Whole Foods CEO Mackey Endorses Cato Book – No More Corporate Crime Prosecutions - by Russell Mokhiber

Most people who shop at Whole Foods are liberal yuppies.

They have enough money to spend $9 on a pound of cherries.

They believe that shopping for groceries at Whole Foods instead of Safeway or Food Lion or Giant or Wal-Mart is the politically correct thing to do.

They probably believe that the President and CEO of Whole Foods is a liberal like themselves.

They of course would be wrong.

John Mackey is instead a libertarian with right-wing tendencies.

Mackey says that Milton Friedman is his hero.

He’s a devotee of Ayn Rand.

He’s opposed to national health insurance.

He’s a union buster.more..


Common Dreams

Letters from Simone de Beauvoir

"the general idea is that you should feel yourself free as long as you dont betray our love, whcih could only be done if you really intended to. I fell many unpleasant remorses for having deprived you of some pleasant time. I am ashamed of it...I love you too much in a physical way too not to feel any jealousy, I think should have to be very cold blooded ... not to feel a bad pang in the heart, but this kind of animal instinct does not matter very much...next time you just sleep with the woman if you want to. Nevertheless, I take it as a tender lovely gift that this time you did not. But a gift is not an alimony; nobody is grateful for an alimony because it is due; you owe me nothing, that is why the gift was precious; dont let us make a system with it.. more...

Found atBBC

Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation by Jacques Derrida (trans. Adam Kotsko)

“God,” if you'll pardon the expression...

Pardon for not meaning2

Imagine that we left this statement to its fate.

Accept at least that for a time I abandon it thus, alone, also stripped, without goal, errant, indeed erratic: “Pardon for not meaning….” Is this statement a sentence? A sentence of a prayer? A question of which it is still too soon or already too late to know if it will have been only interrupted, deserving or excluding ellipses? “Pardon for not meaning [...].”

Unless I found this improbable phrase one day, unless it found itself, alone, visible and abandoned, exposed to every passerby, inscribed on a blackboard, legible on a wall, or right on a rock, on the surface of a piece of paper or saved on a computer disk. Here is thus the secret of a sentence: “Pardon for not meaning...,” it says.

“Pardon for not meaning...” is now a citation. The interpreter then leans over it. An archaeologist can also wonder if this sentence is complete: “Pardon for not meaning to say...” but what exactly? And to whom? Who, to whom? more..

THUS ATE ZARATHUSTRA by WOODY ALLEN

There’s nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. On a recent trip to Heidelberg to procure some rare nineteenth-century duelling scars, I happened upon just such a treasure. Who would have thought that “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Diet Book” existed? While its authenticity might appear to be a soupçon dicey to the niggling, most who have studied the work agree that no other Western thinker has come so close to reconciling Plato with Pritikin. more...

Gutted - slang book is banned

The author of what has been described as the definitive dictionary of slang is gobsmacked, gutted, throwing up bunches, honked, hipped and jacked like a cock-maggot in a sink-hole. A North Carolina school district has banned the dictionary under pressure from one of a growing number of conservative Christian groups using the internet to encourage school book bans across the US.

Jonathon Green, who compiled the 87,000 entries in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, which was published last year, said that North Carolina is the only place he knows of where the book cannot be used in schools. more...

HOW TO WRITE LIKE A LIBERAL SACK OF GARBAGE Posted by The Happy Tutor

Liberals in the broadest sense are those who write plain and candid prose on the assumption that those to whom they write, or in whose presence they write, are gentlemen and ladies who share a common commitment to fairness, truth, evidence, good humor, good sense, and courtesy. This style goes back to Horace writing epistles from his Sabine Farm as a pal of Maecenas and Augustus. It was picked up and perfected for English by Dryden in the essays drawing on the conversational style of the English coffee house. You see it in the virile plainness of Ben Jonson, and is reflected in news writing of Addison and Steele, who again wrote as if for good citizen friends around a beer or a coffee. You saw the style again in the heyday of the New Yorker in the Talk of the Town columns of E.B. White. And that style with some footnotes and academic starch, dominated Anglo-American arts and letters in figures like W.K Wimsatt, G.E. Moore and J.L. Austin. You see it defended in Swift for sermon oratory, and you see it in the blog of AKMA, in the same easy going high church style, brought down to daily doings of the parsonage, as if Sterne still wrote, awaiting his birth as his father winds the clock. The liberal writes as an honest man or woman to other members of that club, assumed in some sense to be universal. Now, of course, that plain style can be faked. Nothing is easier. The spy can write like an honest man, as can the Terrorist, or CIA plant. Information presented with a counterfeit of openness, trust and candor can be disinformation, as when provided by marketers, lobbyists, politicians, or as a public service by think tanks. The plain style is the mark of Knave and Dupe alike. more...

Interview with Hugo Chávez

Mr. Bush is an illegitimate President. In Florida, his brother Jeb deleted many black voters from the electoral registers. So this President is the result of a fraud. Not only that, he is also currently applying a dictatorship in the U.S. People can be put in jail without being charged. They tap phones without court orders. They check what books people take out of public libraries. They arrested Cindy Sheehan because of a T-shirt she was wearing demanding the return of the troops from Iraq. They abuse blacks and Latinos. And if we are going to talk about meddling in other countries, then the U.S. is the champion of meddling in other people’s affairs. They invaded Guatemala, they overthrew Salvador Allende, invaded Panama and the Dominican Republic. They were involved in the coup d’état in Argentina thirty years ago.more...

Starving season By Samuel Loewenberg

World hunger is by far the worst crisis humanity faces, and it's getting worse -- especially in Africa. Until the West overcomes its apathy and works toward long-term solutions, millions of people -- many of them children -- will continue to die unnecessarily.

In a dust-blown clinic on the southern edge of the Sahara desert, scores of women crowd into a bunkerlike structure, clutching children with emaciated limbs and listless eyes. They have come to have their babies weighed. It is a tradition known to every parent. Here, the tradition has become a nightmare.

The medical staff take an infant named Bintow from the arms of his mother and place him in a black harness attached to a hand-held scale. He shrieks at the sudden discomfort, thrashing his arms and legs. His stomach bulges, all of his ribs are visible. The child is 10 months old. He weighs 9 pounds.

Bintow is lucky, as far as it goes. He is so badly underweight that he will receive an emergency ration: two weeks' worth of enriched cornmeal and oil. Only a third of the estimated 200 children at the center that day will receive care. There is simply not enough to go around.more...

Epitaphics By Robin Blaser

Tarzan keeps saying, 'ombawa,'

and everybody does everything

including the elephants


'Wow!' she said, 'I'm out of the

rabbit hole and it’s the same.'


'If there's one thing Harry learned

to love more than the sacred, it was

the sacred in ruins'


found at:Poem of the week found as selected by George Bowering

Richard Brautigan's deep distaste for the automobile

Not driving is a personal decision, not a protest in a socially active way. . . . I don't dislike the modern world. I just don't have a love affair with the car.

I do think it's unacceptable that we have to walk around breathing what's left over from swamps and dinosaurs from prehistoric times. The noise pollution, hum, drone, shifting, grinding and roaring are enemies of silence and contemplation. . . .

Not driving is almost considered a character flaw in America. I just accept it cheerfully and have evolved the Zen art of nondriving. Because I've made this conscious decision not to drive, I've accepted and created a lifestyle around the fact that I do not have spontaneous movement. . . . more...

Brautigan Bibliography plus+

An Open Rejection Letter

It seems a little odd and rather unjust to assume that you will be rejected by Snowbooks - but since we publish about ten titles a year and receive at least three submissions a day, it's also statistically quite likely. Please don't let that put you off sending in your manuscript - we read every one quite thoroughly and you could be one of the ten! If you don't quite make it, however, here's an explanation which may or may not help. more...

By the time we get proof of climate change, it will be too late to reverse course

U.S. foot-dragging fuels global warming
By Elizabeth Kolbert

The climate system is highly inertial; it takes several decades for changes already set in motion to become apparent. Scientists probably won't be able to determine just what level of greenhouse gases will trigger, say, the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet until that level has been exceeded. But as anyone who has ever tried to push a stalled car can attest, systems that are hard to get moving also tend to be hard to stop. Although it sounds reasonable to argue that we ought to wait for certainty before taking action, if we do, effective action almost certainly will become impossible. Once we know for sure that the ice sheet is in danger of disappearing, it will be too late to reverse the process.more....

Fictocriticism, Affect, Mimesis: Engendering Differences - Anna Gibbs

I want to begin by suggesting that fictocriticism is a 'haunted writing': traced by numerous voices which work now in unison, at other times in counterpoint, and at others still against each other, in deliberate discord. The problem of haunted writing comes to the fore in academic discourse when disciplinary authority and discursive protocol function as the voice of the dead stalking the present so as to paralyse it with terror, or else as a kind of watchful superego as resistant to modification as if it were a text inscribed in stone. In an act of defiance, an attempt to exorcise the paralysing interdictions of disciplinary academic authority, feminist writers in particular have sought other relationships to such forms of authority than those of simple submission and unthinking repetition.more....

The Guantánamo Peril - Aziz Huq

Death is typically a moment of truth. But the occasion of three suicides at the Guantánamo Bay—where almost 500 men and boys have been held without trial for up to four years now—have only proved how poorly the Administration grasps the facts of today’s terrorism challenge. And it only showed how deeply ineffectual and counterproductive U.S. counter-terrorism policy becomes when based on flawed assumptions.

The U.S. response revealed how little it has learned since it first launched its “global war on terror” five years ago. The camp’s commander Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris described  the detainees’ decision as “an act of asymmetrical warfare.” The Deputy Assistant of State Colleen Graffy classed the deaths as “a good PR move.” And Southcom commander General Bantz J. Craddock commented that, “This may be an attempt to influence the judicial proceedings” of a case now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court about the President’s ad hoc military commissions. 

GLAM is sexy

GLAM is about constructing yourself as sexy not because you are required to do so in order to conform to cultural standards, but because it is possible to do so in ways that will advance the revolution. (2) People who are GLAM are sexy not because they desire to be used as sexual objects within the predefined relationships represented in Pop Culture, but becuase they wish to free themslves of these predefinitions by expressing their sexuality in a powerful way. (3) Having once decided that it is unnecessary and self-destructive to enclose one's sexuality within the possible permutations of desire presented to us, it is a realization of unlimited revolutionary potential to discover the power available in the irreverent and self-conscious use of pre-existing sexual signifiers.more...

from The Dyke rescue unit

ByThe Fabulous Lady Miss Jessica + The Fabulous Lady Miss Julia

THE NEW ANARCHISTS - DAVID GRAEBER

It’s hard to think of another time when there has been such a gulf between intellectuals and activists; between theorists of revolution and its practitioners. Writers who for years have been publishing essays that sound like position papers for vast social movements that do not in fact exist seem seized with confusion or worse, dismissive contempt, now that real ones are everywhere emerging. It’s particularly scandalous in the case of what’s still, for no particularly good reason, referred to as the ‘anti-globalization’ movement, one that has in a mere two or three years managed to transform completely the sense of historical possibilities for millions across the planet. This may be the result of sheer ignorance, or of relying on what might be gleaned from such overtly hostile sources as the New York Times; then again, most of what’s written even in progressive outlets seems largely to miss the point—or at least, rarely focuses on what participants in the movement really think is most important about it. More....


Found at New Left Review

Police launch eye-in-the-sky technology above Los Angeles

The unmanned aerial vehicle, which looks like a child's remote control toy and weighs about five pounds (2.3 kilograms), is a prototype being tested by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Police say the drone, called the SkySeer, will be able to accomplish tasks too dangerous for officers and free up helicopters for other missions.


"This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers, or survey a fire zone," said Commander Sid Heal, head of the Technology Exploration Project of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. "The ideal outcome for us is when this technology becomes instrumental in saving lives."

Global Warming Is Spurring Evolution, Study Says by Richard A. Lovett

German birds are changing migration patterns. Canadian red squirrels are reproducing earlier in the year. Mosquitoes in Newfoundland remain active longer into August.


Traditionally, scientists have viewed such changes simply as behavior modifications in the face of a changing environment—in this case, global warming.

Dodie Bellamy interviews Lyn Hejinian

The Eternal Repository

I love to writer letters. I love to receive them. And I still writer lots of them. I really do think the letter is a literary enterprise, and I always did even when I wasn’t thinking of being archived. My contemporaries and I have always insisted that our poetry is grounded in the world—and that’s really a place where the grounding can begin, the first workings out in stages of ideas, with the relationship of ideas to other things in life preserved. Maybe I’ll writer to Charles Bernstein tonight and tell him about my conversation with Dodie today, and I’ll say more about what I think about letters, and it will be an unfolding.more...

Found atChain

'Dada' at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum

NOW is as good a time as any for a big museum to take another crack at Dada, which arose in the poisoned climate of World War I, when governments were lying, and soldiers were dying, and society looked like it was going bananas. Not unreasonably the Dadaists figured that art's only sane option, in its impotence, was to go nuts too.

"Total pandemonium" was how the sculptor Hans Arp reported the situation in 1916 at the great Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where Dada was born. "Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.

Quick Notes On Lyric Prose by Fanny Howe

Aiming to come upon, or utter, a truth, it's important to be artless, because the artificial is inappropriate to this situation.

To be artless, however, you have to possess a crafty intelligence, a thorough sense of design. While truth is still beauty, embellishments are often like snares aimed to distract or conceal the truth.

The ideal prose would be fixed and not fiction. For instance, the essay can be a very lyrical form with its own aesthetic, but is undermined because of its non-ego-centered focus. Given the essayist's generosity in discussing a subject outside her historical self, the work sustains a moral luminosity.

Found at Rutgers/however/print archive

WANDA COLEMAN - THE WAR OF WARS

the twin plagues poverty and hate endure century upon

century upon century. hope crumbles like the twin Buddhas

of Bamiyan, or the great horns of Satan in the light of rapture


neutralized by shadow malignancies, and the learned cowed

by authorities who enlist religious tenets to serve oppression


citizen worth taxed then interred in acid earth/the dismissed


history of slavery-based racial dislocations and lynchings.


empty their vaults to the needy? the converted wed amens, candles

& hymns to bone sacrifice? when will the armchair poets rise?


Johnny, your gun in exchange for citizenship & scholarship?

Johnny, your heart for the invalidation of your being.


where are the reparations in culture & coin?

how, then, can the mending of our nation take place?


grandstand rhetoric and flaccid protest do not a power make. 


there is a never. there is a too late

Why White People Are Afraid

A second fear is crasser: White people's fear of losing what we have -- literally the fear of losing things we own if at some point the economic, political, and social systems in which we live become more just and equitable. That fear is not completely irrational; if white privilege -- along with the other kinds of privilege many of us have living in the middle class and above in an imperialist country that dominates much of the rest of the world -- were to evaporate, the distribution of resources in the United States and in the world would change, and that would be a good thing. We would have less. That redistribution of wealth would be fairer and more just. But in a world in which people have become used to affluence and material comfort, that possibility can be scary.

Why White People Are Afraid By Robert Jensen

Found at alternet

the riots By Charles Bukowski

I've watched this city burn twice 

in my lifetime

and the most notable thing

was the arrival of the

politicians in the

aftermath

proclaiming the wrongs of

the system

and demanding new

policies toward and for the

poor.

nothing was corrected last 

time.

nothing will be corrected this 

time.

the poor will remain poor.

the unemployed will remain

so.

the homeless will remain

homeless

and the politicians,

fat upon the land, will live

very well.


Found at bukowski.net

America's endless race wars and massacres

Massacre is an acquired taste. The United States is arguably the only country on the planet whose national personality and self-image is rooted in centuries of unremitting expansion through race war punctuated by massacre. There have always been “free-fire zones” all along the coveted, ever moving peripheries of white American power, from the “Indian country” surrounding the settler beachheads of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown to the “Sunni Triangle” of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. Whole peoples – millions – have been erased in the glorious march of American Manifest Destiny.

It is true that the globe-ravaging European colonial powers certainly killed more human beings in the course of their imperial careers than their settler sons in North America. However, the national characters of Britain, Spain, France, Holland and Belgium were already formed when the Great European Breakout and Worldwide Pillage commenced. Although their wealth was later built on the blood and bones of faraway “natives” and slaves, European civil societies were already shaped by long histories of conflict among themselves, between classes and nations on their small sub-continent. Britain and France stretched forth their naval and army tentacles to ensure that wealth arrived in Liverpool and Marseilles, but the colonized peoples did not effectively intrude on the evolution of European society.

, America's endless race wars and massacresBy Glen Ford and Peter Gamble

Found atthe Black Commentator

The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn't command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future – by thumbing or waving over their shoulders – and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past – by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones – only exactly in reverse.


Back to the Future

I’m going to talk about not poetry of the city, but poetry as a city. Poetry is a city of words, a complex heterogeneity that functions both as its parts and as a whole. It’s full of systems—metaphoric, symbolic, sonic—analogous to the sewage, electrical, and transportation systems that animate a city. You look at a jagged skyline, and see the ragged right margin; you read through the quick shifts of much contemporary poetry, and think of a busy intersection in which your view is cut off by a bus one moment, then opened up the next, and then filled with a crowd crossing the street the next.

The poetic forms most common in the Western world today emerged with modernism, itself a product of the shift in consciousness that accompanied the urban explosion of the mid–nineteenth century. Modernist poetry and cities mirror each other, shed light on each other, and remain together in important works, such as Baudelaire’s, that predict and theorize the city as much as they record it.

Poetry City
by Cole Swensen

Found at Identity Theory

Indian state bans Baa Baa Black Sheep by Maseeh Rahman in Delhi

Tens of thousands of children at Indian schools have been told they can no longer sing popular English nursery rhymes such as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Baa Baa Black Sheep.

In an attempt to rid schools of what is perceived as malign western influence, the school education minister in the state of Madhya Pradesh, Narottam Mishra, has commissioned a new set of rhymes written by Indians to "infuse a sense of patriotism" among five-year-olds.


Found at the Guardian

"something rather dark and bloody" –- and, it seems, criminal -- happened. It started with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, a "feral" unit, living in a "Lord of the Flies" encampment, on its third tour of duty in Iraq.

Collateral Damage: The "Incident at Haditha"
By Tom Engelhardt

I started studying Woolf when I was in high school, and when I was in college I did some papers on her work. I went away from her material for quite a while and then several years ago picked up a book of the short stories and just found them fascinating. I learned that she would write these stories and then put them away in a drawer. When she would get a commission for a whole piece, either from a magazine or an opportunity to do a whole novel, she would pull out a story and then flesh it out. So the stories really have all the essence of the material for a full novel but in just a few pages. Also, what fascinates me is this kind of stream of consciousness way of working where you actually experience her mind.


The Unexpected Importance of Yes: Joan La Barbara

Are the people in the service of money or is money in the service of the people? Do we live to make money or do we make money to live?
 
It appears that the world has been turned upside down and a serious misunderstanding has ensued. What do we work for? For a living? Right? Oh no, no more! We work to increase the Capital. The Capital is God in this upside-down world view. We work to give the gamblers and the usurpers the means to play with stocks and currencies at the world’s money markets.
 
In the cold world of today people are not seen as human beings with individual rights, they are mere cogs in the wheels of the gigantic machinery that keeps the stock market going. Speculation and the amassing of obscene fortunes have become the order of the day. Reward for work well done is of no importance to the brain-dead and soulless men and women who run the wars and control the money flow in today’s derailed world. And, above all, wars are essential to sustain the state of the world that is called Pax Americana.

The Capital is God in today’s world
By Siv O'Neall

Found at Axis of Logic

Who is actually guilty of bringing disrepute to the religion of Islam? The individuals and mobs who invoke the name of their prophet in the commission of crimes that revolt our very humanity? Or the cynic who responds in the only way he knows how, but within the laws of his nation?

We need to address this question in all objectivity: Who are actually bringing the name of their revered icon into the domain of infidels and unbelievers, where he then becomes a subject for open discourse, reference point and scapegoat for the crimes of believers? Only an honest answer can marginalize and disarm the psychopaths of faith, not futile attempts to force any sovereign nation to apply laws that do not conform to its own constitution and usage.

Psychopaths of Faith vs. The Muse of Irreverence, By Wole Soyinka

I beep up and again

a parasitic subshadow desire for

recaptured whereabouts

or the next motion stopping

moving signal

fall of voices with faces

slight or bemused

expecting an on coming departing rest

expecting to see how there is no

original inception transferred to

organized thinking

transferred to

off and on the job

fashionable passive consumption

the rest slides and ladders

adopting personalities

to fit created reputations

dropped off virtueless affliction

attached to everything memory

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all languages are created equal, endowed by their creators with certain inalienable meanings. These meanings are embedded in sounds and texts; in words, imagination, and the poems that bind them. Poetry is the distillation of language; the uproarious babble of human thought, and the engaging patter of consciousness itself "in all languages"”all 6,500 of them.

As the Rosetta Stone encoded language, poems encode culture and world view.Both oral and literary poets are central to the ecology of consciousness, serving as transpondents of culture itself. As ways of identifying the features of a physical landscape, language is bound up with place; its loss marks an exile for the poets who express themselves in that language. And yet, across our fragile planet, poetry and poetic traditions are increasingly endangered as their vehicles of communication, the carriers of their art, the words that constitute their lines and verses, are forgotten or misunderstood. Some estimates indicate that more than half of the world's languages will cease to be spoken within the next century



The peoples poetry Language Initiative: A Declaration of poetic rights and values Written by Steve Zeitlin, Bob Holman, and Emilia Bachrach with assistance from Jerome Rothenberg, Mark Abley, and John Foley.

In making a distinction between the School of Quietude and a blank parody of European-ish-ness, I am trying to separate the dreadfully claustrophohic notion of the "curiously inwrought thing" from a more liberatory, disruptive, and potentially queer notion of "Mannerism" by way of the metonymic distortions we find in Lacan's anamorphosis. This is not so much a literary question as much as a general inquiry about what constitutes realism and mimesis in the arts, along with the corresponding question of what the purpose of pathos might be.

By Tim Peterson at Mappemunde

Composer Gyorgy Ligeti Dies In Vienna

Composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who fled Hungary after the 1956 revolution and gained fame for his opera "Le Grand Macabre" and his work on the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," died today (June 12). He was 83.

Ligeti, celebrated as one of the world's leading 20th century musical pioneers, died in Vienna after a long illness, said Christian Krauscheid, a spokesperson for his publisher, Schott Music in Germany.

Ligeti was born in 1923 to Hungarian parents in the predominantly ethnic Hungarian part of Romania's Transylvania region.

He began studying music under Ferenc Farkas at the conservatory in Cluj, Romania, in 1941, and continued his studies in Budapest. But in 1943, he was arrested as a Jew and sentenced to forced labor for the rest of World War II. His father and brother later were murdered by the Nazis. Ligeti took Austrian citizenship after fleeing his ex-communist homeland. more...

and herewww.gyoergy-ligeti.de

Inside me, it’s all darkness. Since the beginning, I have been cautiously avoiding these dark corners, covering them up, but they grew steadily bigger until they became alienated and turned into a cancer of the spirit. Since the beginning, this has been the reality of my writing.


I no longer feel ashamed or, to put it another way, I no longer feel shame in those moments of shame. I bite my nails, pick my nose, look down on the poor, tell lies to God, spit in public places, hug myself with pleasure, am narrow-minded, support war without taking part in it, fantasize about sex, am suspicious, block my ears to the song of the swan, no longer regard art as being a kind of gold . . . But this is not the sum total of the blackness I have inside me, and if I could bring myself to face it in its entirety, I know that it would suddenly transform into light!


INSIDE ME, IT'S ALL DARKNESS -
by DUO YU

Found atPoetry International

What then is an object? In the literal sense it is: "that which has been thrown or which one throws in front." Are world-objects lying in front of us? The global dimension that characterizes them eliminates the distance between us and them which in the past defined objects. We now live in those world-objects as we live in the world.

Traditional technologies, tools and machines form units with a local range of action in space and time: the sledgehammer drives in the stake, the plow cuts the furrow, in sum, they define an environment where few humans worked, for example a family living on a farm. Such a division of the world into localities allows for a philosophy of mastery and possession, because we can define what we dominate, how we dominate it and who is meant by this we. As the range of action of the objects increased, so did the number of humans that produced or used them; but also vice-versa in a kind of feedback. Smelting furnaces and airline companies do not mobilize the same groups; the concentration and size of subjects condition those of objects. However, the reverse also takes place.

Little by little globalization forms a new universe based on thermal techniques and developed further by the quantitative increase of world-objects. We see these now as technical, physical, and we will soon see them as human and legal as well. Can we still call these things objects, and the people who use them subjects? Are our communication networks objects?


Revisiting The Natural Contract
By Michel Serres

Found atCtheory

Little seems to have changed in the past century, for now we have George W. Bush, leader of the free world, telling us, before invading Afghanistan in 2001, that he was doing it as much to free the country's women as to hunt down Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Five years later, the Taliban is making a serious comeback, and the country's new Constitution prohibits any laws that are contrary to an austere interpretation of Sharia. Furthermore, among the twenty-odd reasons that were foisted on the American public to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, of course, the subjugation of women; this, despite the fact that the majority of Iraqi women were educated and active in nearly all sectors of a secular public life. Three years into the occupation, the only enlightened aspect of Saddam's despotic rule has been dismantled: Facing threats from a resurgent fundamentalism, both Sunni and Shiite, many women have been forced to quit their jobs and to cover because not to do so puts them in harm's way. Why Mr. Bush does not advocate for the women of Thailand, the women of Botswana or the women of Nepal is anyone's guess.

The Missionary Position
by LAILA LALAMI

Found atThe Nation

Cinema died on the 31st September 1983 when the zapper, or the remote control, was introduced into the living-rooms of the world. 


Cinema is a passive medium. It might well have fulfilled many of the expectations of an audience of our fathers and forefathers prepared to sit back, watch illusions and suspend disbelief, but I believe we can no longer claim this to be sufficient. New technologies have prepared and empowered the human imagination in new ways. There is, as we all well know, brand new audiences out there who make up not just a television generation, but a post-television generation where the characteristics of the laptop are persuasive and generate new demands and create new benchmark standards. The ideas of excessive choice, personal investigation, personal communication and huge interactivity have come a long way since September 1983, and the act of cinema has had to exist alongside and be a partner to a whole new world of multiple-media activities, which have all intrinsically metamorphosed cinema itself. Interactivity and multimedia may well be words that are too familiar anymore to be truly attended to, but they are certainly the major contemporary cultural stimulants. How will cinema cope with them, because it surely must. If the cinema intends to survive, I believe, it has to make a pact and a relationship with concepts of interactivity, and it has to see itself as only part of a multimedia cultural adventure. 

Cinema Militans Lecture Toward a re-invention of cinema  
by Peter Greenaway

and ravaged by the next ripped paper horror

impossible opaque tape

paraded dead monumental achievement

no way to gage distance

craving saccharin

another short sorry story life

unreadable

off track

thinking track

thinking lost nothing

in green snake

slithering dawn

Encyclopedia: VoI. 1 A-E

Encyclopedia: VoI. 1 A-Efeatures the work of the following artists and writers:

Morgan Adamson, Afua Kafi-Akua, Laylah Ali, Jess Arndt, Ron Athey, Kelli Auerbach, Chiara Barzini, Susan Bernstein, Louky Bersianik, Jorge Luis Borges, Ricardo Bracho, Poppy Brandes, Julianna Bright, Rebecca Brown, AK Burnes, Mary Cappello, Jonathan Ceniceroz, Greg Chandler, Barbara Christian, Jamie Cortez,Brenda Coultas, Paula Cronan, Brent Cunningham, Samuel R. Delany, Matthew Derby, Bob Doto, Rikki Ducornet, kari edwards, Jacob Eichert, Mikhail Epstein, Brian Evenson Thalia Field, Harrell Fletcher, Sandy Florian, Diana George, William Gillespie, Michael Gizzi, Robert Glück, Billy Gomberg, Minal Hajratwala, Duriel Harris, Jordan Harrison, Katie Hays, Patrick "Pato" Herbert, Tanya Hollis, Joanna Howard, Erika Howsare
Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Laird Hunt, Sara Jaffe, Xylor Jane, Jeff Johnson, john R. Keene, Jr., Miriam Klein-Stahl, Kate Kunath
Sarah LaBrie, Ana M. Lara, Catherine Liu, Kenyetta Lovings, Sarah Madsen, Katherine Mann, Sara Marcus, Melissa Maristuen, Dawn Lundy Martin, Carole Maso, Andrew McAleaveym Annie Medina, James Meetze, Bernadine Mellis, Talan Memmott, EE Miller, K. Silem Mohammad, Eileen Myles,Christian Nagler, Kofi Natambu, Kirthi Nath, Cynthia Nelson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Alice Notley, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Akilah Oliver, Sally Oswald, Micah Perks, M. Nourbese Philip, Praba Pilar, Corinna Press,, Frances Richard, Deborah Richards, Damien Riggs, Lisa Robertson, Jocelyn Saidenberg , Kate Schatz, Carolee Schneeman, Christine Schutt, Gail Scott, Sara Seinberg, Prageeta Sharma , Sun Yung Shin, Mahwash Shoaib, Zak Smith, Julianna Snapper, Anna Joy Springer, Christopher Stackhouse, Vincent Standley, Suzanne Stein, Chuleenan Svetvilas, Livia Tenzer, Padcha, Tuntha-Obas , Deb Olin Unferth, Fred Wah, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Noah Waldrip-Fruin , Michelle Weinberg, Celia Wiley, Diane Williams, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Matt Wolf

I wish to go more and more outside to be among the problems of nature and problems of human beings in their working places. This will be a regenerative activity; it will be a therapy for all of the problems we are standing before.... I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context.

statements by Joseph Beuys

Found at dia art foundation

Ode To The Maggot

Listen

Brother of the blowfly

And godhead, you work magic

Over battlefields,

In slabs of bad pork


And flophouses. Yes, you

Go to the root of all things.

You are sound & mathematical.

Jesus, Christ, you're merciless


With the truth. Ontological & lustrous,

You cast spells on beggars & kings

Behind the stone door of Caesar's tomb

Or split trench in a field of ragweed.


No decree or creed can outlaw you

As you take every living thing apart. Little

Master of earth, no one gets to heaven

Without going through you first.


By Yusef Komunyakaa


The internet poetry archive

We are not entirely human, germ gene experts argue

We are somehow like an amalgam, a mix of bacteria and human cells. There are some estimates that say 90 percent of the cells on our body are actually bacteria.more...

HOWL TURNS 50!

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HELLO, CRUEL WORLD LITE : BETA 1.0.1

You’re better off alive, no matter how messed up you think you might be right now. And you’re better off alive no matter how mean someone is being to you. You are simply better off alive than dead—no matter who or what you are, no matter who or what you love, and no matter what you do. Just don’t be mean. Being mean never works. Never. So that’s the only rule I can think of that’s worth following in life: don’t be mean. Yes, you can be mean to yourself if that’s what’s going to keep you alive. I’m sorry if that’s happening to you. But keep in mind that there are alternatives that hurt a lot less, and I hope you find one soon. Do what you have to do, and stay alive because it gets better. I promise. xoxo Kate

FROM KATE BORNSTEIN'S NEW BOOK: AN OUTLAW’S MINI-GUIDE TO SURVIVAL BASICS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

“It is my conclusion as an officer of the Armed Forces that the war in Iraq is not only morally wrong but a horrible breach of American law. Although I have tried to resign out of protest, I am forced to participate in a war that is manifestly illegal. As the order to take part in an illegal act is ultimately unlawful as well, I must as an offficer of honor and integrity refuse that order."

“The war in Iraq violates our democratic system of checks and balances. It usurps international treaties and conventions that by virtue of the Constitution become American law. The wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of the Iraqi people with only limited accountability is not only a terrible moral injustice, but a contradiction of the Army’s own Law of Land Warfare. My participation would make me party to war crimes."

Army lieutenant who won’t go to Iraq issues recorded statement

On Simple Human Decency

I am therefore led to wonder what the common citizen is allowed to “say” anymore, in print or otherwise, and still feel reasonably sure that some indignant team of G-men, or else a pair of gung-ho local screws, will not drag him away to a detention center, there to act out, with the detainee as a prop, that familiar scene in which one hero cop or another is patriotically unable to resist certain outbursts against the detainee and what were once imagined to be the detainee's constitutional rights. Because I am loath to violate whatever fresh new mores the people have agreed upon, or have been told they agree upon, and because I do not care to have my ass kicked repeatedly in a holding cell while I beg to see a lawyer, I almost hesitate to ask the following question. I will ask it, though, out of what used to be called simple human decency:
Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?

By Ben Metcalf more....

Found at Harper's Magazine

Kate Greenstreet interviews CACONRADon How has your first book changed your life?

The most usual way of appeasing the indignation of such as we have any way offended, when we see them in possession of the power of revenge, and find that we absolutely lie at their mercy, is by submission, to move them to commiseration and pity; and yet bravery, constancy, and resolution, however quite contrary means, have sometimes served to produce the same effect.

THAT MEN (sic) BY VARIOUS WAYS ARRIVE AT THE SAME END by MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Found at Project Gutenberg

Democracy and its Corruptions

‘The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.’ That sentence, so resonant with recent events all over the world and particularly in America, was written by Acton in 1877. The problems with democracy have a long pedigree. One problem is that democracy has always had two definitions. The first definition is government by and for all the people. Since the word democracy means literally ‘the people rule,’ we may take this to be the true as well as the desirable meaning; but it is hard to implement in practice, because a ‘people’ will have many different interests, all clamouring to be heard and acted upon. In practice, the only way it can be implemented is for government to remain above and beyond the clamour of different interests; but this is not the route that has been travelled.

The second definition, easier to implement but potentially much less satisfactory, is government by a simple majority. And ‘government by majority’ is all too apt to degenerate into government by a minority, as disillusioned voters, who feel they are represented by no particular party, drop out of the voting altogether.

Democracy, Fascism and the New World Order
Ivo Mosley

Keith Waldrop - Soft Hail

Afterwards, to tell how it was possible to

identify absolute space, a matter of great

difficulty, keeping in mind always

that not all old music is beautiful and

therefore it's necessary to choose. Ice

loading and unloading as the ice caps

wax and wither. Brutal and uncouth from the beginning

even unto time, space, place, motion.

How are we to obtain true motion? I

predict a fiasco - and a fiasco

with cat-calls. Wind-circulation in the

case of plants, predators in the case

of animals, affecting their distribution on

the ancient land masses. And

who will conduct the chorus and

orchestra? Many things exist at once.

Predilection and preference. Begin

with the storm. more....

T H E H A M I L T O N S T O N E R E V I E W

Spring 2006 (Issue No. 9)

Poetry

Rodney Nelson
kari edwards 
Sybil Kollar
Lanny Quarles
Michelle Greenblatt and Sheila E. Murphy
Jan Clausen
Jeanne Shannon
Alan Sondheim
Janet Jackson
Bob Marcacci
Simon Perchik


Fiction
 
D. L. Luke 
Grant Tracey
Aaron Gilbreath
Charles Rammelkamp
Mark MacNamara
Rebecca Kraft

 
Non-fiction

Lori Horvitz
Tim Murphy

it occurs to fill the pain of shame

occurs in an images

occurs for every thinking image

causes respect for worldly position

a corpse regulated formula

sometimes borrowed from lips

sometimes heard though walls

corrupt because

there is another

no longer other

stranger grasping mad

criminally insane


pale liberation

hope monster

vast vortex borne

amid a mass of haze


creative jingo

with ceaseless horizons

the master’s troubled eden

solemn agitation and

tranquil digital crimson


true love

a true self

someone's country god

ornamental tribute


misery's silent massive night

possessing a chance

to posses

accomplished possession

as far as the eye can see


dog devotion

reduced to violent affliction

a whole hearted hell

in a false abyss

purity for perfect

reproduction

nothing for an

illusional devotion

reflected

down a street

named misery

The List: The World’s Water Crises

If oil was the resource of the 20th century, then the 21st century belongs to water. The lack of clean water and basic sanitation already curbs world economic growth by $556 billion a year, according the World Health Organization. Foreign Policy looks at four countries struggling to quench their thirst.

September 13

John Travolta is in your kitchen, propped in front of an open refrigerator with his face wrapped in damp dishtowels. You’ve got three fans blowing on him—two oscillators set on wooden chairs and a Super Tornado duct-taped on top of the fridge door breezing steadily across his face. You unwrap it to see a flattened nose, a glass eye skewed in its socket, his broad comic face sagging like a stroke victim.



You curse.



Rule number one: Don’t steal a wax-museum statue from people who can hurt you. Rule number two: Don’t transport it to your apartment in a beat-out Subaru in late summer when the mercury is pushing past 90 and the air conditioner is dead as dead. You were so close, a few feet, within inches, and now here you are: You alone with Travolta. Alone with a libido so gone that all the gods of myth and man can’t do a thing to resurrect it.

from R-72 by Michael Mazza

zyzzyva.org

When the international system for the protection of human rights was developed after the second world war, it was largely in response to Nazi atrocities. The Nazis had held a collective belief that the German nation was a living organism and that its well-being was threatened by "useless eaters" and "life unworthy of life."[1] The German medical profession, 45% of whom belonged to the Nazi Party in the early 1930s, was empowered to tend to the health of the national organism. The psychiatric branch of the profession led the way by "medically killing" some 80,000 -- 100,000 hospitalised mental patients. The expertise the Nazi psychiatrists acquired in killing off their mental patients was later applied to Jewish people.

How Involuntary Psychiatric Treatment Violates Basic Human Rights
By Richard Gosden


Long long ago, back when the world was young - that is, sometime around the year 1958 - a lot of artists and composers and other people who wanted to do beautiful things began to look at the world around them in a new way (for them).

They said: "Hey! - coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants. The sloshing of my foot in my wet boot sounds more beautiful than fancy organ music."

And when they saw that, it turned their minds on. And they began to ask questions. One question was: "Why does everything I see that's beautiful like cups and kisses and sloshing feet have to be made into just a part of something fancier and bigger? Why can't I just use it for its own sake?"

When they asked questions like that, they were inventing Fluxus; but this they didn't know yet, because Fluxus was like a baby whose mother and father couldn't agree on what to call it - they knew it was there, but it didn't have a name.

A Child's History of Fluxus
Dick Higgins

Found atArt no art

National Security Agency Will "Neither Confirm Nor Deny" Surveillance of LGBT Community "2006 is the new 1984," says SLDN

Washington, DC - In a June 5 letter to counsel for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), the National Security Agency (NSA) says it will "neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence" of information that may have been obtained through agency surveillance of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.  SLDN sought information, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, after media reports indicated the agency may have been monitoring groups and individuals opposed to the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban on lesbian, gay and bisexual personnel.  The June 5 letter was sent in response to SLDN's appeal of NSA's refusal to release any information related to that surveillance.  The appeal was filed on SLDN's behalf by the law firm of Proskauer Rose LLP.
                                                                                               
"2006 is the new 1984," said SLDN executive director C. Dixon Osburn.  "The federal government's Orwellian surveillance programs of ordinary, law-abiding citizens violates our right to privacy under current law.  The government's refusal to disclose its surveillance programs erodes the public trust."
 
The NSA letter, from William B. Black, Jr., notes that "any substantive response to [the original] request would tend to confirm or deny specific activities."  SLDN has up to five years to appeal the NSA's response.
 
In January, the Department of Defense acknowledged that it had "inappropriately" conducted surveillance on student protestors at several universities.  The Pentagon has also indicated it has additional surveillance materials, in the form of government TALON reports, which will be released at a later date.  Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said the surveillance program is "no big deal

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
 
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,'' and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''

I reviewed the directions my neighbor Volker had written out for me, periodically checking back and forth between them and my pocket Métro/RATP map as the train sped towards the Bastille station. Volker, who lived in the apartment across the hall from where I was staying during my research sabbatical in Paris, had told me that he visited this bar at least once a month, and he'd assured me, though we'd only had a few conversations and hadn't discussed my particular bar tastes, or tastes in men for that matter, that I'd like it. For a moment I wondered if I should get off at the next stop and try to find my way to one of the other bars I'd picked out myself, or even just go back home and read through the lone paragraph that I'd written based on three weeks of archival work on Louis XIV's edict of 1685 -- which had become the code noir -- and the regulation of slavery and black bodies. I could see its opening sentence as if it were now sitting on my lap: "The question of the humanity of any human being should never be a question." The thought of the next sentence, from which I couldn't summon a single word, and of the paltry few that followed and failed to fill out even half a page sank my spirits, so I refocused my thoughts on my destination. Evenings out had always recharged me back in Chicago.

Black Code by John Keene


Found at Blithe House Quarterly

Aimee Nezhukumatathil - BEE WOLF

Not a bee. Not a wolf. A wasp.
Once I saw one try to lift a lizard
off a wall. The lizard did nothing, only
held its pink suction toes a bit tighter.
But after a few stings, the lizard’s

tongue flicked furious, and it fell.
I’ve felt it too. When a man you love
won’t love you back, almost nothing
can pry your sticky fingers from a phone,
even if you just want to hear the pause

in his voice you know so well—so well
you could pick out his exact breath
in a darkened room full of men. A mother
bee wolf teaches its babies well. To dig
an underground cell of soil almost

a yard deep, she carries a pebble at a time back
to the surface in her shiny mandibles.
Paints a white spot with her furry legs
on the place where her baby should start
digging once it’s ready to try the lavender air.

This new wasp will find a lizard of her very
own. At least she has a direction—I am sick
with the lack. I need a mark, a tattoo
etched on the arch of my foot, telling me
to hold on, clutch only what is mine.


Found at Melic Review

I’d sit down and write a thought that I’ve had or used in other writings or something that’s just occurred to me. I’ll give you two examples. I’ve been near people dying. Parents and loved ones have died in my lifetime. I’ve become fascinated and in the throes of the idea of death and what happens. But that’s too heavy to put into a musical thing. So, I wanted to do it in a lighter way and attempted to do that with “You’ll Have Time.” Another instance is when I was once on my way to Nashville and read a tabloid in an airplane and I see the term “has been” referring to me. I’ve always gone off on that term. It’s such a stupid thing used by these stupid people as a pejorative. The truth of the matter is somebody’s been somebody and like a flower, you spring out, flower and then ultimately, the petals fall off one way or another in some time or another. It happens to all living things. To call a flower a has been is as idiotic as calling a great artist who hasn’t done anything in the last while a has been. WILLIAM SHATNER Exploring strange new musical worlds
by Anil Prasad

Found atInnerviews


Imperialism is constant for capitalism. But it passes through various phases as the system evolves. At present the world is experiencing a new age of imperialism marked by a U.S. grand strategy of global domination. One indication of how things have changed is that the U.S. military is now truly global in its operations with permanent bases on every continent, including Africa, where a new scramble for control is taking place focused on oil.

A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy
by John Bellamy Foster

Monthly Review

Kenji Sirato - [MECHANISM OF ANGEL]

The pure white cell: the clone city boys of this sun line nerve end of dustNirverna is murdered to the blue of the sky. The vision=the placenta form paradise of the ADAM doll where the larva machine of wind....syndrome of the cute vagina of the gimmick girl: the paradise that the soul-machine of the drug embryo that uterus-machine of the future, cyber dog that resuscitate explode short be parasitic is parasitic*the zero-speed of the chromosome: vacuum war myself and yourself of the DNA=channel that synchronizes head line of BABEL animals inheriteds along the clonic suicide line of the artificial sun. more

We don’t represent Iraqi women, we are women from Iraq who have witnessed the occupation and we are here to tell our side of the story. We want people to know how the Iraqi people have not only suffered from the severe sanctions but are now suffering again from this unjust war. Our basic infrastructure such as schools, bridges, hospitals, sewage, and water system have been destroyed. Everything was destroyed completely and only the ministry of oil was saved. In the search for Saddam Hussein, our children, women and men are constantly under bombardment. We ask ourselves how and why did this happen? Iraq is even smaller than the state of California. All this destruction was done under the guise of searching for weapons of mass destruction and toppling Saddam Hussein. Instead, the US administration toppled the whole of Iraq, destroyed houses and the lives of people.

Voices of Resistance: Women Speak Out
Azza Basarudin and Khanum Shaikh
Interview Amal Al-Khedairy and Nermin Al-Mufti

What happens when we are the objects of the violence and fetishizations that we study in classrooms with instructors who are not equipped to notice the impact? What happens to the mind-body split that we must perform as a matter of course in academia? What happens when we study and write about autobiography from within our own narratives? What happens when the narrative we study is not just an object on a microscope slide but resonates within our lovers, our sisters, friends, cousins, grandmothers and elders' lives and experiences? Where do we put this excess energy that is the receptacle of the colonial past and has no place in this academic space? What fills up the vacuum that is created in this enormous act of emptying the self of emotional content and triggers because it is not what is done up here? The discourses of personal narrative, artistic expression of self, or emotional outbursts are not part of the Manichean division that privileges words and languages over all else.
http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/laflamm2.htm

An "Uppity" Memoir and some "Cheeky" tips:
On what it is like for me to be a woman of colour at a university whose structure is still predominantly white and Eurocentric in its focus
 By Michelle La Flamme

Found atthirdspace

This work brings fragmentary objects into contact with one another to create resonances, juxtapositions, rifts, networks. mirroR facing Blankness uses reading and seeing as techniques for assembling. The text is an assemblage of words that are connected to one another on different functional planes (meaning, sound, repetition, proximity), and the readers experience becomes an assemblage of images derived from attempting to parse the text. Procedural readings applied to this labyrinth emphasize the artifice of the combinations, and create new sets of connections. 

(de-)facing "mirroR facing Blankness": essay and notes by poet and composer
Jon Sakata and Christopher Jones

Found atsapaan

There are various systems that allow moral compulsion, derived from overly active view of perfection. another tradition, a select few with a limited numbered versions, innately known to the limited numbered intrinsically determined paths layered in modified fat truism, regulate monetary offerings, religious judgments, or armed conflict.

Hermeneutics and Critical Hermeneutics: Exploring Possibilities Within the Art of Interpretation - Elizabeth Anne Kinsella

FERRARIS (1996) defines hermeneutics as "the art of interpretation as transformation" and contrasts it with a view of theory as "contemplation of eternal essences unalterable by their observer" (p.1). In these post-positivistic times, the need to make explicit the art of interpretation, and the transformative possibilities within, has never been more urgent. This paper suggests that hermeneutic thought has much to offer those interested in qualitative inquiry and, as SCHWANDT (2001) points out, serves as a major source of ideas for qualitative inquiry. Most research is informed by philosophical underpinnings that originate in unacknowledged and implicit philosophical traditions. I suggest that qualitative research is by its very nature informed by hermeneutic thought, although this link is not often made explicit in qualitative research writing. On a broad level, greater attention to the tradition of hermeneutic scholarship can enrich, substantiate and make explicit assumptions about interpretation and understanding that are central to qualitative research. Given that the emphasis in qualitative research is on understanding and interpretation as opposed to explanation and verification, and that the parallel emphasis is evident in hermeneutic thought, where for instance GADAMER (1996) demonstrates that understanding (verstehen) is the universal link in all interpretation of any kind, the connection between qualitative research and hermeneutic thought becomes self-evident. more....

Oil and Poverty Alleviation Don't Mix

The African nation of Chad has forced the World Bank to back down in a dispute that illustrates the problems with lending to poor nations for oil and gas production.

The dispute reached full boil in January when the World Bank decided, in a rare move for an organization that's reluctant to admit to anything ever going amiss with its lending, to suspend a controversial and historic loan it made to Chad. Then, in April, Chad's oil minister Hassan Nasser threatened to stop the 160,000 barrels a day flowing through its pipeline unless the Bank reversed its decision. With oil prices topping $75 a barrel at that time, and the World Bank apparently more accountable to its oil-hungry clients than to the poor in Chad, the World Bank was the first to blink.

Searching for a modern utopia

When the anti-capitalist movement began to emblazon its banners with the slogan “Another World is Possible”, it signalled the revival of a utopianism that had been furled up and forgotten for at least a couple of decades.

Utopianism – the attempt to envisage a different, better world – was one victim of the right wing onslaught led by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US. From 1979, when Thatcher took office, utopianism seemed unacceptable. “There is no alternative” was the slogan associated with the neo-liberal ideology she helped engineer.

I am torn to shreds by an impluse; a sence of duty that leads everyone to speak on topics, policy and mean provisions, keeping all ism’s to general common sence palette. Accodingly to one tradtion, the picture conflicts with the conflict, or the conflict conflicts with emplty orgainisms and mallable products.