From: http://aparienciapublica.blogspot.com

Untitled (choreographic sketch by by Trisha Brown, 1980)

Network Maps, Energy Diagrams

Structure and Agency in the Global System

La produccion de la nueva geografia, requiere de una serie de nuevos dispositivos de realidad. Es decir este nuevo paradigma reacciona y replaneta no solo una forma deconstruccion de relaciones tanto culturales como sociales. Esta vision GLOCAL es muy importante pues las condiciones tectonicas , las capacidades de las nuevas tecnologias han construdio un hecho, una realidad multiple absolutamenbte evidente pero tambien invisible en sus redes de vinculos y a su vez en el poder de representatividad que estas tiene, es decir ahora con estas nuevas geografias como se representa esta nueva sociedad? cuales son sus espacios de legitimizacion? como son estos espacios de regeneracion, de re-apropiacion y de re-formulacion cultural?

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The Internet is the vector of a new geography – not only because it conjures up virtual realities, but because it shapes our lives in society, and shifts our perceptions along with the ground beneath our feet. Networks have become the dominant structures of cultural, economic and military power. Yet that power remains largely invisible. How can the networked society be represented? And how can it be navigated, appropriated, reshaped in its turn?

Reflecting in the early 1980s on the spatial chaos that technological and financial developments had impressed upon contemporary cities, Fredric Jameson pointed to the need for “an aesthetics of cognitive mapping” to resolve “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.” He conceived this cartographic aesthetics as a collective pedagogy, whose challenge would be to correlate the abstract knowledge of global realities with the imaginary figures that orient our daily experience. Epistemological shifts, pushed forward by the use of sophisticated technical instruments, would need to be paralleled by the deployment of radically new visual vocabularies, in order to produce a clearer understanding of contemporary symbolic relations (social roles, class divides, hierarchies) and a fresh capacity for political intervention in the postmodern world. Only by inventing “some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing” could we “again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.”1

Twenty years later, what has become of the mapping impulse? What new forms of cartography have arisen to chart the virtual/real spaces of the present? What kinds of agency do they permit? What modes of social organization do they foster? Can critical and dissenting maps be distinguished among the established and dominant ones?

Skitter Graph / Centers & Peripheries (click for enlargements)

Let’s start by looking at an impressive technical and aesthetic feat: the “Skitter Graph” by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (Caida) – an academic offshoot of the military-industrial complex, based in the city of San Diego. This map shows a record of peering sessions between some 12,500 “autonomous systems” (basically equivalent to Internet Service Providers, or ISPs).2 To produce it, twenty-five different monitoring points run a “traceroute” program known as Skitter over a period of two weeks, following packets from over 1,100,000 IP addresses. The researchers analyze the path of the packet stream, which is only considered significant when it goes outside its autonomous system of origin. Information from the Border Gateway Protocol database is used to track each message back to a localized ISP. The graph displays the major link lines between the autonomous systems, and represents the quantity of outgoing connections per ISP, placing the lower values on the edges, in light blue, with higher intensities as you move toward the center, in dark blue, violet, orange and finally yellow. But to give all this data the form of a world map, it is also organized by the geographical location of the ISPs – or at least, their head offices – which are distributed around the circle according to longitude.

The autonomous systems fall into three major groups. At the bottom are those in North America — from San Jose and Vancouver to the Eastern seaboard — clearly dominating the Western hemisphere. Slightly further east are two exceptions: Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo/Rio, indicating the only significant connectivity in South America. Next comes Europe, with a great arc of ISPs stretching from London to Moscow; Pretoria falls in the middle, the one African city to be mentioned. On the upper left is Asia, with peak intensities in Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong, and lower values in Singapore, Perth and Sydney. The immensely productive population of mainland China barely shows up on this map of outgoing connections.

The Skitter Graph presents the raw facts of location and transmission: a geography of unqualified information flow. But what does it tell us about social relations? It can be compared to the map of “Centers and Peripheries,” elaborated by the geographer Denis Retaillé in 1992 and published in a 1994 volume on the “globalization of capital” by the economist François Chesnais.3 This map shows three things. First, a circuit linking the United States, Western Europe and Japan, the so-called “Triad” regions, which form a “global oligopoly” accounting for the majority of industrial and financial exchanges. Second, the major nodes of the world network, represented by densely outlined circles. And third, the hierarchical relations between the regions, as described with these categories: center; periphery integrated to the center; annexed periphery; exploited periphery; abandoned periphery. Chesnais performs a Marxist analysis, showing how globally fragmented production lines are coordinated through the computerized circuits of the financial sphere. His map describes the hierarchy of social relations in a post-national era, when no political formation can erect any substantial barrier to the dictates of capital. And it reveals the near-perfect correlation between the graph of virtual flows and the geography of human exploitation.

Having identified a dominant map, I now want to ask the political question. Where do the forces of resistance come from, and how do they gain agency in an era of planetary management and control?

To get an idea, you can log back onto the Caida site and look at an animated version of exactly the same information used in the Skitter Graph (try it here and refresh after the page has loaded for a few minutes, or better, download the flipbook animation). Each frame of this movie-map is a snapshot of Internet usage across the world during a few hours time; five different images were compiled every two days, over a period of some eighteen months. The result is an extraordinary visual experience. The ISPs turn green and advance toward the center as their connectivity increases; the link lines shift as the routing structure reconfigures to meet the moment’s demands. We watch the diurnal flux of the Internet, and feel the complex, disjunctive rhythm of the global information machine. It’s like the pulsing of a hive, a planetary brain: the cognitive and imaginary activity of untold millions of individuals, establishing far-flung connections. What the activation of the Skitter Graph reveals – as though despite itself – is the micro-political dimension of the global production system: not a stratified representation, but a generative diagram.

The visual spectacle of this animated map can help us to sense the presence of an underlying diagram, in the sense described by Gilles Deleuze: “a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field.”4 The notion of the diagram, derived from Michel Foucault’s work on the microphysics of power, does not designate a static grid, a preconceived template for the application of a unified force. Rather it describes a productive matrix: a dynamic field where tensions culminate at an almost infinite number of heterogeneous points. Each of these ‘points’ – human beings, but also their material objects and inventions – is entwined in singular and evolving relations to others, relations of power that involve both constraint and freedom. From the interplay of such relations, functional patterns and statistical averages emerge. These can be codified as stratified ‘laws’ within the social sciences. They can be charted in a synoptic table, by representations like the Skitter Graph or the map of centers and peripheries. But beyond the stratified structures, the vital dynamics of each period arise from what Deleuze calls strategies, which can be understood as the generative moves of social experimentation.

Thus we can distinguish between a determinate network map — a geographical representation of structures of networked power, which attempts to identify and measure the forces at play – and an undetermined energy diagram, which opens up a field of possible agency. Deleuze describes the diagram of power as “highly unstable or fluid… constituting hundreds of points of emergence or creativity.” His aim is to indicate the openness, the possibility for intervention that inheres to every social relation, because of the limited but real power that flows through each of the participants. Thus at its point of application, where individual behavior is molded into functional patterns by the convergence of mutually reinforcing constraints, power can also fold in upon itself, producing resistance and alterity through its own redoubling in the subject, then its subsequent dispersal. This understanding of the way that social hierarchies can be altered or dissolved by a deliberate twisting or counter-application of the very forces that make them cohere was the fundamental breakthrough of French critical thinking in the late 1979s and early 1980s, going beyond the deterministic schemas of traditional Marxism (even that of Louis Althusser), but without abandoning the description of dominant structures. At stake here is a fundamental concept of resistance and exodus. Two decades later, that epistemological breakthrough has lent momentum to an aesthetics of critical and dissident cartography, capable of twisting the techniques and visual languages of network maps away from their normalized uses, and thereby pointing to a place for autonomous agents within the global information grid.

Jameson saw the correlation of abstract knowledge and imaginary figures as key to understanding contemporary symbolic structures, and regaining the capacity to act within them. A range of recent mapping projects, all dealing with the forms of social organization, will serve as exemplars of this process. They can be arrayed within a circle marked by four cardinal points and traversed by two major oppositions.

At the top of the compass, an initial group of maps offers critical depictions of hierarchically concentrated cultural, economic and military power. At its polar opposite, another group invokes swarms of self-organizing singularities. In the right-hand quadrant are diagrams of social networks in the process of constitution, represented either in their tendency toward the concentration of power, or in their moment of dispersion into all-channel meshworks. And in the left-hand quadrant, opposite these constitutive diagrams, we find the cartography of dissemination, which traces and effaces the footfalls of wanderers in the global labyrinth.

The cardinal examples of the first group are the flowcharts by Bureau d’Etudes, such as “The World Government” (2003), which can be seen as a culmination of the critical analysis of globalization carried out scholars and social movements since the early 1990s. This information map uses pictograms to represent over forty different categories of actors, linked into a continuous and contradictory network. At the center is a financial core, populated by transnational investment groups. Around these groups, in a structure of nested rings, are the most powerful nation-states, themselves subsumed under regional or strategic ensembles. Major industries, service providers and transnational organizations appear in direct or ambiguous relations to these blocs. The effect is one of arresting detail, compelling the eye to a seemingly endless iteration of links. But if you draw back, this extraordinarily complex map reveals rounded, almost cosmological forms, small enough to be seen in a single gaze.

“To understand a real thing in its totality we always tend to work from its parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it,” writes the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. He compares this analytic process to the effect of artistic miniatures: “Reduction in scale reverses this situation. Being smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable. More exactly, this quantitative transposition extends and diversifies our power over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the latter can be grasped, assessed and apprehended at a glance. A child’s doll is no longer an enemy, a rival or even an interlocutor. In and through it a person is made into a subject.”5 Through miniaturization, the aesthetics of cognitive mapping becomes a way for an individual subject to grasp the complexity of the networked world.

The shift from object to subject propels us from one pole of the compass to its opposite, from hierarchies of power to self-organizing swarms. Howard Rheingold has described this new organizational form, showing how “smart mobs” use mobile devices to coordinate actions in real time.6 But the momentary convergence of mobile, self-organized groups goes back at least to the Zapatista uprising, and was used extensively by the counterglobalization movements. The best examples of what might be called “swarm cartography” have come from activist groups in Spain. “Transacciones/Fadaiat” is a “geography of the geopolitical territory of the Straits of Gibraltar,” compiled in 2004 by independent media producers of the group “Hackitectura,” with collaborations from Tangiers and the Canary Islands. One sidecity map to help spark protests against the Universal Forum of Cultures, widely perceived as a mere prop for real-estate speculation along the waterfront. is a map of power: on a Mercator projection turned upside-down, it shows sea-going migration routes, refugee camps, destination zones, electronic surveillance systems, military installations, internment centers, etc. But the other side traces a complex meshwork of activist groups on both sides of the Straits, showing their interrelations, their meetings, their evolution over time. The aim is not only to represent, but above all to catalyze a future range of possible interventions by autonomous agents, from direct action protests to immigrant support networks, legal cases, satire, subversion and the production of dissident knowledge. A comparable project was completed in 2004 by activist groups in Barcelona, who created a sophisticated

click detail for whole map

This strategy of diverse, punctual, recurrent interventions was defined by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt in their study of Zapatista Social Netwar: “Swarming occurs when the dispersed nodes of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces can converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing – swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and re-disperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse.”7 Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s formulation has been highly influential – first among activists, but then for the U.S. government, after the attacks of September 11. The glaring contradiction of a direct-democratic strategy defined by military experts and utilized by terrorists might encourage us to ask how networked organizations actually emerge in contemporary society, and how in the best of cases they also dissolve entirely, avoiding the destinies of instrumentalization or hierarchical stratification.

The first question shifts us to the right-hand quadrant of our hypothetical map of maps, to explore the constitutive processes that midway lie between swarm phenomena and hierarchical structures. Social network analysis yields insights here, especially when combined with computerized visualization techniques. The maps by Govcom.org use an “Issue Crawler” to analyze a group of websites, discovering common outgoing links (eg. two included sites both linking to a third one, outside the initial group). Thus they identify a larger network of issues. For example, “Ruckus Camp” starts with the websites of forty-nine organizations, whose common links reveal a remarkably consistent set of almost three hundred activist groups. A more complex document entitled “Climate Change” (pdf) displays a densely interlinked cluster of major international organizations at upper right, relatively isolated from a broader meshwork of NGOs, businesses and domestic governmental agencies. The map illustrates the difficulty for bureaucratic hierarchies to interface with ad hoc civil-society initiatives. But can social network analysis be used to portray the full dynamics of network formation?

Ruckus Camp (detail)

An intriguing sequence of diagrams entitled “The case of Sklyarov versus Adobe on the Web” (pdf) shows how a constellation of ephemeral allies comes together to defend a Russian programmer’s hack of a proprietary software application. We see the timeline of a small-scale swarm phenomenon, from constitution to final dispersal. Unfortunately, few network analyses deal with such dynamics. More characteristic is Josh On’s ingenious database project, They Rule, which uses a “friend of a friend” algorithm to generate charts of overlapping membership on the boards of America’s Fortune 100 companies, revealing what are arguably the most robust networks of power in the contemporary world. “They Rule” clearly moves toward the hierarchical maps of contemporary capitalist power compiled by Bureau d’Etudes. But the weakness of all such studies is precisely to focus on what sociologists call “strong ties” – eliminating the play of chance encounters and the insurgency of events that continually reshape social existence.

When power structures coalesce and harden, the specific opposite of network constitution becomes an issue. The last quadrant of our metamap deals with the cartography of dissemination. The idea of a dispersed, subjective cartography is inspired by Michel de Certeau’s opposition between the representational grid of the modern map and the “spatial practices” of walkers in the city, their “opaque and blind mobility,” narrated through word and footstep. “One can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy.”8 That phrase can perfectly introduce the “Geograffiti” proposal on www.gpster.net, which involves spontaneously recording waypoints with a GPS device and associating them with impressions about what’s on that particular spot – all to be inscribed on a website accessible to the mobile devices of other passers-by. The dream is to retell the story of the world with your ideas and emotions, even while moving through it.

Christian Nold gives that dream another twist, with his Biomapping project. A galvanic sensor is wrapped around a person’s finger, to register the so-called “startle response” that provokes a drop in the electrical resistance of the skin. That information, coupled with continuous waypoint recording by a GPS device, produces a map of the participant’s route through the city in cool green dots, punctuated by bursts of stress or excitement marked in red. Psychogeography goes automatic. But Nold foresees critical applications too: the Biomapping unit could be connected to additional sensors correlating stress response with pollution, radiation, noise levels and so forth.

The most beautiful example of cartography in motion is Esther Polak’s “Amsterdam RealTime: Diary in Traces,” where GPS-equipped pedestrians sketch out the city plan of Amsterdam as a record of their everyday itineraries. Their paths appear as lines of light on a black ground, only to be gradually effaced, giving way to the traces of other walkers. But the work is a fragile gesture, fraught with ambiguity: the individual’s wavering life-line appears at once as testimony of human singularity in time, and proof of infallible performance by the satellite mapping system.

The increasing use of Geographic Information Systems to profile the habits and desires of consuming populations makes clear the ways that corporate networks can now reach in to seize the very flux of subjective difference. A company like iMapData sorts such consumer profiles into precise geographic “envelopes” on a digitized city plan (a political jurisdiction, an infrastructure service zone, an area impacted by a major sports facility, a tourist attraction, a natural disaster, etc.). Web access to these maps is sold to businessmen who want to make strategic marketing decisions on the go. Even more impressive is the integration of such private-sector archives to government databases, themselves keyed to the new biometric passports with which security forces seek to track entire populations caught up in the frenetic mobility of the present. An International Campaign Against Mass Surveillance has been mounted to warn the public of the dangers that may lie ahead.

Critical and dissident cartographies arise against the background of these dominant mapping technologies. They appear as counter-behaviors in Michel Foucault’s sense: deliberately denormalized refusals of the reason of state – that is, of transnational state capitalism – elaborated with and against the very tools that consolidate the control society.9

Notes

1 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review no. 146 (July-August 1984).
2 See the graph and an explanation of the discovery processs at www.caida.org/analysis/topology/as_core_network. I used the 2003 version. The animated map, discussed below, is accessed on the same page (download the flipbook version).
3 François Chesnais, La mondialisation du capital (Paris: Syros, 1994), p. 26; adapted from M. F. Durand, J. Levy and D. Retallé, Le Monde: espaces et systèmes (Paris: Presses de la Fondation des sciences politiques, 1992).
4 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 34.
5 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 23.
6 Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003).
7 D. Ronfeldt, J. Arquilla, et alii, The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico (Rand Corporation, 1998), chapter 2, available at www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR994.
8 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: UC Press, 1984), pp. 91-96.
9 See Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004), pp. 195-219 and 362-365.

link
brian holmes
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com

Jose Llano
Arquitecto, Diseñador de Delitos & Coreografo del Deseo
editor aparienciapublica
www.aparienciapublica.org
http://aparienciapublica.blogspot.com/

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AMERICA has a rest, where you want to be

// posted by Alice @ Thursday, September 27, 2007 0 Comments

From: http://thesacredpath.wordpress.com
Sep 24th, 2007 by Richard

// posted by Alice @ Tuesday, September 25, 2007 2 Comments

Bill Clinton has written a new book. It is called “Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World.” He will give a portion of the proceeds to charity. Giving, the former president informs us, gives us fulfilment in life and is “the fabric of our shared humanity.”

His book is the political equivalent of “Marley & Me” It is filled with a lot of vapid, feel-good stories about ordinary and wealthy Americans setting out to make the world a better place. It smacks of the philanthropy-as-publicity that characterized the largesse of the robber barons — the Mellons and the Rockefellers — and has become a pastime for our own oligarchic elite. Clinton’s call for charity is the equivalent of well-scrubbed prep school students spending a day in a soup kitchen, doling out food to the people whose jobs were outsourced by their mommies and daddies. It does little to alleviate suffering. But it is a balm to the conscience of the oligarchic class that profits handsomely from the impoverishment of the working class, globalization and our anti-democratic corporate state. The rich love to dine out on their own goodness.

The misery sweeping across the American landscape may have begun with Ronald Reagan, but it was accelerated and codified by Bill Clinton. He sold out the poor and the working class. And Clinton did it deliberately to feed the pathological hunger he and his wife have for political power. It was the Clintons who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. The Clintons argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, the Clintons argued, to take corporate money and use government to service the needs of the corporations. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton’s leadership, had virtual fund-raising parity with the Republicans. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.

The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Goods would be cheaper. Workers would be wealthier. Everyone would be happier. I am not sure how these contradictory things were supposed to happen, but in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters. NAFTA would also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United States.

“There will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home,” President Clinton said in the spring of 1993 as he was lobbying for the bill.

But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the curious effect of reversing every one of Clinton’s rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans for Mexican farmers, they had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States. The Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted. At least 2 million Mexican farmers were driven off their land from 1993 through 2002. And guess where many of them went? This desperate flight of Mexicans into the United States is being exacerbated by large-scale factory closures along the border as manufacturers leave Mexico for the cut-rate embrace of China’s totalitarian capitalism.

Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation’s social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single parents, off of the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. But these were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from the welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding. The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill.

The growing desperation provided a pool of broken people willing to work for low wages and without unions or benefits. And while Clinton was busy selling out the poor, he lowered the capital gains tax from 28 percent to 20 percent, a reduction that permitted the wealthiest 1 percent of the population to derive 80 percent of the tax savings. Clinton, like George W. Bush, also provided lavish government funding for his corporate backers, including in 1998 a $200-billion highway and transportation package for the big construction companies and a $17-billion increase in the military budget. This was the largest increase in military spending since the end of the Cold War. Corporations, flush with government aid, saw their taxes dwindle. Amway, for example, had its taxes cut during the Clinton years by an estimated $280 million. The Clinton and Bush administrations, through tax breaks and corporate bailouts, have squandered billions of our tax dollars on corporate welfare.

The appreciative oligarchs and corporate class have made Bill rich. He is fond of boasting in public about how wealthy he has become. Hillary raised $26 million in the first quarter of the year, almost three times as much as any politician previously raised at that point in a presidential election.

We face the prospect of having two families govern the country for 16 years. The system is rigged. Our democracy is a consumer fraud. The government has given up any pretense of serving the interests of citizens. The corporations rule. And for all Clinton’s charm and talent for self-promotion, he is largely to blame.

Half a century ago, corporations paid 45 percent to 50 percent of the income tax. Today they pay 6 or 7 percent. This is why our infrastructure is crumbling, there is no universal health care, our public education is in crisis, regulatory agencies are impotent and our poor and working class are desperate.

// posted by Alice @ Sunday, September 23, 2007 0 Comments

The Psychic Mafia online

This got me thinking. Who are some mediums I would name as genuine? The following is a partial, by no means complete, list. I am listing "mental" mediums only. I'm also listing some of the work that impresses me about each of these women (and they are all women, for some reason).

• Leonora Piper (research with Richard Hodgson, William James, and others)
• Gladys Osborn Leonard (the book and newspaper tests with Charles Drayton Thomas; the Bobby Newlove case, also with Thomas; much other research)
• Geraldine Cummins (Swan on a Black Sea)
• Margaret Verrall, Helen Verrall, Alice Kipling Fleming, Winifred Coombe-Tennant a.k.a. Winifred Willett (the cross correspondences)
• Eileen Garrett (the R-101 case)

There are others, of course. I tend to focus on those who have been the most thoroughly studied (Piper was studied continuously for twenty years!), or those who produced extraordinarily evidential material (Cummins, Garrett, the Verralls et al). None of these cases are recent; there has not been much sustained, high-quality investigation of mediums in the last few decades.

Some famous names didn't make the cut. Arthur Ford was found to have done research on his sitters. Edgar Cayce got many of his medical diagnoses uncannily right, but seems to have been way off base in his readings on history and archaeology. Emanuel Swedenborg was probably a genuine medium, but a case from the 18th century is a little too musty, even though it was well investigated at the time.

I think Pearl Curran ("Patience Worth") had genuine psi abilities, but since the earthly existence of Patience Worth was never established, it's hard to insist that she was a medium per se. Some of Jane Roberts' writings have the ring of truth to me, but again, there is no evidence for the earthly life of her principal communicator, Seth, and even Roberts herself was unsure who or what Seth was.

Any other names come to mind?

// posted by Alice @ Saturday, September 22, 2007 0 Comments

Stewart A. Alexander for President
Peace and Freedom Party
Socialist Party USA

September 18, 2007

Yesterday John Reiger, a member of Peace and Freedom Party, was among ten war protestors that were arrested at the office of Congresswoman Doris Matsui in Sacramento California. The protestors were part of a nationwide movement of anti-war protestors that oppose the Iraq war and congressional support for the war.

This month the Democrats and Republicans are expected to vote on another war funding measure, giving President Bush $148 billion to continue his war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democrats and Republicans continue to support the war against the growing opposition of the American people and the world community.

Among those arrested at Representative Matsui’s office were four veterans and the mother of a US soldier now in Iraq. John Reiger is the husband of Debra Reiger, State Party Chair of Peace and Freedom Party.

John Reiger said, “Today we paid another visit to Representative Matsui’s office. We wanted her to sign a pledge to, among other things, stop voting for money for the war. We just sat down throughout the office and waited.”

Cres Vellucci, a Vietnam veteran and member of Veterans for Peace Coalition to End the War, says, “For the past several years we have repeatedly and politely met with the representative’s staff, and asked her for a meeting, but it has not worked. She still supports the policies of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which includes providing more money for the war.”

Recently President Bush spoke to the nation attempting to gain support for an increasing unpopular war. The president recently made a visit to the troops on the ground in Iraq; and his top US Commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker spoke before Congress trying to gain support and funding for the war.

Today most Americans have grown tired of a war that seems to be without an end and without a plan. Recently Bush admitted that the war will continue for years and will continue into the administrations of future presidents. More recently Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden said regarding the war, “There is no plan to win, no plan how to leave, no plan how to end this.” Still, it appears that Congress is prepared to write President Bush another blank check to continue his war.

The Iraq War has been a complete failure and a disaster for America. All the information and intelligence leading into the war was fabricated and untrue, and the reasons for remaining in Iraq is to “protect American interest;” the oil that belongs to the people of Iraq and the Middle East.

The war in Iraq and Afghanistan has already claimed the lives of over 4,000 Americans and over a million Iraqis. There is presently over 4 million refugees and over 2,000 Iraqis are leaving their homes everyday.

The Iraq government has lacked the ability to bring order to the nation and less than half of the 18 benchmarks necessary for the Iraq government to achieve have been accomplished. Still, with the evidence of failing results, Representative Matsui along with other Democrats and Republicans are preparing to give Bush the funding to continue the bloodshed.

All the socialist candidates with Peace and Freedom Party and Socialist Party USA are supporting American troops calling for an immediate withdrawal of American forces and are demanding that Congress cut all funding for the war.

John Reiger has been a lifetime peace activist and is vowing to continue his protest against the Iraq War and to support the struggles of working class people.

For more information search the web for: Stewart A. Alexander for President; Democrats Retreat before Bush; Socialist Presidential Candidates at America’s Crossroads.

http://stewartalexandercares.com/
http://sacendwar.org/node/203
http://www.vote-socialist.org/
http://peaceandfreedom-sjv.org/home/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_third_party_presidential_candidates
http://newsblaze.com/story/20070917184341nnnn.nb/newsblaze/TOPSTORY/Top-Stories.html

http://StewartAlexanderCares.com

// posted by Alice @ Tuesday, September 18, 2007 0 Comments

By Mr Ethanol | September 18, 2007

Cattle Network:
Brazil’s environmental Minister Marina Silva, long seen as unfriendly toward Brazilian agribusiness, told the press at a sugar and ethanol conference Monday that Brazil ethanol production is drastically cutting the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“Ethanol is an alternative for reducing carbon emissions that contribute to global warming, and is a major contribution to decarbonizing countries that are heavy fossil fuel users,” Silva told reporters.

However, another ministry official said that while ethanol might be beneficial for climate change, it remains to be seen whether ethanol is good for the environment.

// posted by Alice @ Tuesday, September 18, 2007 0 Comments

Canadian Government sets up C$500 Million biofuels fund

// posted by Alice @ Monday, September 17, 2007 0 Comments

What is it like to have a relationship with Dionysos? Well, to begin with, he is a very intense god, whose presence intensifies everything, often to a fever pitch. He comes into our lives like a whirlwind, frenzied, ecstatic and beautiful, melting, changing, heightening everything he touches. Those walls we built up, those masks we carefully constructed to shield us from the painful and frightening things in our past and in the world dissolve before him like brittle clay submerged in water. He coaxes us out of the shadows into the light of day, unfolding us gently like a flower to behold the beauty and warmth of a world enchanted and infused with his radiance and life-nourishing essence. He drives off our sorrows and fears, leaving us free and alive, a whole vista of unexplored sensations and emotions now open to us. He holds out a cup full of the wine of life and bids us drink deeply from it, then courses through our bodies: a dizzying, maddening, blessed fire which drives us to dance and shout and laugh in a state of unparalleled bliss. This is what it means to touch god and be touched by him in return - and having felt the ecstasy of an encounter with Dionysos you will never forget it.

But sometimes that's the problem. We are mortals. It's not possible for us to maintain that peak of pure experience, of divine joy, indefinitely. Some try and manage an intimacy with him which most can only dream of - but even the greatest mystic must eventually come down from the mountain and walk amid the mortal world. And for some this can be a sad and disheartening experience. But it needn't be - in fact, it shouldn't be. Because Dionysos is no world-denying, body-hating ascetic contemptuous of the commonplace, dreaming of a fantasy land that doesn't exist. His world is here, now, and he recognizes no dichotomy - and in fact tears down all barriers which might impede the flow of life and spirit.

The goal of the Dionysian is not to have great mind-blowing trips, to cultivate strange powers and unique experiences like notches on a belt, with all the time between as this dull, dismal interlude to real existence. Rather, the purpose of the true Dionysian is to resist such spiritual dilettantism and to work a much more subtle and powerful form of magic than the maenads of old did when they drew fountains of wine from the earth or tore apart wild bulls with their bare hands. Our task is to gradually transform consciousness, to awaken ourselves to an awareness of the world as it truly is, to its beauty and complexity and contradictory nature, the inherent rhythm of creation and destruction which beats through the hearts of all living things. This pulse is so omnipresent that we often cannot hear it, since it has been with us from the moment we drew our first breath and before that even. It sounds in even the humblest of circumstances, in the cadence of our footfalls as we walk through the hallway at work, in the splash of water as we do the dishes after dinner. It is with us always, and so we never hear it; but Dionysos urges us to open our ears and listen, for that song is his song, the song of life which he performs for all creation. Such a simple thing, really, this mindfulness, this being present in the world around you - and yet for many in our fast-paced, hectic society it's next to impossible to accomplish. And so they feel disconnected, alien, cut-off from the source of life. But how much of that is just in their heads?

The biggest barrier to a rewarding spiritual life is usually one's own self. Not the true self, the primal core of their being whose fiery essence is composed of the same essential stuff as the stars in heaven and Dionysos himself - no, not their true self, but the illusionary self that we create for ourselves, composed of fears and self-doubt and the internalized criticism of our family, friends, and society. Our wants and petty aspirations, our material desires, that part of us which is defined by the work we do during the day, the clubs we belong to, our political, racial and even familial identity - all the things that we take to us and wrap around our true selves, weaving a cocoon of illusionary identity in order to fit in with other people who have a similar identity. But none of this is who we truly are, as we find when those strands are cut and fall away. It may be painful to lose them, since we can grow attached to our carefully constructed ego, but we will not cease to be if they are lost. And that is an important distinction to keep in mind. Because if we should begin to lose part of our true selves, a process of death begins. And sometimes the weight of all these masks, all these layers of ego can begin to smother our true selves, snuff out the flame of our immortal being.

And when Dionysos senses that happening he intervenes. He comes to us and challenges us to remember who we truly are, to loosen the threads that bind us, to lift the masks and stare out at the world with our own true eyes once more. And when gently coaxing and subtle reminders are not enough, Dionysos will put on a frightening visage and he will begin to tear all of that stuff away from us, devouring it with his sharp and vicious teeth, and that can be the most painful experience imaginable if you are deeply attached to the false layers. It can feel like you are being torn apart alive, the flesh peeled from your body to reveal muscle and blood and raw nerve endings. And if you resist, if your fear gets the better of you and you fight to stay trapped in ego-snares, you can even die. But if you trust him, if you let him dissolved the falseness, you will find him to be gentle and kind and full of greater love than you could ever have imagined. Not a soft, sentimental, indulgent love - for Dionysos' love is a challenge which we must always strive to meet. His love is freedom and truth, an erotic attraction to our primal being and the transcendent unity of all creation. With that love blazing in our hearts we flee from our homes, our settled, conventional existence, to run free through the forested mountain heights, proclaiming our adoration of him through ecstatic song and dance. Io euoi! Io Dionysos the liberator!

// posted by Alice @ Saturday, September 15, 2007 0 Comments

A mighty river rolled between them there.
What could the mountain do but gaze and burn?
What could the meadow do but look and yearn,
And gem its bosom to conceal despair?

Their seething passion agitated space,
Till lo! the lands a sudden earthquake shook,
The river fled: the meadow leaped, and took
The leaning mountain in a close embrace.
*

// posted by Alice @ Saturday, September 15, 2007 0 Comments

By Mr Ethanol | September 14, 2007

MSNBC:
As a chief advocate for corn farmers around the country, Rob Litterer will be working the halls of Congress this fall to push for increased ethanol production. But he’s facing stiff opposition from what on the surface seems an unlikely source — the farm lobby.

The burgeoning ethanol industry is creating a wave of prosperity for rural towns throughout the Midwest, but the energy bonanza is also pitting farming groups on separate sides of the fence.

Corn farmers are pushing for more ethanol production as the industry creates an enormous new market for their crop, giving corn prices the kind of lift they haven’t seen in years. But the corn farmer’s win is the hog farmer’s loss. Meat, dairy, and other food producers are pushing back against the ethanol boom as higher grain prices cut into their already slim profit margins.

So as Litterer, incoming president of the National Corn Growers Association, visits with members of Congress in coming months, he knows that meat and dairy lobbyists will be close behind, delivering the opposite message.

“There is no question they have a policy that they are opposed to an increase,” Litterer said. “But I don’t think their opposition carries any water.”
*
Ethanol Shifting Research to Pipelines

Posted by John Davis

// posted by Alice @ Thursday, September 13, 2007 0 Comments

Notice: Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks

Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency I declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, the Pentagon, and aboard United Airlines flight 93, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, last extended on September 5, 2006, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2007. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency I declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.

This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.

GEORGE W. BUSH

# # #

// posted by Alice @ Thursday, September 13, 2007 0 Comments

by viziondanz

"OUR STREETS 'R OUR MEDIA -WE have TOTAL access"

The pavements are an untapped media resource through which we ordinary
peace loving folk can share our messages, hopes, dreams, ideas and
create a new momentum towards peace - at a certain point there is
critical mass in the cultural conversation which transforms into ACTION!

Chalk4Peace2007 SEPT 15 -23 - The Global Street Art Event

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please copy this & forward this to your contacts
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For Your Local Organiser LOOK In The Mirror


Mission Possible - "Our World Working For ALL of Us"

Chalk4Peace2007 SEPT 15 -23 - The Global Street Art Event - ITS
HAPPENNING - United Kingdom.. United States.. Egypt.. Austria..
Germany.. Canada.. Ecuador.. Puerto Rico.. France.. Chile.. Iran..
Iraq.. Mexico.. Spain.. Italy.. Cypress.. Israel.. Your Town..
-EVERYWHERE!

http://www.infinitepossibility.org
http://www.myspace.com/chalk4peace
see video from last year
--------------------------------------------------

We CAN Make THE Difference!

THE WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 15th to 23rd Chalk4Peace!

You are invited to Take Action! - ("Scroll down for WHAT CAN YOU DO?")
To Participate in this GLOBAL outpouring of public art. Where we
makeour personal statements for peace on the pavements and sidewalks
of our cities all over our world.

Chalk4Peace IS HAPPENING!

All around the globe, together we are decorating, dedicating and
declaring, in deep sincerity our collective call for peace.

Chalk4Peace is about our empowerment. We The People, our global
culture, all people everywhere and our common desire to live in peace.

The Chalk4Peace project has already transformed the experience of
thousands of people attending demonstrations for peace all over the
world during the past 4 years. Chalk4Peace is both a tool and a
conduit for non violent public self expression, and participation in
the growing global movement for peace.

Chalk4Peace is an opportunity for all of us of all ages to make our
feelings known, especially the young, whose future is in dire jeopardy
as our global village falls faster and faster into the fear breeding
fear breeding fear spiral.

Our global culture is teetering on the edge of extinction.

No 1 person alone can turn this around, but together WE CAN!

"The Structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, one
party,or one nation. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative
effort of the whole world" ... Eleanor Roosevelt

Our basic human instincts drive us to seek safety. This is what this
chaos is all about.Our essential human survival instincts are acting
out of context with the wider global cultural need resulting in
mistrust, fear and conflict.

Everywhere the media bombards us with WAR TALK, distractions and
negative belief patterns that encourage us to believe that the future
of our world is out of our hands entirely.

One place we still have communal access to, is OUR STREETS.

We can balance our GLOBAL CONVERSATION with collective self-expression
using OUR STREETS AS OUR MEDIA!

Chalk4Peace is one step, a catalyst that can transform our global
conversation as "we the people", en masse make our statement that is
our common aspiration for PEACE.

START NOW! Just DO IT!

Carry some chalk with you, invite a friend with you, to chalk
inspirations on the pavement whenever and wherever you fancy.

Chalk is harmless, cheap and washes away within a few days.

Especially PARTICIPATE in the Sept 15th to 23rd GLOBAL Chalk4Peace ACTION!

Make it happen in your Community!

(Scroll down for "WHAT CAN YOU DO?")

Lets us turn our grey streets into a living river of colour and
possibility - With poetry, hearts, peace symbols, empowering
statements, also expressions of our frustrations and despair.

All will be seen for several days by thousands of people, then as they
are washed away by the elements WE CAN CONTINUE to find fresh places
to Chalk4Peace.

We don't need to be an artist to Chalk4Peace. Every statement, however
small or large becomes part of the amazing tapestry that is our global
future.

This unique event conceivably, could be the largest of its kind in
modern history. It is a global effort that is happening.

We The People are spreading the word and making the effort to be a
part of this huge creative endeavour to bring Peace back into the
equation.

It is our goal for at least one million or more of us to participate
with this sidewalk/pavement chalk extravaganza, at thousands of
locations, in as many countries, cities and towns around the world as
is possible.

So WHAT CAN YOU DO to help make this happen?

1. NETWORK/POST this email to your friends, contacts and where ever
else seems appropriate
2. JOIN the Yahoo group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Chalk4Peace or
send a blank email to:
Chalk4Peace-subscribe@yahoogroups.comChalk4Peace-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
to network with others around the world who will be Chalking4Peace.
3. EMAIL: viziondanz@infinitepossibility.orgviziondanz@infinitepossibility.org
to let us know what you are doing in your community, and please send
us pictures. Or to find out how you can participate in the project.
4. ARRANGE with you local businesses, libraries, churches, mosques,
synagogues, restaurants, supermarkets etc to chalk on the pavement
outside their premises on the 15th - 23rd of September and whenever
else. IDENTIFY public squares such as Trafalgar Square in London and
invite all your friends and your friends' friends to show up with a
few boxes of chalk, or even get some from your local quarry. TAKE
extra chalk with you to hand out to passers-by.
5. USE this Email as a press release for you local TV, Radio and
Newspapers. Let them know that Chalk4Peace is happening ASAP to get
the momentum going.
6. DOCUMENT YOUR Chalk4peace actions with photos and video. Send them
to your local media - copies for our website will be greatly
appreciated - send to:
viziondanz@infinitepossibility.orgviziondanz@infinitepossibility.org
7. ENGAGE co-creatively in local communal efforts, strengthen working
relationships and find what it takes to stand for peace and freedom.
8. Have lots of FUN and keep on Chalking4Peace after the September event.

"FUN The Final Frontier"

How did Chalk4Peace begin? "Message in a bottle"
http://www.infinitepossibility.org/chalk/message/
http://www.infinitepossibility.org/chalk
http://www.myspace.com/chalk4peace

for Chalk4Peace locations in America
http://www.chalk4peace.org

Its time for us to move beyond the "No to War" position and come
together "Saying Yes2Peace"

"If we don't create our future, our past will create it for us"

http://www.infinitepossibility.org/yes1
Lets skip the war bit and just get to the peace

Greet someone new today, look into their eyes, smile, say hello, shake
their hand ... LET THE PEACE BEGIN!

Brian :)

==================================================----
"There is nothing wrong with our world,
we are just having a weird conversation"
"Reclaim the conversation"
"Our New World Order IS Love
http://www.infinitepossibility.org

"when the conversation reaches critical mass, it transforms into ACTION"
..... Social Acupuncture
http://www.infinitepossibility.org/sa

The Synergy Project video
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-5590384322623930783

"Celebration, Our Journey, Our Destination"
http://one.revver.com/watch/161159

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=viziondanz
http://www.myspace.com/viziondanz
http://www.myspace.com/chalk4peace

Dedicated to the child inside each one of us,
All the children and
All the children to come

viziondanz
e-mail: viziondanz@infinitepossibility.org
Homepage: http://www.infinitepossibility.org

// posted by Alice @ Thursday, September 13, 2007 0 Comments

“I believe it is imperative that we never lose our voice of dissent, regardless of political pressure. As Martin Luther King, Jr said: ‘there comes a time when silence is betrayal’…However, it is unforgivable that Congress has been unwilling to examine these matters or take action to prevent these circumstances [executive branch crimes] from occurring again.”
– Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), Introduction to Constitution in Crisis (2006)

Pigs of War come in both political colors of red and blue. We are all unfortunately very familiar with the red pigs. The pigs of war who manipulated, cherry-picked, stove-piped and manufactured intelligence to suggest to the world that Saddam had mushroom cloud producing WMD and something to do with the tragic events of 9-11 that occurred six years ago now.

Many blue politicians are pigs of war and they willingly went along with the deceptions and even parroted red pig talking points whenever they got a chance but now claim that the “fiendishly clever” George fooled them into believing the nearly unbelievable. I don’t know about you, but I take small comfort in that excuse. When we have a system of government where our supposed public servants can profit off of war along with the corporations that pad their bank accounts both blue and red pigs benefit and young people needlessly lose their lives sometimes killing other humans in the process.

Our troops and the people of Iraq are the ones getting trapped between our pusillanimous politicians. These dear human beings become ciphers in purely political calculations from Congress and only an exercise in abstraction from pundits, poets, publishers and the majority of the average American who has not been personally touched by this excremental occupation. In Iraq, every citizen has been personally touched and the American occupation is a living, fire-breathing, palpable entity that has intruded its imperialistic self into every aspect of their daily lives.

How do I know that Congress is playing politics with human hearts? All one has to do is observe the lack of action on the part of the red and blue pigs to come to this sad but inevitable conclusion. Apparently, MAJORITY Leader, Harry Reid (D-NV) has spent more time over his summer recess trying to convince red pigs to go against George’s war plan than he spent trying to coalesce his blue caucus into something that would not resemble the red pigs so closely that the blur becomes purple. He and Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) have already decided that they do not have enough votes to end the occupation just as they decided that impeachment was “off the table” even before they were elected! So they will happily hand over to George more of your tax money and China’s money to continue the killing fields in Iraq. Why are they so miserly with democracy, but generous with our treasury and with our dear human treasure?

I got two very overt answers to this question one day in Congress this past spring when I was on the Hill. In one of my meetings with Congressman Conyers, he told me that it was more important to put a Democrat back in the White House in ‘08 than it was to “end the war.” After I recovered from my shock, I knew it was confirmed that partisan politics is exactly what is killing our children and the innocent civilians in Iraq. My next stop was in a Congresswoman’s office who has always been 100% correct about the war. She is a lovely woman with a lovely heart and does not in anyway qualify (and there are a few dozen others who do not) as a blue pig. She had tears in her eyes when she told me: “Cindy, when I go to Speaker’s meetings and we talk about the war, all the talk is about politics and not one of them mentions the heartbreak that will occur if we don’t pull our troops out, now.” People are dying for two diverse but equally deadly political agendas. The red pigs want to keep the war going because they feed out of the trough of carnage and the blue pigs want to keep it going for votes! Either way is reprehensible.
There is a lot of chatter about the Petraeus (written and produced by the White House ) report.

Will the general recommend drawing down troops — even if he does, three-five thousand doesn’t even bring the number down to pre-surge levels — and the report says, in direct contradiction to the GAO report on the surge, that sectarian violence in Iraq is down 75%, without saying that the red pigs have re-defined the term “sectarian violence.” All I know is that the report will paint a rosier picture than what really exists on the ground in Iraq and like Ron Paul said the other day in the Fox News “Leader of the Red Pigs Wannabe” debate: “How can anyone believe anything they say?”

The blue pigs won’t believe the report, but they will expediently go along with the red pig request to further fund the disaster because they believe that it will mean political victory in ‘08.

It is up to we the people to care more about humanity and democracy than either the reds or the blues and it is mandatory that we mount campaigns to defeat the pigs and their masters: the war machine.

Twenty-one families here in America and dozens more in Iraq have felt the sting of the lethal politics of war just since the beginning of September, and the beat goes on.

What if instead of pigs of war in our government, we had elected officials who put humanity before politics and people before profits? Maybe the horrible twin tragedies of the Bush Regime and 9-11 would have never occurred within our borders and the rest of the world could look up to the USA with respect as a true leader in world peace instead of glaring at our shocking and awful quest for empire off the backs of the many who benefit the pocketbooks of the few? It’s not to late, but we are getting there.

Silence is betrayal and the silence of a host of blue pigs is the biggest betrayal of all.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan who was killed in Bush's war of terror on 04/04/04. She is the co-founder and president of Gold Star Families for Peace and The Camp Casey Peace Institute. Read other articles by Cindy.

// posted by Alice @ Wednesday, September 12, 2007 0 Comments

The professor, Nadia Abu El-Haj, who is of Palestinian descent, has been at Barnard since 2002 and has won many awards and grants, including a Fulbright scholarship and fellowships at Harvard and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Barnard has already approved her for tenure, officials said, and forwarded its recommendation to Columbia University, its affiliate, which has the final say.

// posted by Alice @ Monday, September 10, 2007 2 Comments

Masturbation in Women

Raw Statistics:

Nearly all males masturbate daily, or even more frequently, well into their 20s and sometimes far beyond.

This decline is more drastic among females, and more gradual among males.

While females aged 13–17 masturbated almost once a day on average (and almost as often as their male peers), adult women only masturbated 8–9 times a month, compared to the 18–22 among men.

Female masturbation techniques

These include a woman stroking or rubbing her vulva, especially her clitoris, with her index and/or middle fingers. Sometimes one or more fingers may be inserted into her vagina to repeatedly stroke the frontal wall of her vagina where her g-spot is located.

Masturbation aids such as a vibrator, dildo or Ben Wa balls can also be used to stimulate the vagina and clitoris.

Many women caress their breasts or stimulate a nipple with the free hand, if these are receptive areas for sexual stimulation. Anal stimulation is also enjoyed by some.

Lubrication is sometimes used during masturbation, especially when penetration is involved, but this is not universal and many women find their natural lubrication sufficient – some even produce more lubricant alone than with a partner.[citation needed]

Common positions include lying on back or face down, sitting, squatting, kneeling or standing.

In a bath or shower a female may direct tap water at her clitoris and vulva.

Lying face down one may use the hands, one may straddle a pillow, the corner or edge of the bed, a partner's leg or some scrunched-up clothing and "hump" her vulva and clitoris against it.

Standing up, a chair, the corner of an item of furniture or even a washing machine can be used to stimulate her clitoris through her labia and clothing.

In the 1920s, Havelock Ellis reported that turn-of-the-century seamstresses using treadle-operated sewing machines could achieve orgasm by sitting near the edge of their chairs.

Some women can reach orgasm merely by crossing their legs tightly and clenching the muscles in their legs, which creates pressure on the genitals.

This can potentially be done in public without observers noticing. Some prefer to use only pressure applied to the clitoris without direct contact, for example by pressing the palm or ball of the hand against underwear or other clothing.

A few women can orgasm spontaneously, after experiencing prior sexual arousal, due to intellectual stimulation alone, for instance listening to certain pieces of music.

Often, these mental triggers have associations with previous instances of arousal and orgasm.

Some women even claim to be able to orgasm spontaneously by force of will alone, but that ability, if it exists at all, may not strictly qualify as masturbation as no physical stimulus is involved.

Sex therapists will sometimes recommend that female patients take time to masturbate to orgasm, especially if they have not done so before.

Female Masturbation & Sexual Freedom

Masturbation gives women the opportunity to explore their body while at the same time giving them a high degree of sexual freedom.

It allows women the opportunity to experience sexual pleasure without relying on a partner, and to release sexual tension when they feel the need to.

Masturbation can be very empowering teaching tool for women, it teaches them about their bodies, and how it responds to sexual stimulation.

Many normal and healthy women only experience orgasm while masturbating, or it is their most intense type of orgasm.

Masturbation is the first and most important sexual skill a woman should learn, as it holds the key to enjoying other forms of sexual activity.

Ideally, this skill is learned prior to the age of five, but far too often it is not learned until a women is in her late teens or early twenties.

This stems from the incorrect notion that children are entirely devoid of sexuality and they are to be protected from the 'evils' of sexuality.

Children, especially infants, are incredibly curious individuals who will undoubtedly discover masturbation on their own.

A parent, if they catch their child masturbating, should not chastise their child for it, but rather, tell them about private and public actions.

In spite of the sexual revolution, female masturbation is still somewhat taboo.

Even though popular songs, movies, and television shows make mention of female masturbation, or the use of vibrators or dildos, it is not a common topic of discussion.

Men and women are more likely to make mention of boys and men masturbating than girls and women. I

t is given that men and boys masturbate, but for girls and women, even though it is commonly accepted that it is okay for them to do it, they are not expected to.

If a woman does not know that her peers masturbate and that they presume that she does, she is less likely to do it, or if she does, she feels guilty for doing it.

Even if it is acceptable to do something, people are less likely to do it if they do not know that their peers do it. Since women do not generally talk about it, it is presumed that they do not masturbate.

While it is extremely untrue, the majority of people believe that women are less sexual than men. We are led to believe that women think about sex and desire sex much less. Society creates outcasts of women who are openly sexual.

This results in women believing they should not have strong sexual feelings and desires. Unfortunately, many women are ashamed to admit they become horny.

This results in women introverting and denying their own sexual feelings and desires.

While a woman's desire for sex may change with time as the result of hormonal influences, they are just as sexual as men.

If a woman accepts that she is equally as sexual as a man, she is more likely to feel comfortable with her desire to masturbate.

The main reason a woman should masturbate is because it feels good. Women with strong sex drives may masturbate frequently, but they do so because it feels good, not because they are driven to.

If it did not feel good, it is not likely that they would, no matter how aroused they were. A woman should

not forgo masturbating just because she does not have a strong sex drive. Even if you have no desire for partner sex, you should still enjoy giving yourself pleasure.

The fact that pre-adolescent girls masturbate proves that hormonally induced sex drives are not the only reason to masturbate. Young girls do it for no other reason than it feels good. Since it does feel good, there is no reason to expect women not to. There is nothing wrong with a woman giving herself pleasure on a daily basis.

For masturbation to be pleasurable, it does not have to end in orgasm. Masturbation may involve nothing more than placing your hands against your vulva when you go to sleep at night, because it feels good.

Women are increasingly developing very positive attitudes towards masturbation and the pleasure it can bring them. If given the opportunity, women will often discuss their masturbation habits with pride, without the least amount of guilt.

// posted by Alice @ Monday, September 10, 2007 4 Comments

Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan and three other protesters were arrested shortly after noon today outside the Capitol hearing room where Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker were testifying in a joint hearing of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees.

Capitol Police charged Sheehan with disorderly conducted for shouting during the hearing.

Desiree Fairooz of the District and Christy Anne Miller, a California resident and Sheehan's sister, were charged with disorderly conduct for shouting in the hallway of the Cannon House Office Building, where the hearing is taking place.

The fourth person arrested, the Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. of the D.C.-based Hip Hop Caucus, was transported to George Washington University Hospital after complaining that he was injured during his arrest. Yearwood was charged with disorderly conduct and assault on a police officer.

Police said he jumped in front of the line and refused to move to the end of the line.

Lori Perdue, an eyewitness and Code Pink protester from Indianapolis, said eight Capitol Police officers "piled on" Yearwood while he waited to enter the hearing room.

In addition, three other protesters who shouted at Petraeus were taken from the room by police following his testimony.

// posted by Alice @ Monday, September 10, 2007 0 Comments

Two years ago, I heard about a therapist in Hawaii who cured a complete ward of criminally insane patients--without ever seeing any of them. The psychologist would study an inmate's chart and then look within himself to see how he created that person's illness. As he improved himself, the patient improved.

When I first heard this story, I thought it was an urban legend. How could anyone heal anyone else by healing himself? How could even the best self-improvement master cure the criminally insane? It didn't make any sense. It wasn't logical, so I dismissed the story.

However, I heard it again a year later. I heard that the therapist had used a Hawaiian healing process called ho'oponopono. I had never heard of it, yet I couldn't let it leave my mind. If the story was at all true, I had to know more. I had always understood "total responsibility" to mean that I am responsible for what I think and do. Beyond that, it's out of my hands. I think that most people think of total responsibility that way. We're responsible for what we do, not what anyone else does--but that's wrong.

The Hawaiian therapist who healed those mentally ill people would teach me an advanced new perspective about total responsibility. His name is Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len. We probably spent an hour talking on our first phone call. I asked him to tell me the complete story of his work as a therapist.

He explained that he worked at Hawaii State Hospital for four years. That ward where they kept the criminally insane was dangerous. Psychologists quit on a monthly basis. The staff called in sick a lot or simply quit. People would walk through that ward with their backs against the wall, afraid of being attacked by patients. It was not a pleasant place to live, work, or visit.

Dr. Len told me that he never saw patients. He agreed to have an office and to review their files. While he looked at those files, he would work on himself. As he worked on himself, patients began to heal. "'After a few months, patients that had to be shackled were being allowed to walk freely,' he told me. 'Others who had to be heavily medicated were getting off their medications. And those who had no chance of ever being released were being freed.' I was in awe. 'Not only that,' he went on, 'but the staff began to enjoy coming to work.Absenteeism and turnover disappeared. We ended up with more staff than we needed because patients were being released, and all the staff was showing up to work. Today, that ward is closed.'

This is where I had to ask the million dollar question: 'What were you doing within yourself that caused those people to change?'

'I was simply healing the part of me that created them,' he said. I didn't understand. Dr. Len explained that total responsibility for your life means that everything in your life - simply because it is in your life -- is your responsibility. In a literal sense the entire world is your creation.

Whew. This is tough to swallow. Being responsible for what I say or do is one thing. Being responsible for what everyone in my life says or does is quite another.

Yet, the truth is this: if you take complete responsibility for your life, then everything you see, hear, taste, touch, or in any way experience is your responsibility because it is in your life. This means that terrorist activity, the president, the economy or anything you experience and don't like--is up for you to heal. They don't exist, in a manner of speaking, except as projections from inside you.

The problem isn't with them, it's with you, and to change them, you have to change you. "I know this is tough to grasp, let alone accept or actually live. Blame is far easier than total responsibility, but as I spoke with Dr. Len, I began to realize that healing for him and in ho 'oponopono means loving yourself.

If you want to improve your life, you have to heal your life. If you want to cure anyone, even a mentally ill criminal you do it by healing you. I asked Dr. Len how he went about healing himself. What was he doing, exactly, when he looked at those patients' files?

'"I just kept saying, 'I'm sorry' and 'I love you' over and over again," he explained. "That's it?" That's it.

Turns out that loving yourself is the greatest way to improve yourself, and as you improve yourself, you improve your world. Let me give you a quick example of how this works: one day, someone sent me an email that upset me. In the past I would have handled it by working on my emotional hot buttons or by trying to reason with the person who sent the nasty message.

This time, I decided to try Dr. Len's method. I kept silently saying, 'I'm sorry' and 'I love you,' I didn't say it to anyone in particular. I was simply evoking the spirit of love to heal within me what was creating the outer circumstance. Within an hour I got an e-mail from the same person. He apologized for his previous message. Keep in mind that I didn't take any outward action to get that apology. I didn't even write him back. Yet, by saying 'I love you,' I somehow healed within me what was creating him.

I later attended a ho 'oponopono workshop run by Dr. Len. He's now 70 years old, considered a grandfatherly shaman, and is somewhat reclusive. He praised my book, The Attractor Factor. He told me that as I improve myself, my book's vibration will raise, and everyone will feel it when they read it. In short, as I improve, my readers will improve. "What about the books that are already sold and out there?" I asked. "'They aren't out there," he explained, once again blowing my mind with his mystic wisdom. "They are still in you".

In short, there is no out there. It would take a whole book to explain this advanced technique with the depth it deserves. Suffice It to say that whenever you want to improve anything in your life, there's only one place to look: inside you. When you look, do it with love.

“Forgiveness is the fragrance left by the violet on the heel that crushed it.” - Mark Twain

e-mail:: theuniverseisyou@hotmail.com

// posted by Alice @ Monday, September 10, 2007 0 Comments

I also believe that if all unions in the world work together we can achieve more, but many countries don't have unions, and in some that do, like my birth country Iran, union leaders get arrested all the time. So, my question is, how can we support unions in other counties?

The answer to that question lies in two basic principles of the labor movement: self-determination (what we wish for ourselves, we want for all) and solidarity (an injury to one is an injury to all).

Self-determination

“What we wish for ourselves, we want for all” means that all people must have the right to determine their own affairs. That includes dealing with their own leaders and governments, however corrupt.

The more the U.S. threatens Iran, the more the Iranian government can silence internal dissidents by claiming they are American agents. To support workers in Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Cuba, Columbia, Africa, Asia, etc., American workers must oppose any U.S. intervention in those nations for any reason.

In The New Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo, Noam Chomsky documents how NATO bombed the former Yugoslavia “in the name of principles and values.” The actual goal was to take control of a portion of eastern Europe that was formerly under Russia’s influence.

Imperialism presents itself as humanitarian intervention in order to override domestic opposition to war.

The U.S. invaded Iraq on the pretext of protecting the world from nuclear attack, protecting the Iraqi people from a cruel dictator and establishing democracy. These have all proved to be lies. The majority of Iraqis want U.S. troops out of their country, and the majority of Americans and American soldiers agree. Yet, Washington continues its military occupation because, from the beginning, this has been a war for oil.

It is impossible to support workers in other nations and also support our own government invading or meddling in those nations. Capitalism forces us to choose: be loyal to your nation and betray your class or be loyal to your class and betray your nation. (By “nation,” the capitalist class means its own interests, not those of the majority.)

The loyalty of the labor movement is divided. Without the awareness or consent of their members, top executives in the AFL-CIO have helped Washington to overthrow democratically-elected governments, prop up anti-union dictators and support right-wing unions against progressive governments. When the AFL-CIO backed the short-lived coup against Venezuela’s democratically-elected President, Hugo Chávez, many rank-and-file workers were outraged. As the South Bay (California) Labor Council protested,

There’s no solidarity when labor becomes a go-between, laundering funds and resources from the Bush administration and passing them to groups abroad. That role is more appropriate for government agents — agents of empire…We believe that international labor solidarity must come from the heart of the workers in one country to the heart of workers in another country — a…reciprocal relationship.

Solidarity actions

My first demonstration was at the U.S. embassy in Toronto in the spring of 1965. It was a solidarity rally, protesting police violence against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. I was amazed that a group of predominately White people would stand for hours in a cold rain to defend the rights of Black people in another country.

Mutual aid (solidarity) is basic to human nature. Over 70 percent of Americans think that the government should ensure that no one goes without food, clothing or shelter. More than three-quarters of the billions of dollars raised by U.S. non-profit organizations every year is donated by individuals. In every disaster, 9/11, Katrina, the Asian tsunami, ordinary people rally to provide aid.

Worker solidarity has a special power. In the fall of 2003, thousands of dockworkers shut down ports in Los Angeles in solidarity with striking grocery workers. In Brazil, unionists organized a solidarity campaign against U.S. intervention in Colombia and supported striking Volkswagen workers in South Africa.

As the world becomes more integrated, the need for solidarity grows. An increasing number of goods are now manufactured by Chinese workers, assembled by Mexican workers, sold by American workers and serviced by Indian workers. Although workers are divided by national boundaries, global capitalism is forcing them to unite to defend their common interests.

Building solidarity

United we stand. Divided we fall. The political relationships we build today make possible more effective solidarity actions tomorrow.

American unionists are sponsoring Iraqi unionists to tour the United States. Talking person-to-person about what’s really going on in Iraq helps break through the web of self-serving lies spun by the people in power.

Every year, people from around the globe gather at World Social Forums and demonstrations against the G-8 summits. Last year, I attended a Labor Notes conference in Detroit. The most memorable meeting was the one where union activists from more than 17 different countries met in one room.

Workers from Northern Ireland, Iraq and Palestine shared their experiences of organizing under military occupation. Auto workers from Germany, France and the U.S. exchanged tactics on fighting assembly-line speedups. Despite language barriers, our similarities were overwhelming. After the meeting, people traded names and email addresses with great excitement.

An Irish nurse and I found much in common and began writing to each other. One by one, we have included other health workers in our discussion. There are now six of us, from three different countries, corresponding by email. The challenges we face on the job and in our lives are remarkably similar. We want to build an organization of international health workers.

You might be wondering what six people in three different countries could possibly do. Knowing that you are not alone, that others are struggling with the same rotten system, is essential to staying sane and continuing the fight. That, alone, is priceless. But we want more than that. The relationships we are building today will be the foundation of tomorrow’s solidarity actions.

There is only one world. Economic booms and slumps spill over national borders and ripple around the globe in synchronous waves. Internet technology allows people to communicate from anywhere on the planet in seconds.

To keep us divided, our rulers insist that we are more different than similar. We are discovering that the opposite is true. And in the process, we are beginning to build a very different world based on sharing and cooperation.

// posted by Alice @ Sunday, September 09, 2007 0 Comments

http://ltradio.blogspot.com/search/label/2007YIR

// posted by Alice @ Sunday, September 09, 2007 0 Comments

Dialogue between John Holloway and Vittorio Sergi

I

Dear Vittorio,

The events at the end of the anti-G8 march in Rostock on Saturday 2 June, when there was an outbreak of prolonged and violent fighting between some of the demonstrators (the so-called “black block”) and the police, disturbed and challenged me. I felt critical of the violence of the black block, but also felt the need to discuss and understand. I think a lot of people on the march felt the same way – critical but wanting to talk and understand rather than condemn (there were, of course, others who simply condemned the action, but that is not my position).

I wanted to discuss with you in particular because I know you were in the middle of the battle and because I have a very great respect for you and I think we can discuss honestly and without disqualifications. The aim for me is not to win an argument, not to come to an agreement, but to understand.

1) Let me explain the way I experienced the march:

My friends and I did not have a pre-established place of affiliation on the march. We walked along the march before it started, looking for an attractive place to insert ourselves. We walked past the large block of people (generally young, mostly men) dressed in black, many with hoods and many with their faces masked. We inserted ourselves finally near the front of the march, just behind the samba group with their drums and their dancing. From our perspective, the march was very big, colourful and fun. There was a massive, but at that stage inactive, police presence at the side of the road. We were particularly impressed by the clowns and the way in which they went up to the squadrons of police and made fun of them, imitating them, blowing bubbles at them, dancing around their cars and so on.

When the march reached its end-point, the harbour, I felt it had been a successful, enjoyable and colourful march. The “black block” arrived shortly afterwards and a friend I was with remarked that it looked as if they were ready for a fight. A minute later the fighting broke out, with columns of heavily-armoured police rushing back and forth and lots of young people dressed in black throwing stones at them. This was the first I saw of the violence which would dominate both the reports in the media and many of the discussions in Rostock over the next few days.

2) I think there are three main reasons why I found the violence disturbing.

Firstly, I felt that it was the unfolding of a two-sided, predictable ritual. There were two sides prepared for battle, two sides who knew that, once the preamble of the march was completed, there would be open, violent conflict, in which the majority of people present on the march would be mere spectators. What was disturbing was the predictability and the symmetry of the conflict. In this there was a sharp contrast with the clowns who confronted the police in an unpredictable and absolutely asymmetrical way: in terms of sexuality, movement, dress, behaviour, solemnity and so on, the clowns were the opposite of the police, whereas the black block, in terms of uniform, sexual composition, disposition to violence, solemnity were very like the police.

Secondly, I was disturbed by the macho tone of the black block. Although there were some women and perhaps some older people, the block was dominated by young men, and the atmosphere generated was of the sort often associated with large gatherings of young men: aggressive, boastful, insensitive to the feelings of those who surrounded them.

Thirdly, the action was divisive. It seemed to me to go against the wishes of the great majority of those present, and caused considerable resentment among many. The participants in the action seemed to dismiss the feelings of the other demonstrators as irrelevant. I had the feeling that the other demonstrators were in some way being labelled as reformist or non-revolutionary. In other words, the action was identitarian, imposing a label upon others and dismissing their feelings as unimportant. An anti-identitarian approach would recognise other people as being self-contradictory and try to find a way of stirring the contradictions within them.

A very different and more sympathetic reading of the action would be to say that that was precisely the aim of the violence: to appeal to the hatred of the police and to move people to action. Someone in one of the discussions compared throwing stones at the police to occupying a house: in both cases you help people to overcome their fear of authority. This argument I can understand, but I think it is probably not true, in the sense that I think the action probably did not have this effect. I think the clowns’ mockery of the police was probably far more effective in demystifying state authority.

Perhaps I am saying that in any action, the question of its resonance is very important: not that the action should be judged simply by its resonance, but that its capacity to resonate with the rebelliousness that exists in repressed form in most people is of very great importance. Not only that but that resonance is a question of a-symmetry. That which we want to stir inside people is their anti-capitalism, and the only way in which we can do that is through actions that are anti-capitalist in their form, actions that propose ways of behaving and ways of relating that are quite unlike those of capitalism. The resonance of asymmetry seems to me the key to thinking about forms of anti-capitalist action.

3) In explaining why I feel disturbed and challenged by the events of 2 June, I do not simply condemn the violence. It is clear that the violence used by the demonstrators was virtually nothing compared with the violence exercised every day by capital against us. I accept too that there may be circumstances in which the use of violent methods strengthens the movement against capital. But this is the problem: the action in this case seemed to be separated from any consideration of its effect on the movement as a whole. I may well be wrong about this and I may be quite unfair in much that I have said, but then I would be glad if you could explain it to me (and to anyone else who may read this).

Best,

John

II

Caro John,

Your letter, in which you express your criticism towards the violent clashes of the 2nd of June in Rostock, seemed to me an excellent opportunity to begin an honest and necessary discussion. I will try to answer all your major questions. My reply is not motivated by the abstract need to bring forward an apology of violence or of the “black block”, but by the urgency to explain, as a participant myself, the reasons, problems and state of an open process of rebellion.

The march of June 2nd had, in all its aspects, a ritual and predictable character. The fact that it would take place before the beginning of the summit cast a shadow on the following days, when more radical groups would confront a long week of actions without the coverage of a great event during the days of the summit. The march also constituted an effort to represent a united movement, despite its differences. This aspect is closely linked to the customary dynamics of summits and counter summits which has, for the past ten years at least, constituted one of the main public expressions of anti-capitalist movements around the world.

On the other hand, due to the precedents in Germany and the rest of Europe, the march of June 2nd had a different air to it; there was energy and hope for a new drive for social movements: that also explains the large number and strong militant spirit of the participants.

All organized political subjects, from the clowns you mention to ATTAC and the “black block” itself, wished to be represented and have their space of representation on the big stage. And so did the police, actually... it had announced the biggest security operation of its history, with a contingent of 17,000, and it couldn’t fail...

The so-called black block was created as a large group of affinities, made up by various smaller groups which varied as to composition and geographical origin. The etiquette (black clothes, covered faces) should not fool anyone as to the diversity of subjects present.

The Dissent! group took up the role of a “hub”, i.e. a centre of connection and distribution of information amongst groups which were more inclined towards direct action and did not consider it convenient to participate in the Block G8 alliance, which due to its broad and plural character included, amongst others, important reformist subjects such as ATTAC and the German section of the European Left party, known today as “Die Linke”.

Thus, the block included anarchist groups from many different places (Poland, Germany, Denmark, Holland, England, United States, Greece, Catalunya), as well as autonomous groups from Italy, Sweden, France, Euskadi, Switzerland and Germany, amongst others.

Also, many anti-fascist groups which in Germany do not have a sole organization but are largely influenced by the Antifascistiche Linke Berlin (part of the Interventionist Left, i.e. also of the Block G8 coalition) joined the Block from the bus bearing the slogan “Make Capitalism History”.

The block thus included 3,000 to 5,000 people who defied the ban on covering their faces and carrying sticks and other instruments of self-defence in the marches. The common intention of the participants in the block was to directly attack the private property of banks and corporations, as well as the police. There were also discussions as to measuring the amount of force which could be employed according to the response of the rest of the march; almost the majority agreed on acting in a way which would not harm it.

So I do not believe that this choice was in total contrast with the spirit and intentions of the rest of the march. Maybe of one part, but then again there is always a great deal of differences in this kind of international marches. However, throughout these years it has been established that all forms of protest should have the right of “citizenship”, in the boundaries of respect for others. Also, the block did not wish to stay in the background or fringes of the march for a political reason. Radical forms of direct action are also a part of the movement and militant groups involved in that kind of action, or simply those who support it or individually participate in it, respect other forms of struggle; there would be no sense in separating them.

The tactics of the block was an escalation of actions which would lead to a direct confrontation once having reached the harbour, where most police forces were concentrated.

It is true that, as you mention, the block also aimed at motivating and involving the rest of the march in a resistance against the police and in attacking corporations and their façades. Indeed, that did happen when the police, frustrated at not being able to defend itself from the beginning, attacked the entire march as well as the people watching the concert. Those present reacted in many ways when that happened, from throwing stones to creating chains and advancing with their hands in the air, managing to contain the offensive of the police, despite the armoured cars and water tanks.

It is true that the block was made up mostly of young people and the fact that there were not so many women as men is an aspect of a differentiated participation in actions and initiatives; however, that is something that occurs in many communities and organizations and depends on a broader problem surrounding the forms and languages of political action. Nonetheless, I was surprised by the number of women participating in the clashes, by much larger than what could have been observed in Italy.

You also consider the majority of young radicals as a lack of comprehension towards other forms of life and ages. On the contrary, I consider it to be a starting point, as well as a necessary form of construction of a common movement which, as always, begins amongst the young, due to the urgency, rage and passion with which the negation of the existing is exercised, “the negation of the negation” in practice.

Turning our gaze towards Mexico, Oaxaca for example, we observe a very different composition in the barricades, but that is due to a political and social “popular” form that exists only in few occasions and places in Europe. The division between young generations and the rest is deeper and relates to complex causes which also bear political implications; however, this issue cannot be solved in one march.

Against those who speak of a depressed and apathetic generation, I felt, on the contrary, a lot of positive energy and passion in this contingent. Many different ways of living and a lot of decisiveness and will for conspiring and cooperating altogether in order to achieve a radical social change.

Action, in the case of a march, is not simply symbolic; it seeks direct effectiveness. It has shown, for example, that the police is not invincible when put up against a multitude that seizes the initiative and cooperates. It has also shown that the struggle against an economic, social and military system cannot limit itself to events or public moments of representation (and mediation), but that it rather overflows and takes the initiative, it can mark the time, space and form of a confrontation that can also be called class struggle, that it does not have to restrain itself to defending the few collective riches that still remain in hands of the people.

For this reason, I attach the document which resulted from the discussion between various groups that participated in the confrontation march of June 2nd and has been put up on the Dissent! website.

Plan B has started already: join to the battle of joy

4 June 2007 – international brigades

There are certain moments when it seems appropriate, without it ever being a matter of calculation, to address everybody in a manner as simple and direct as possible. One of these moments has arrived.

We want to speak briefly about what happened on the 2nd of June in the city of Rostock during the demonstration against the G8. We speak, of course, from a partisan position, but one forged of multiple voices which at certain moments manage to become singular. One of these moments has arrived.

This 2nd of June, thousands of people didn’t wait for the ritual which we have so often been subjected to in this movement to play itself out: mobilizations, demonstrations, less than symbolic actions, conferences crowned with pat conclusions long ago prepared by some obscure functionary. Nor did they accept donning the worn out postures of those who pretend to be concerned with the state of the world and abandon themselves to a pious compassion for the most misfortunate.

These thousands, on the contrary, did not content themselves with reacting or resisting, but took the initiative, consciously attacking the places where, day after day, capitalist exploitation and the material effectiveness of the global civil war are extended. The G8 is not only the expression of the domination of capital over the world, a theatre of dubious quality where the leaders put onto the stage another ritual, one that serves to codify their rule over the lives of subjects. The G8 is the symbol of the suffering inflicted daily on millions of people. That we should be reproached for our violence when it is they who have their hands full of blood!

In the end what happened was very simple: free beings decided to collectively and practically oppose the symbols of capitalism and the baleful face of the state incarnated by all the police of the world. The assemblies and long speeches, if they are not followed by irruptions in the streets of our metropolis, produce only suspicion and resignation.

We want to also recall another truth in relation to the combatants in the battle of Rostock: they are women and men originating from every corner of the world and have no need of an identity card to recognize each other, constitute gangs, and experiment new forms of life. We are the nationless who seek to destroy the frontiers – as much material as symbolic – which separate our lives, thought and bodies. We are made of multiple singularities who desire to join in order to create the conditions of a more ecstatic life. We come from everywhere, it is why we are everywhere. Those who affirm the contrary are brazen-faced liars.

There is another truth: under every black mask was a smile, in every stone thrown against the common enemy there was joy, in every body revolting against oppression there was desire. We don’t harbor sad passions and resentments, if that had been the case we wouldn’t have fought and resisted for so long. Thus don’t be deceived, look at those with whom you are connected, or whom you love; perhaps you will find one of these bodies, one of these smiles, one of these hands engaged in the struggle. Joyful passions placed in common and joined to the assault on command – such is the secret of the battles waged in the heart of the asymmetrical conflict which opposes us to the sadness of the weapons and bodies of power. Individually we are nothing, together we are a power. Together we are a commune: the commune of Rostock.

We all arrived here with a personal and collective history, a history of struggle and battle waged in every corner of the earth. We don’t want this event to be perceived as a simple continuation of the old cycle of struggle which, since September the 11th, has known so many disappointments. We believe on the contrary that the 2nd of June was the signal of a powerful and determined rupture with this phase of defeat and that this battle inaugurates new offensives. That this breach permits us to flee together to the other side of the mirror, the side of freedom.

And now comrades, we block the flows...

Long live the commune of Rostock and Reddelich!

International Brigades

June 2nd must also be judged in a broader time frame. During the following days, the same people that encouraged the clashes were involved in constructing and participating in many self-managed camp activities: from the kitchen to the collective bars, workshops, alternative media, parties, political and artistic workshops, the multitude (yes, mostly young...) returned to its everyday positive forms of action.

The massive blockades of the 6th, 7th and 8th were in benefit of the variety of forms of struggle and action; none was more determinant than the others. Dissent!, as well as Block G8 and non-organized groups and individuals joined the marches and blockades, other forms of swarms... Everyone, from the most radical pacifists to the toughest anarchist groups, cooperated in order to avoid a violent escalade of the conflict and to make blockades effective.

That leads us to the conclusion that in the minds of most of the participants in the June 2nd march, the black block is but a transitory form, a swarm, and not the “army of the movement”. It also adopts an aesthetic form that is closely linked to the influences of the “Autonomen” German movement of the 80s, as well as to the Anglo-Saxon anarchist movement, especially active in the environmental struggle. It is, thus, a transitory form, a kind of intelligent mob with a long history in radical dissent in Europe and the United States. The donning of black clothes and covered faces is of a practical utility in times of generalized video control. It also reflects the resonance of powerful symbols of rebellion such as the balaclava. From the Zapatistas of 1994 to Carlo Giuliani in Genoa in 2001, the rebels cover their faces in order to be seen.

The clashes of June 2nd and the following days urgently pose the question as to how to react against the repressive apparatus. Pacifism and its ethics cannot be an alibi for impotence, or worst, as in the case of ATTAC, for the collaboration with the repressive military apparatus. However, there have been consistent pacifists, whom I have seen receive blows and gas discharges in the face for trying to break the police lines or resist in a blockade, on the ground with dogs and truncheons biting their skin. Nonetheless, we must work together in a wider and more coordinated sense in order to be able to defend autonomous spaces, in the countryside as well as the cities, defend strikes, road and train blockades, marches and meetings, in a growing state of siege and militarization, in Mexico as well as in Europe.

That is why I do not believe that the clowns that you so admire are an efficient response to these matters either. They have a very positive role in confusing and delegitimate the authority and aggressiveness of the police, but we cannot all become clowns, neither will we always be able to stop tanks with flowers. We need everyone, we cannot disqualify anyone in this movement and uneven power relation.

By the way, we will always love flowers, but the days of putting flowers in gun barrels have gone by. The images of military helicopters flying above the heads of thousands of unarmed protestors, launching police assault troops, gas charges, water tanks and horses against the defenceless crowd speak of the madness and dangerousness of the police apparatus in our days. That is not insignificant. Put up against this phenomenon, most radical groups do not respond with militarization; on the contrary, there is a conscience and a rejection of symmetrical violence, of hierarchic organization and authority. However, this does not mean there is not a search for forms of power, for ways of changing power relations through asymmetrical forms of resistance and attack.

I hope I have answered a few questions and maybe cleared some doubts. However, everything is under an open process of discussion and creation; that is the positive aspect of today’s movement. Rostock was a partial, but encouraging victory. We continue to walk and discuss!

Saludos,

Vittorio

III

Caro Vittorio,

We agree on much, but not on all. The question of the composition of the “black block” (or perhaps “black non-block”) is not so important – although I do remain suspicious of any group composed largely of young men, and I would be even more suspicious of one composed largely of old men. And I agree that is important to see the march in the context of the week’s actions, where the atmosphere was certainly a very good one of respectful unity-in-diversity. I also agree that violence is not the central issue: my argument is not a pacifist one. And yet the whole thing of the stone-throwing keeps worrying me.

Let me emphasise again that I respect those who throw stones at the police. But for me respect cannot mean just a side-by-side co-existence: it means saying “we are comrades, that is why we must discuss our differences and doubts openly”. That is what these notes are about.

We are at war. Let’s start from there. The last twenty years or so (and especially the last five years) have seen a great intensification of capitalist violence against humanity. We can see this as the Fourth World War (as the Zapatistas put it) or as the war of all states against all people (as Eloína and I put it in an article a few years ago). The question then is how we should fight this war.

The notion of war is perhaps unfortunate, because it usually suggests a symmetry: one army fights another army, and there is not much difference between the organisation (the social relations) of the two sides. Generally, it does not matter very much which side wins: either way, the war and the militarization which accompany it signify a defeat for humanity, for the sort of social relations that we want to construct. It is generally the more numerous, better equipped, more cleverly aggressive side that wins.

There are two problems about thinking of the struggle for a new world in these symmetrical terms. Firstly, we would probably lose: there is no way we can match the military power of the capitalist states. And secondly, and even more important: symmetrical organisation means that we are reproducing the social relations that we are struggling against.

The question then is how we think about fighting this war asymmetrically. The enormous strength of the flowers in the guns and of the clowns confronting the police is that they emphasise this asymmetry. They say clearly “our strength is that we are not like you and that we shall never be like you.”

You suggest that clowns and flowers may be important but that it is not enough. You say “we must work together in a wider and more coordinated sense in order to be able to defend autonomous spaces, in the countryside as well as the cities, defend strikes, road and train blockades, marches and meetings, in a growing state of siege and militarization, in Mexico as well as in Europe. That is why I do not believe that the clowns that you so admire are an efficient response to these matters either.” But what does “defence” mean? It does not mean “defence” in any absolute sense. The armed force of the state could overcome stone-throwers just as easily as it could overcome flower-carriers or clowns. Defence really has to be understood as dissuasion. How do we dissuade the state from exercising the full force of its armed power? Is stone-throwing more effective in this respect than flower-carrying? Probably not, because the dissuasive effect is not a question of physical strength but of resonances: of the resonances that the participants succeed in stirring throughout society. It is above all these resonances that impose limits on state action: the degree to which the resonances make the state afraid of the social reaction that might follow from a violent repression. Thinking in terms of resonances and reactions, we must ask: is it easier for the state to violently repress a group of stone-throwers or a group of flower-carriers? Violent repression is possible in both cases, but I think it is probably easier for the state in the case of stone-throwers.

Take the Zapatistas, for example. How do we explain the ability of the Zapatistas to resist (so far) a violent repression by the state? Not so much in terms of “defence” but in terms of dissuasion. The Zapatistas have dissuaded the state from violent repression by being armed for self-defence, but above all by their communiqués which have resonated so strongly through the world. Maybe we should see the Zapatistas as armed clowns: by being armed but always acting in a way that emphasised their asymmetrical relation with the state. Their flight, with marimba and all, when the army attacked on 9 February 1995, is an outstanding example of that. Perhaps the greatest strength of the Zapatistas is that they have always understood war as a question of aesthetics, of theatre. The obvious contrast in Mexico is with the EPR, which is a classical armed organisation and has never succeeded (or perhaps tried) in stirring the sort of resonances that would act as a defence against a state.

Which is more radical, the EZLN or the EPR? For me, without doubt, the EZLN, because they are constantly re-thinking the struggle, above all because they are far more asymmetrical in their relation to the state. But I can see that for some people, groups like the EPR may appear more radical, because they appear to represent a more direct and violent confrontation with the state.

The state, in its fight against us, constantly tries to weaken the social resonances of our movement, in part by pushing us more towards direct, symmetrical confrontation with it. If they succeed in doing that, then open repression becomes politically more easy for them. That is my worry: not a moral condemnation of stone-throwing, but that what appears to be more radical is in fact less radical and weakens the struggle against capital.

If we think of the issue in terms of the Fourth World War and how we fight that war, then I would suggest as a principle of the effectiveness of struggle that our struggle must be asymmetrical to that of capital. Asymmetry (the clear manifestation that we are not like them and will never be like them) is crucial to the strength of anti-capitalist resonances. There should be room for people who throw stones, but there must also be room for people who say that stone-throwing is not a very effective way of fighting (and of course that guns would be an even less effective way).

Saludos,

John

IV

Caro John,

By a strange coincidence, I write these lines while returning to Italy from Mexico. I had to return for personal reasons, today, when a new confrontation is feared in the town of Oaxaca, where I was last week, when thousands of people who wished to celebrate the popular festivity of Guelaguetza were violently repressed by the police and the army, resulting in many men and women imprisoned and injured.

The reality of violence, of its menace and its use against the nonconformists, is presented over and over again as the reality of oppression, of inequality, of exploitation. That is, as a social relation.

And also as a form of organization, of military and militarized groups and apparatus, such as the army and the police. The history of these people is filled with this violence, its memory, in America as well as in Europe, records a long chain of violations, injustices, unpunished crimes perpetrated by these organizations, whose reason of existence lies in the defence of the State and capital.

Now, our discussion has led us to some important points, on which I still disagree with you:

I agree with your approach on asymmetry. It is of great importance and an obvious significance in relation to the current situation. Parting from the inequality of power in the current social power relations, it is reasonable to think that no radical change will be accomplished in a symmetrical revolution, in a sort of topsy-turvy world, but rather through a diagonal change, a tearing, thousands of ruptures. This perspective obviously affects political practices and, therefore, practices of confrontation with the established powers. However, I believe it does not exclude open confrontation. I see the need for blending various forms of action in this asymmetrical confrontation, in the same way that the forms of breaking the relation of violent domination which imposes relations of exploitation depend greatly on cultural differences and different historical heritages. For example, the same practice of participating in a demonstration is very different in Germany, against the G8, or in Oaxaca, this morning, in order to boycott the Guelaguetza of the authoritarian PRI government, in the same way that participating in a pacific march in Pakistan, Guinea Conakry or Colombia can mean risking one’s life. Thus, according to the context, the violence used by the people for their defence is of different forms and natures than the ones used by those in power, it has different political aims, it responds to different criteria, to that of the defence of dignity and not of the imposition of an abstract order and legality.

Obviously, aspects of symmetry and forms of coordination are also present. When we think of an asymmetrical confrontation with power we cannot ignore the issue of organization. Our action must be spontaneous and creative, but it must also be coordinated and organized along with others, so as to consider three fundamental aspects of the development of all revolutionary politics: time, space and, as Machiavelli pointed out, opportunity. Referring to a violent confrontation with the state forces, you say: “Firstly, we would probably lose: there is no way we can match the military power of the capitalist states. And secondly, and even more important: symmetrical organisation means that we are reproducing the social relations that we are struggling against.”

I do not agree. Given that we are going through the “Fourth World War” and that the violence of power is not simple defensive, i.e. it is not presented as a police officer safeguarding a bank, but rather as a thief who enters our house in order to steal, we must consider defence as necessary and pledge our commitment to the possibility that asymmetrical forms of confrontation could also put the military power of capitalist states in a difficult position.

If we think that it is not possible, that it is not possible to put an end to the oppression of the armed groups of the state, then symmetrical confrontation for gaining power (and control over the repressive bodies) would once again be the only tragic options for us, who are underneath.

My second comment is on your mention of the EZLN. I agree with your observation about the theatrical and ritual sense of this army of indigenous peasants. From their point of view, I have even heard the militaries being called “brothers”. The Zapatistas do not dehumanize the enemy, they try to conserve its human face and, to this moment, they have managed to avoid fratricide war with the paramilitary groups despite their numerous crimes. Their form of political struggle has been, without doubt, peculiar and the fact that the conflict in the South East of Mexico has not ended in carnage, as happened ten years ago in Guatemala, is without a shred of doubt something positive that partly depends on the EZLN itself. However, we must consider that the EZLN had, and still has, a disposition to war. In this sense, I do not believe this organization should be considered more or less radical than the EPR, for example. To this day, the latter has a modus operandi which is much closer to forms of the past, more openly confrontational and focused on the enemy army; however, despite its clear Marxist-Leninist political positioning, it would adopt markedly asymmetrical forms of guerrilla warfare if that were to lead to a tactical advantage. We could rather say that, from our point of view, the EZ had the capacity to adapt and innovate its forms of political action, and its experience of “asymmetrical” struggle is a good base for thinking about possible forms of revolutionary political struggle in the near future.

Despite our differences, I agree with your concern about the need to turn asymmetrical struggle into a virtue of the anti-capitalist movement, to express our rejection towards the system in a negative, non-dialectical way.

Taking “Fourth World War” seriously amounts to admitting that there is a system of violence set up against us. Therefore, our strategy of confrontation cannot be accused of triggering the repression; maybe it can supply media elements for its justification, but then again we know that the latter can occur without the need for an effective excuse.

You say: “It is above all these resonances that impose limits on state action: the degree to which the resonances make the state afraid of the social reaction that might follow a violent repression.” The resonances of our action can indeed put a limit, dissuade the State, and there will be, no doubt, marches and actions where it will be better to throw flowers instead of stones. However, as the recent history of the people of Oaxaca shows, there are moments when it becomes clear that violence comes from above, against our flowers and our dancing.

We began our discussion in the protests against the G8 in Germany and ended up in the streets of Oaxaca, without a conclusion, it would seem...

We know there is an ongoing confrontation, made up by different simultaneous confrontations, and that the security machinery of all States is being militarized and organized against the “internal enemy”.

However, we also know that our victory, from a revolutionary perspective, has to commit to the defeat of war and of the enemy at the same time.

It would be meaningless to win a war and lose dignity.

How this is possible, we can only found out in practice.

Ciudad de México – Madrid, 23 de julio de 2007.

Vittorio

V

Caro Vittorio,

You are right, of course, that we are talking not just of Rostock but of many different situations in the world that require different responses.

Thinking of Mexico, there is one image that keeps on coming to my mind in the last few days: the famous photo of the Zapatista women literally pushing back big armed soldiers who were trying to invade their village. This photo has been very widely circulated all over the world and has undoubtedly had an enormous political impact. For me it illustrates the force of asymmetry, but it could be argued that it also creates a romantic, unreal image of the conflict in Chiapas. Perhaps one way to close the dialogue (for the moment) would be to leave that image as a question.

Ciao,

John

// posted by Alice @ Saturday, September 08, 2007 0 Comments

[I use a website called http://bookmooch.com - I received a book that I ordered from someone called "The Wordsworth Dictionary of the Occult" yesterday. Inside the cover the sender put a single tarot card. And a bookmark that said "Compliments of Jo Howe". I just thought that was a brilliant idea and I intend to do so myself when I send out books now... - anyway..it was THE MAGICIAN card]

Basic Card Symbols

Red & White coloring, the lemniscate (infinity symbol), a small wand, a table displaying a chalice, a pentacle, a staff (wand) and a sword.

Basic Tarot Story

Traveling on his way, the Fool first encounters a Magician. Skillful, self-confident, a powerful magus with the infinite as a halo floating above his head, the Magician mesmerizes the Fool. When asked, the Fool gives over his bundled pack and stick to the Magician. Raising his wand to heaven, pointing his finger to Earth, the Magician calls on all powers; magically, the cloth of the pack unfolds upon the table, revealing its contents. And to the Fool's eyes it is as if the Magician has created the future with a word. There are all the possibilities laid out, all the directions he can take. The cool, airy Sword of intellect and communication, the fiery Wand of spirituality and ambition, the overflowing Chalice of Love and emotions, the solid Pentacle of work, possessions and body. With these tools, the Fool can create anything, make anything of his life. But here's the question, did the Magician create the tools, or were they already in the pack? Only the Magician knows - and on this mystery, our eloquent mage refuses to say a word.

Basic Tarot Meaning

At #1, the Magician is the male power of creation, creation by willpower and desire. In that ancient sense, it is the ability to make things so just by speaking them aloud ("And God said 'Let there be Light!' and there was Light"). Reflecting this is the fact that the Magician is represented by Mercury. He represents the gift of tongues, a smooth talker, a salesman. Also clever with the slight of hand (Mercury *was* the god of thieves!) and a medicine man - either a real doctor or someone trying to sell you snake oil. The 4 suits laid out before him remind us of the 4 aces, which in the Tarot symbolize the raw, undeveloped, undirected power of each suit. When the Magician appears, he reveals these to you. The reader might well interpet this card as telling the querent that they will be given a vision, an idea, a magical, mental image of whatever it is they most want: the solution to a problem, an ambitious career, a love life, a job.

Thirteen's Observations

If any card in the Tarot is the Tarot, it is the Magician. He's one of the most recognizable cards, always a favorite. He's also the only card in the Majors that refers to the minors with the "trumps" displayed upon his table. If the reader believes the Magician stands for the Querent, then the Querent either is, or is currently finding himself eleoquent and charismatic at this time. Both verbally and in writing, he is clever, witty, inventive and persuasive. People listen and agree with him. He also has an interest in science. He might be, in fact, a doctor or scientist or inventor.

Standing for someone other than the querent, the Magician could be a skillful doctor, scientist, inventor lecturer, salesman, or con-man. It's important to remember that the Magician can as easily be clever as skilful, a trickster as well as a magician. This is someone with a magnetic personality, someone who can convince people of almost anything. For better or worse, his words are magic.

Most importantly, the Magician card stands for the "reveal" - as in a magic trick. The handkerchief is draped over an empty box, the Magician waves his wand, *presto!*--now there is a dove in the box. The Magician card does the same for the Querent--only what it reveals is not birds or rabbits but NEW ideas. Emphasis on NEW. When the Magician card appears, the Querent is likely to say: "Now there's an idea! Why didn't I think of that before?" Truth is, the Querent had that idea in his head all along. The Magician merely revealed it to him. But what will the Querent do with this idea? That's a question for the next card....

// posted by Alice @ Friday, September 07, 2007 0 Comments

By Gary Corseri

9/5/07

“Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other.”

–Henry David Thoreau

“It is better to be almost right than precisely wrong.”

–Warren Buffet

“Can we all just get along?”

–Rodney King

How well Thoreau, our best philosopher and political thinker, would have “gotten along” with Buffet, our Empire’s investor-sans pareil, is a matter for speculative fiction, but I suspect the open-minded Naturalist would have endorsed the financier’s caveat against overweening pride in one’s own judgment. Not only must we look before we leap, but, once sure-footed on the other side, we must also look behind to inspect the ground we’ve covered, and to assure ourselves we’re not about to topple backwards.

We are fast approaching one of those “benchmark” moments of back-looking which are becoming noisome, ritualistic affairs of hearty self-congratulation, vacuous critiques, and paralytic inaction. The Empire has lost its rudder in the quicksand of Iraq, and neither General Petraeus’s upcoming, indubitably rosy, assessments nor the General Accounting Office’s countervailing grade of “F” will extricate that rudder any time soon. Congress will balk, Cheney will snarl, and the “dogs of war” we unleashed nearly five years ago will continue to ravage that once-prosperous land that had the misfortune to fall for a dictator we supported.

Continue Reading »

// posted by Alice @ Thursday, September 06, 2007 2 Comments

And in academic news, professor Norman Finkelstein has resigned from DePaul University after the two sides agreed on a private settlement. The deal was announced Wednesday just before a scheduled protest against the school's decision to deny Finkelstein tenure and to cancel his classes this semester. Finkelstein spoke before a crowd of about 125 supporters wearing t-shirts that read "We are all Professor Finkelstein."

• Norman Finkelstein: "I have been recognized as a public intellectual at many of the leading universities in the United States and Europe and have become an internationally recognized scholar in my academic specialties. Based on this record, I should have received tenure. It is now time for me to move on and hopefully find new ways to fulfill my own mission in life of making the world a slightly better place on leaving it than when I entered it."

// posted by Alice @ Thursday, September 06, 2007 4 Comments

The Israelis broke the sound barrier and "dropped ammunition" over deserted areas of northern Syria overnight, the spokesman was quoted by the official Syrian Arab News Agency.

"We warn the Israeli enemy government against this flagrant aggressive act, and retain the right to respond in an appropriate way," the Syrian spokesman said.

It was not clear if Syria was accusing the Israelis of using warplanes or some type of other aircraft such as drones.

"The Israeli enemy aircraft infiltrated into the Arab Syrian territory through the northern border, coming from the Mediterranean heading toward the eastern region, breaking the sound barrier," the spokesman said. "Air defense units confronted them and forced them to leave after they dropped some ammunition in deserted areas without causing any human or material damage."

Israel's army said it was looking into the report.

Israel acknowledges flying over Lebanon routinely, but it is unclear how often its aircraft fly over Syria.

At the beginning of last summer's war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, Israeli warplanes buzzed the palace of Syrian President Bashar Assad in what analysts called a warning to Damascus. They also flew over Assad's summer home in the coastal city of Latakia, after Syrian-backed Palestinian militants in Gaza captured a young Israeli soldier.

// posted by Alice @ Thursday, September 06, 2007 0 Comments

By , High Times
Posted on September 1, 2007, Printed on September 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60959/

Editor's note: There are millions of regular pot smokers in America and millions more infrequent smokers. Smoking pot clearly has far fewer dangerous and hazardous effects on society than legal drugs such as alcohol. Here is High Times's top 10 reasons to marijuana should be legal, part of its 420 Campaign legalization strategy.

10. Prohibition has failed to control the use and domestic production of marijuana. The government has tried to use criminal penalties to prevent marijuana use for over 75 years and yet: marijuana is now used by over 25 million people annually, cannabis is currently the largest cash crop in the United States, and marijuana is grown all over the planet. Claims that marijuana prohibition is a successful policy are ludicrous and unsupported by the facts, and the idea that marijuana will soon be eliminated from America and the rest of the world is a ridiculous fantasy.

9. Arrests for marijuana possession disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanics and reinforce the perception that law enforcement is biased and prejudiced against minorities. African-Americans account for approximately 13% of the population of the United States and about 13.5% of annual marijuana users, however, blacks also account for 26% of all marijuana arrests. Recent studies have demonstrated that blacks and Hispanics account for the majority of marijuana possession arrests in New York City, primarily for smoking marijuana in public view. Law enforcement has failed to demonstrate that marijuana laws can be enforced fairly without regard to race; far too often minorities are arrested for marijuana use while white/non-Hispanic Americans face a much lower risk of arrest.

8. A regulated, legal market in marijuana would reduce marijuana sales and use among teenagers, as well as reduce their exposure to other drugs in the illegal market. The illegality of marijuana makes it more valuable than if it were legal, providing opportunities for teenagers to make easy money selling it to their friends. If the excessive profits for marijuana sales were ended through legalization there would be less incentive for teens to sell it to one another. Teenage use of alcohol and tobacco remain serious public health problems even though those drugs are legal for adults, however, the availability of alcohol and tobacco is not made even more widespread by providing kids with economic incentives to sell either one to their friends and peers.

7. Legalized marijuana would reduce the flow of money from the American economy to international criminal gangs. Marijuana's illegality makes foreign cultivation and smuggling to the United States extremely profitable, sending billions of dollars overseas in an underground economy while diverting funds from productive economic development.

6. Marijuana's legalization would simplify the development of hemp as a valuable and diverse agricultural crop in the United States, including its development as a new bio-fuel to reduce carbon emissions. Canada and European countries have managed to support legal hemp cultivation without legalizing marijuana, but in the United States opposition to legal marijuana remains the biggest obstacle to development of industrial hemp as a valuable agricultural commodity. As US energy policy continues to embrace and promote the development of bio-fuels as an alternative to oil dependency and a way to reduce carbon emissions, it is all the more important to develop industrial hemp as a bio-fuel source - especially since use of hemp stalks as a fuel source will not increase demand and prices for food, such as corn. Legalization of marijuana will greatly simplify the regulatory burden on prospective hemp cultivation in the United States.

5. Prohibition is based on lies and disinformation. Justification of marijuana's illegality increasingly requires distortions and selective uses of the scientific record, causing harm to the credibility of teachers, law enforcement officials, and scientists throughout the country. The dangers of marijuana use have been exaggerated for almost a century and the modern scientific record does not support the reefer madness predictions of the past and present. Many claims of marijuana's danger are based on old 20th century prejudices that originated in a time when science was uncertain how marijuana produced its characteristic effects. Since the cannabinoid receptor system was discovered in the late 1980s these hysterical concerns about marijuana's dangerousness have not been confirmed with modern research. Everyone agrees that marijuana, or any other drug use such as alcohol or tobacco use, is not for children. Nonetheless, adults have demonstrated over the last several decades that marijuana can be used moderately without harmful impacts to the individual or society.

4. Marijuana is not a lethal drug and is safer than alcohol. It is established scientific fact that marijuana is not toxic to humans; marijuana overdoses are nearly impossible, and marijuana is not nearly as addictive as alcohol or tobacco. It is unfair and unjust to treat marijuana users more harshly under the law than the users of alcohol or tobacco.

3. Marijuana is too expensive for our justice system and should instead be taxed to support beneficial government programs. Law enforcement has more important responsibilities than arresting 750,000 individuals a year for marijuana possession, especially given the additional justice costs of disposing of each of these cases. Marijuana arrests make justice more expensive and less efficient in the United States, wasting jail space, clogging up court systems, and diverting time of police, attorneys, judges, and corrections officials away from violent crime, the sexual abuse of children, and terrorism. Furthermore, taxation of marijuana can provide needed and generous funding of many important criminal justice and social programs.

2. Marijuana use has positive attributes, such as its medical value and use as a recreational drug with relatively mild side effects. Many people use marijuana because they have made an informed decision that it is good for them, especially Americans suffering from a variety of serious ailments. Marijuana provides relief from pain, nausea, spasticity, and other symptoms for many individuals who have not been treated successfully with conventional medications. Many American adults prefer marijuana to the use of alcohol as a mild and moderate way to relax. Americans use marijuana because they choose to, and one of the reasons for that choice is their personal observation that the drug has a relatively low dependence liability and easy-to-manage side effects. Most marijuana users develop tolerance to many of marijuana's side effects, and those who do not, choose to stop using the drug. Marijuana use is the result of informed consent in which individuals have decided that the benefits of use outweigh the risks, especially since, for most Americans, the greatest risk of using marijuana is the relatively low risk of arrest.

1. Marijuana users are determined to stand up to the injustice of marijuana probation and accomplish legalization, no matter how long or what it takes to succeed. Despite the threat of arrests and a variety of other punishments and sanctions marijuana users have persisted in their support for legalization for over a generation. They refuse to give up their long quest for justice because they believe in the fundamental values of American society. Prohibition has failed to silence marijuana users despite its best attempts over the last generation. The issue of marijuana's legalization is a persistent issue that, like marijuana, will simply not go away. Marijuana will be legalized because marijuana users will continue to fight for it until they succeed.

Learn more about High Times's 420 Campaign marijuana legalization strategy.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/60959/

// posted by Alice @ Saturday, September 01, 2007 0 Comments

From: http://thegoddessfiles.com


Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in Burgundy.

A contemporary of Proust, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, and Edith Piaf, her life was her art, her lifestyle was left-bank, and no matter what else was going on (war, husbands, lovers, near-death illnesses, day jobs), she was writing.

Deep Inside the Paris Boudoirs

But when I read her novels - any of more than 50 of them! - I follow her characters like Alice following the white rabbit - into Colette approximately 1890their fringe, backstage worlds. I am seduced by the depth and color of these vibrant, foreign rooms, roads, boudoirs, dressing rooms, and after-hours dining establishments.

Relationships were her "thing." Men and women. Mothers and daughters. Women and women. Young girls dreaming of love. The layers of these relationships are deep, complex, and profound.

She started writing for Monsieur Willy, her older first husband, who (so the story goes) would lock her in a room until she finished writing the day’s required number of pages. Willy also had a nasty habit of putting his name on her books. Needless to say, the marriage didn’t work out.

Scandal and Liberation

Colette filled every moment of her life fulfilling her desire to experience, and then record. She worked as a dancer, singer, and mime in Parisian music halls and stages, and the Moulin Rouge. In 1906, she flashed a bare breast on stage - Parisshaking up even the most liberal of Paris society.
...

// posted by Alice @ Saturday, September 01, 2007 0 Comments