting individual Congress members is not a choice. It smacks of cowardice. It is an inside-the-Beltway idea that has no relevance to the people who cast votes in a nation no longer recognizing the sovereignty of The People.
8. Our nation has ventured into the beginning of a reign of fascism, a too close alliance between government and corporate powers. The so-called "Bail-out" is symptomatic of this.
9. The Republican and Democratic Parties have become way too intertwined and mutually corrupt. Their members are deluded by material gain and illusory power rather than serving as our true representatives. Other Parties must be allowed equal access to office.
10. Currently reigning political corruption is most damaging to us in foreign policy. We often label other nations as intolerant and in violation of civil rights. In fact we are a nation of great resources and wealth with an obligation to share with those who are not so blessed. Yet we fail to provide some of our own citizens with "the pursuit of happiness" as could be provided by health care.
11. Money forfeited to the now defunct regime of evil, to be replaced by President-elect Barrack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden, has been wasted on violence, personal accrual of assets, false and nefarious propaganda and directives such as the imperial rule of the Department of Justice, blasphemous violations of the Constitution by political operatives for political gain, abuse of the role of Commander in Chief, and establishment of illegal empire in foreign states. These are indeed high crimes and misdemeanors.
12. As a citizen of the United States of America, I demand that the Congress of these United States proceed with impeachment against George W. Bush and Richard (Dick) Cheney.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Nothing to lose but walls
That sends the frozen-ground-swell underneath
And spills the upper boulders in the sun.
--Robert Frost
We used to see and hear the stories on TV, black and white back in the early sixties, of people trying to climb the Berlin Wall and being shot down, of others tunneling under, and we cheered them on. To us in our middle class neighborhoods these scenes were cruel aspects of some life far away from us, while we lived in freedom in America.
The Diary of Anne Frank, televised version, ended with that creepy up and down siren that lived on in the imagination afterward, even though that detail was actually a fiction. All of us little white children could never have imagined the horrors even in our own country of segregationist policies that kept some people out of the halls of power. Until they too showed up on that little screen in the living room, most of us were excruciatingly naïve. We had not yet comprehended our own shame, far less that of others, far less that of governments.
Oh, it was all in the Bible, those verses that we memorized and sought to practice against reprimands from our parents. But we had very little other context than our own back yards, the swing sets, the doll houses, the teeny little green rubber soldiers that engaged in make believe battles on the sidewalk or on the living room rug. A lot of us had fathers who were soldiers in World War II.
Across the street from where I was a new little house went up next to the giant oak tree and a family moved in with a couple of girls around my age and their little brother. Their father was a “Mason,” or so my mother told me with a touch of disdain in her voice. I never was sure what that meant or why it angered her. Maybe she was jealous.
But clearly it was some kind of distaste which was not even something described in the Ten Commandments, to my knowledge. I wanted her to be friends with the mother because one of those girls and I hit it off over making mud pies together. Before we moved away from there when I was twelve that family was already in another new house, bigger and better, around the block from us, and my first real friendship with someone outside the family had vanished into thin air. I never really knew what had happened. My first best friend had to be substituted for by some girls at school who were, presumably, of the right sort of Christian like us.
Where do those kinds of wall come from, the ones that prevent people from speaking their minds and honestly working out their problems, leaving some things unsaid with the blessing of humane acceptance? Those subtle walls known as prejudices slowly build over time into physical structures, separating us from the benefit of alternatives to our own rigid thinking. In the U.S. we now have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and are building actual physical walls on our southern border.
Now, nearly half a century later than making my first solid friendship, everything on the computer screen is in color and you will not be able to watch TV next year if you have not yet made some adjustments for high definition. Oh yeah, it is all still about money. Some of us have access to information, political power, education and jobs and others do not.
And now we have businesses such as Boeing, a corporation which is a member of Dwight D. Eisenhauer's predicted military-industrial complex, benefiting from the current rage in building walls to keep people from crossing borders to our south, just like Israel has around Palestine. Here we have the effects of so-called “free trade” at work, along with climate change. Well, you know, it is all for our safety against terrorism (one of those “isms” in the same class as racism). And building walls provides Americans with jobs, not to mention gives some specific contractors access to government handouts. Who gives a deflated dollar if it hurts them there foreigners or does virtually no real good for us? For the most part it is kept totally out of our eyesight anyway, since the corporately owned media will not let us know what we are doing as a nation. And that keeps us innocent of any crime as individuals, at least in our imaginations.. It is all the property of the Homeland Security office or some foreign state that we underwrite. None of us need get our own hands dirty if we don't want to. It is just the way things are. We gotta have walls.
During my last couple of years in high school I lived in a southern state, not the Deep South, but close enough. We were some of the first students to go to the now desegregated school. The town was still divided, as it probably remains to this day, into black and white neighborhoods. Moving back to St. Louis again not long after graduation-- and even up until today-- our neighborhoods are still generally ethnically divided. People say that they want to live by people who are like them, but that is not the whole story and we know it, everyone who has half a brain. Yeah, we still have these walls, which we work together to maintain, despite those noble words of Robert Frost. If only they could tumble down so readily among us creatures so easily divided by hierarchical heritage with our fearful brains and hairless bodies hiding under clothes. Each of us insists we are some special breed because of the small piece of land upon which we were bred by circumstance outside of our command. Sometimes I feel lucky to be able to answer the eternally famous St. Louis question, “Where did you go to school?” with two words, ”Not here.”
Because I don't fit in anywhere. Because I started out working in the trenches with the least among us and did so for years and years, and I always wanted to learn something new. So I found out at a young age what dying was like, what a corpse actually looks like, how people are terrified by death and work like hell to bring someone back, rarely entertaining the idea that for some it might actually be an improvement over what they are experiencing on this plane.
And I went from hospitals to homes and usually made friends with the “lower class” workers and patients because they were more like me in many ways, despite some advantages that I have benefited from. In my own early life there had been violence, a lesson that imprints itself indelibly on the organism's physical body forever after, leaving trust of others always in question. Besides that I was “shy,” a quiet person who didn't talk excessively like most “leaders” do, so I became an astonishingly good observer, since that was my job, and also my lifestyle.
Politics are everywhere and nearly always involve dirt. When they sink to violence we might consider them animal, but the truth is that no other species is as self destructive as we are to ourselves. When Mr. Gorbachev “tore down those walls'” in 1989 as leader of the Soviet Union he was just a few years past the Chernobyl incident in the Ukraine. Reagan may have taken credit for it but internal pressure was probably more likely the cause of democratic moves in Eastern Europe.
Perhaps I have spent most of my life looking for something that will always remain totally inexplicable and elusive. We apparently cannot escape the despicable ways that humans beings behave so that we find lasting peace.
But this week I was given renewed hope by a small band of international human rights workers who sailed on a couple of fishing vessels into Gaza, opening the Palestinian citizens there to outsiders for the first time in forty-one years. The Free Gaza Movement had arrived.
On Saturday, August 23, two boats landed on the beach where they were welcomed by enthusiastic Palestinians, who have been blockaded into their small borders by the Israelis since 1967. Perhaps facing the devastation of ensuing global climate disruption will bring us forward into a new era of peace, working together for our common interests.
We really don't have much to lose in hoping.