Duh
Bob Morris @ Nov 5th 2005 22:01 - Category: Unfiled ;
From AmSam
Mark Crispin Miller: "Kerry told me he now thinks the election was stolen"Future leaders are going to have to think a lot faster than that.
Archive for November 5th, 2005
Something’s happening here
Bob Morris @ Nov 5th 2005 18:22 - Category: Unfiled ;
BBC: French violence enters 10th night
The Guardian: French cabinet in crisis as riots erupt nationwide
The Telegraph: A country in flames. French cities teeter on the edge of anarchy
Oddly, there’s practically nothing about this on the homepage of Paris Indymedia. Are they out participating in it? Conflicted? Or, more probably, stunned by the suddenness and ferocity like everyone else.
The Premier just made it clear he does not want his top cops calling the protestors "scum", as this only makes things worse. Unless it, um, burns itself out, then the only state solution is to send in the military, something they are no doubt loathe to do in their own cities. Not to mention that it could lead to lots of dead bodies and serious escalation.
Technorati tag: Paris riots
Should be satire, isn’t
Bob Morris @ Nov 5th 2005 14:50 - Category: Unfiled ;
Insurrection
Bob Morris @ Nov 5th 2005 09:24 - Category: Unfiled ;
Rioting spreads from Paris across France
Marauding youths torched nearly 900 vehicles, stoned paramedics and burned a nursery school in a ninth night of violence that spread from Paris suburbs to towns around France, police said Saturday.
More on King Leopold, genocidal capitalist
Bob Morris @ Nov 5th 2005 08:16 - Category: Unfiled ;
Continuing on from our previous post, "And the worst genocidial killer in history was…"
The image is of a stock certificate for a Belgian Rubber company operating in the Congo in 1901, almost certainly one of King Leopold’s companies. Many millions, yes millions, of Congolese died and were tortured so he could enrich himself. (The stock certificate is for sale here.)
This was predatory capitalism, and racist to the core.
Under Leopold II’s administration, the Congo Free State was subject to a terror regime, including atrocities such as mass killings and maimings which were used to subjugate the indigenous tribes of the Congo region and to procure slave labor.
He set in train a brutal colonial regime to maximize profitability. The first change was the introduction of the concept of terres vacantes "vacant" land, which was anything that no European was living on. This was deemed to belong to the state, and servants of the state (i.e., any white men in Leopold’s employ) were encouraged to exploit it.
To enforce the rubber quotas, the Force Publique (FP) was called in. The FP was an army whose purpose was to terrorize the local population. The officers were white agents of the State. Armed with modern weapons and the chicotte, a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide, the Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages (mostly women), flogged, and raped the natives. They also burned recalcitrant villages, and above all, took human hands as trophies on the orders of white officers to show that bullets hadn’t been wasted.
Finally, activism - and results.
Edmund Dene Morel, a clerk in a major Liverpool shipping office and a part-time journalist began to wonder why the ships that brought vast loads of rubber from the Congo returned full of guns and ammunition for the Force Publique. He left his job and became a full-time investigative journalist, and then (aided by merchants who wanted to break into Leopold’s monopoly or, as chocolate millionaire William Cadbury who joined his campaign later, used their money to support humanitarian causes), a publisher. In 1902 Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness was released: based on his brief experience as a steamer captain on the Congo ten years before, it encapsulated the public’s growing concerns about what was happening in the Congo.
Heart of Darkness wasn’t the dark allegory into the human condition that it is portrayed as today, it was stone-cold political. (This is a favored deception of the Right, by the way, rationalizing savagery and greed as being an unchangeable part of the human condition.) It was Joseph Conrad and Edmund Morel who mobilized public opinion and finally, after too many years, the governments of Europe acted against Leopold.
Finally, on 1908-NOV-15, four years after the Casement Report and six years after Heart of Darkness was first printed, the Parliament of Belgium annexed the Congo Free State and took over its administration.
Too little, too late. But at least Congolese were no longer being murdered so this moral cripple could amass more wealth.
A water oligopoly in the making?
Bob Morris @ Nov 5th 2005 08:14 - Category: Water ;
New federal regulations in the US seem likely to trigger the rapid oligopolization of the US water utility market. That’s according to a story in The New York Times ("It Doesn’t Mix With Oil, and the Market Is Drinking It Up", 10/30/2005).Currently, most the US’s water and sewage systems are owned by local, municipal or semi-public companies. There are a total 55,000 of such utilities, and (according to the article, 95% of them serve fewer than 3,000 homes each. Most of these systems are over 50 years old, and many are in need of serious maintenance campaigns.
But the kicker is that these cash-starved services are about to get hit by new government regulations.
These regs, which mandate new water quality standards, make it likely these small water companies will get bought out by enormous multinational water companies. Sure, we need clean water, but when an enormous French, British, or US multinational owns the water system in your town, I’m guessing they will put profit before anything else. And that’s hardly a guarantee of clean, reasonably priced water, now is it? Because suddenly your water system is no longer public, can be bought and sold without the say of those who use the water, and unless you think the Enron debacles were a good thing, then let’s keep water public and affordable.
The ocean and global warming
Bob Morris @ Nov 5th 2005 08:14 - Category: Climate change ;
From the Global Warming Information Center
"The oceans of the world have gotten warmer since the 1940s. Furthermore, it has done so from the surface down towards the bottom of the three oceans, introducing the dimension of depth, something that was not previously actively considered when measuring ocean temperatures.Now the larger driver of the new climate oscillation is the heat we put into the oceans of the world. The world’s increasing ocean temperatures have spawned ever-stronger ocean waves over the past 40 years. This energy increases as the ocean’s temperature rises, so the energy content of the tsunamis, hurricanes and typhoons also rises,"said Sinyan Shen, Director of the GWIC in the U.S.
