Badlands Journal

Here are three articles written in the last two days on the Israeli military act of piracy against the flotilla of people and supplies headed for the Gaza Strip. Each has valuable insights from experienced, different angles. We think, however, that the most immediate lesson for us may be Patrick Cockburn's theory of why Israel leaders are so stupid: "The problem is that nobody believes Israeli propaganda as much as Israelis." The same phenomenon explains the idiocy of our own leaders here in the Valley.

Maybe they all go to the same leadership training classes.

6-2-10
CounterPunch.com
Mad-Dog of the Planet
Notch Up Another Disaster for Israel's Well-Oiled Propaganda Machine
By PATRICK COCKBURN

2-25-10
The Independent (UK)
Gaddafi son sparks crisis with arrest at Swiss hotel
By Peter Popham
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/gaddafi-son-sparks-crisis-with-arrest-at-swiss-hotel-876809.html
Diplomatic relations between Switzerland and Libya were in crisis yesterday after Libya vowed "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" in retaliation for the Swiss authorities putting Hannibal, the youngest son of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, in jail for two days.
Libya announced it would halt fuel supplies to Switzerland and bar the country's ships from its ports in protest at what it called the "fabricated" and "illegitimate" charges against one of Col Gaddafi's seven sons.
Hannibal Gaddafi, 30, who has a record of run-ins with police across Europe, was arrested and jailed on 15 July after staff at the luxury Geneva hotel where he was staying alerted police to violent rows in his suite. Mr Gaddafi and his wife, Aline, who is nine months' pregnant, were arrested and charged with maltreating their domestic staff. He was held in custody and later released on bail; she was taken to hospital when she complained of feeling unwell.

When the fascist regimes rose in Europe, scholars could continue their work by taking refuge in countries whose universities remained unaffected by government pressure. They could go to France, Canada, the United States. But since then, a new and infinitely vaster danger has arisen to unfettered academic activities. This is the irresistible pressure emanating from the explosive dimensions of modern mass societies, which can educationally be accommodated only by universities of vast scale. Though these are no less destructive to scholarship than tyrannical governments, one can no longer escape their strangulating effect, as was possible under fascism, merely by taking refuge in other countries. There are none left which do not share the mounting pressure of their increasing multitudes. Geographically, only flight to another planet could solve the problem.

Yet, there is one last way out. This is for scholarship to change its location not geographically but institutionally; to flee not from the earth to another planet but from the university to another establishment, an institution which by nature is immune to persecution from mass pressure because of the intrinsic smallness of its material frame; and from ideological pressure because it exerts a dissolvent effect on all solidified ideas as a result of the fragmentising radiation to which it exposes everything. This institution - the last refuge of the humanities - is the inn.

As old readers of Badlands know, we've been great fans of George Monbiot for years and always recommend people visit Monbiot.com for a broad, deep perspective on environmental issues. Monbiot was in Copenhagen for the UN climate change conference. His report begins with a call for human decency and ends with a report of the probably tragedies arising from the failure of human decency at this conference. Of course, if tragedy is uncomfortable, one can always join the climate-change deniers and the onward stampede to continue idiotically plundering nature and destroying whole continents. This international mentality is mirrored at the local level because sewage always flows downhill. Apparently, awareness of natural limits on the planet has driven the major power states in the world into nakedly anti-democratic aggression against their own people and others. It is as if present and past imperial powers, when confronted with the planet's growing ecological distress, regress to imperial patterns of 150 years ago. Their policy is to seize more control while rejecting any responsbility for the human element in global climate change.

7-22-09

Merced Sun-Star

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/177/story/963037.html

Letter: Patience is needed

Editor: Gary Frago made a mistake. He has admitted it and has apologized for it. Like others, I was surprised and disappointed. From serious eye-opening experiences like this, humble people can learn and grow from them.

Give Gary Frago a chance to address the issue from all angles, spiritual included. Elections are the time to select our City Council persons.

 
  

It's good to remember heroes when times look dark -- BLJ

University of California Riverside   
Ernesto Galarza Applied Research Center

Activism and Intellectual Struggle in the Life of Ernesto Galarza (1905-1984) with an Accompanying Bibliography by Richard Chabran first published in: Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 1985, Vol 7 No. 2, 135-152
http://www.clnet.ucla.edu/EGARC/about.html

Ernesto Galarza was a man of stature. He was a man of conviction and action. He was recognized both within the Chicano community and, as witnessed by his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, internationally. He knew his mission in life and pursued it with a rare precision and determination. Yet Don Ernesto was also a humble man of letters. This small tribute in no way pretends to be comprehensive; our intention is to provide an outline of his life and work and provide a glimpse of the person behind these actions.

We were curious about an agenda item for the Merced County Planning Commission that appeared in late February: "To permit (legalize) the raising of up to 40 roosters as a hobby and occasional sales, on a 9.7 acre parcel."

When we read further, we realized we'd passed this rooster ranch in Stevinson not long before and had commented that someone must be raising fighting cocks on the site. There seemed no other explanation for a field full of little pens holding individual roosters that did not look like White Leghorns or Plymouth Barred Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, Araucanas, Banties or any other typical barnyard variety of chicken. They looked like gamecocks. It was our general impression that cockfighting is supposed to be illegal in California, although it is a law widely disobeyed since its passage. We were also aware of something of a campaign against raising gamefowl in the county in recent years and a number of cockfight busts. So, we, the perpetually ignorant public, wondered what this agenda item could be doing in front of the planning commission rather than on the Sheriff's blotter. We asked someone at a county office about it, but she just rolled her eyes and said she didn't always read the documents she distributed.

Members of the public called the editorial board and suggested they watch the video of the planning commission meeting. They said it was one of the most mysterious moments they had ever witnessed in local government.

In a Berkeley lecture hall 20 years ago, someone asked the speaker, Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, who his influences were. This is one story contained in Hugo Chavez' gift to Obama of Galeano's book, Open Veins of Latin America.

Galeano said that night that one of his main influences was American writer John dos Passos. There are plain connections between Galeano's work and dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy. Galeano's books, particularly Open Veins and the Memory of Fire Trilogy, helped a new generation of Americans rediscover dos Passos. 

Sidebar 1: American novelist William Faulkner was a major influence on Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia-Marqez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Sidebar 2: Chavez revealed a literary taste few in North America suspected.

Sidebar 3: Chavez is much more "media savvy" than the talking meat heads of the US media uncovered. In 2005, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Nicaragua started their own international TV network, Telesur. Galeano is a member of its board.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.