Connectivity

2008-02-13T11:02:00.000+13:00

Recently over at Maps' blog there has been debate over, and remembrance of, Hone Tuwhare. You can read about it here and here. I wanted to pay tribute to one of my favourite poets by selecting a couple of his poems and putting forward Scott's tribute poem to Tuwhare.

Rain
I can hear you
making small holes
in the silence
rain

If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut

And I
should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind

the something
special smell of you
when the sun cakes
the ground

the steady
drum-roll sound
you make
when the wind drops

But if I
should not hear
smell or feel or see
you

you would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me
rain

Friend

Friend,
Do you remember that wild stretch of land
with the lone tree guarding the point from the sharp-tongued sea?
The boat we built out of branches wrenched from the tree, is dead wood now.
The air that was thick with the whir of toetoe spears succumbs at last to the grey gull's wheel.
Oyster-studded roots of the mangrove yield
no finer feast of silver-bellied eels, and sea-snails steaming in a rusty can.

Friend, allow me
to mend the broken ends
of shared days:
but I wanted to say
that the tree we climbed
that gave food and drink
to youthful dreams, is no more.
Pursed to the lips her fine-edged
leaves made whistle—now stamp
no silken tracery on the cracked
clay floor.

Friend,
in this grim time
of dark unrest I press your hand
if only for reassurance that all
our jewelled fantasies were real
and wore splendid garb.

Perhaps the tree
will strike fresh roots again:
give soothing shade to a hurt
and troubled world.

The Old Place

No one comes
by way of the doughy track
through straggly tea tree bush
and gorse, past the hidden spring
and bitter cress.

Under the chill moon's light
no one cares to look upon
the drunken fence-posts
and the gate white with moss.

No one except the wind
saw the old place
make her final curtsy
to the sky and earth:

and in no protesting sense
did iron and barbed wire
ease to the rust's invasion
nor twang more tautly
to the wind's slap and scream.

On the cream lorry
or morning paper van
no one comes,
for no one will ever leave
the golden city on the fussy train;
and there will be no more waiting
on the hill beside the quiet tree
where the old place falters
because no one comes anymore
no one.

To a Mäori figure cast in bronze
outside the Chief Post Office, Auckland

I hate being stuck up here, glaciated, hard all over
and with my guts removed: my old lady is not going
to like it

I’ve seen more efficient scarecrows in seedbed
nurseries. Hell, I can’t even shoo the pigeons off

Me: all hollow inside with longing for the marae on
the cliff at Kohimarama, where you can watch the ships
come in curling their white moustaches

Why didn’t they stick me next to Mickey Savage?
‘Now then,’ he was a good bloke
Maybe it was a Tory City Council that put me here

They never consulted me about naming the square
It’s a wonder they never called it: Hori-in-gorge-atbottom-
of-hill. Because it is like that: a gorge,
with the sun blocked out, the wind whistling around
your balls (your balls mate) And at night, how I
feel for the beatle-girls with their long-haired
boyfriends licking their frozen finger-chippy lips
hopefully. And me again beetling

my tent eyebrows forever, like a brass monkey with
real worries: I mean, how the hell can you welcome
the Overseas Dollar, if you can’t open your mouth
to poke your tongue out, eh?

If I could only move from this bloody pedestal I’d
show the long-hairs how to knock out a tune on the
souped-up guitar, my mere quivering, my taiaha held
at the high port. And I’d fix the ripe kotiro too
with their mini-piupiu-ed bums twinkling: yeah!

Somebody give me a drink: I can’t stand it

Tuwhare by Scott Hamilton

Tangaroa scuttles whales
and beaches fleets of dolphins,
Rehua flies moreporks
into an overpass,
Tane sends chainsaws
to chew on totara:
let’s face it, Hone,
the Gods are bloody stupid.
They give, and they take
away. They were stupid
again, this week.

I’m drinking Hone Hikoi
in the Harlequin Bar,
watching the TV,
watching them dig your hole.

Hine-nui-te-po was a bird
in the pub at Mangakino.
Not the blonde,
not the brunette, whatever
their names were –
the other one,
the one with the dampness
of the earth in her veins.
The one with the blackhead
on her chin -
the one filling an ashtray
in the corner of the pub,
under the dartboard
that had lost its numbers.

You ignored her,
but she was watching.
At closing time she sidled home
to sew you a suit.
She had to leave room,
knowing you’d fill out,
with Common Room sausage rolls
and literary dinners,
with Kaka Point homebrew
and with hot air.
Years, decades passed,
but the suit was waiting.
You’re wearing it now
as they squeeze you into the hole.

To write is to take
some little thing from death,
from Hine-nui-te-po,
'the Great Lady of Night'.
You took a dozen toi toi
and the rain on
a corrugated roof;
the Southern Ocean
and the walk down Highway One.
You left her a mound of earth
on the edge of Kaikohe,
and noon traffic backing up
to Ngawha Springs.

2008-02-13T10:05:00.001+13:00

Pureora Forest

Pureora Forest Park straddles the Hauhungaroa and Rangitoto Ranges between Lake Taupo and Te Kuiti. It is a hidden wonderland of tall trees, clear rivers and rare wildlife.
Location
Pureora Forest Park lies between Te Kuiti, Taumaranui and Lake Taupo and is easily accessed by SH 30 and SH 32.

Maps and I recently visited Pureora Forest - we liked it so much we're returning this week and aim to walk to the top of Mount Puriora (Maps assures me it's an easy 2 1/2 hour trek - I'll let you know if we make it!).
We are lucky today to be able to visit Pureora Forest and see the ancient native trees like Totara. It is only due to the efforts of people in the 1970's that the forest still exists. In 1978 protestors occupied the treetops of Pureora Forest in a bid to protect the native forest from logging. Their actions were successful and the government eventually ended native forest logging in the Park. You can listen then local MP Ian Shearer expressing his concern over the logging plans here and here you can read a story of tramping in Puriora.

One of the things you can do in the Park is climb a forest tower and be among the treetops like the protestors would have been in the seventies. It's 12 m high and only a 10 min walk from Bismark Road car park. You can hear & see the native birds calling from the tower - it's a great view.

2007-10-24T10:57:00.000+13:00

2007-10-13T12:24:00.000+13:00

The girls enjoying a night out!

2007-10-06T22:06:00.000+13:00

Our cute cat Smudge - 7 months old :-)

2007-09-26T19:10:00.000+12:00

What is Exposure07?
The University of Auckland Postgraduate Students’ Association is proud to present Exposure07, the 2007 Postgraduate Research Exposition at the University of Auckland, kindly supported by The University of Auckland, the School of Graduate Studies, The University of Auckland Society, and Watercare Services Ltd.

Exposure07 Postgraduate Research Exposition is a celebration of academic excellence and student ingenuity at the University of Auckland. It has been designed to give postgraduate researchers the chance to showcase their work to peers and staff, gain public exposure, and receive important feedback about the research they do at the University.

When is Exposure07?
Exposure07 will be held from 2nd - 10th October 2007. There will be a professional, published programme with abstracts, a catered evening prizegiving with live music, and more than $10,000 in prizes will be awarded to the participants, runners up and winners.

Exposure07 Outline
Poster presentations
Posters will be on display in the Engineering Atrium from 2 October to 10 October from 10 am to 5 pm daily.
Oral presentations
There will be six oral presentation preliminary sessions held from Tuesday 2nd - Thursday 4th October (9 am- 12 pm, 1- 4 pm), in the Graduate Centre Seminar Room. The winner from each session will go through to the oral finals on Monday 8th October, 6 - 9 pm in Engineering Lecture Room 1.401.

Students will present to an audience and a panel of three judges consisting of staff and invited guests. Everyone is invited to come along and listen to the talks. Exciting spot prizes can be won by anyone from the audience.
The detailed programme for each day may be downloaded here

If you are interested in the postgrad research taking place at Auckland uni, come and be part of the event - check out a few presentations and have a look at the posters in the engineering atrium (20 symonds street).

2007-08-09T12:25:00.000+12:00

The Leaning Tower of Penchant-by BackLit Productions

This production is created by some of the most innovative and exciting young choreographers and dancers in New Zealand (they also happen to be my friends). They are at the cutting edge of creativity in NZ - Go and see your yourself!

dancer in photo: Lucy Miles
photographer: Camille Sanson

'Penchants' Exposed in a Vibrant Performance by Nine Auckland Choreographers and Dancers.'

Contemporary Dance Company BackLit Productions will present an unusual and stirring performance as part of the TEMPO Festival of Dance 2007. The show is an experimental collaboration between the nine members of the company, combining their varied skills as choreographers, dancers and artists to create an explosive Contemporary Dance/Performance Art show that takes in-depth look at human 'penchants' and desires.

'The Leaning Tower of Penchant' was originally crafted for an outdoor venue at Wellington Fringe earlier this year, winning runner up for 'Best Newcomer' Award. BackLit Productions now brings this performance to Auckland audiences, re-vamped and re-structured to fit the TAPAC theatre.

Artistic Director of the project, Rosey Feltham, describes the show:

'Penchant' is a tower of indulgence and desire. The inhabitants of Penchant are entranced by their obsessions. As you are immersed in this illusory world, you realize that nothing is as it seems and even the most solid character is fragile when bound by their 'Penchant'. Will the tower continue to accumulate desires and hold fast, or will it topple under the strain?' Exploring new grounds in dance performance by using unusual props and set and breaking away from the traditional use of proscenium theatre, BackLit Productions explore the possibilities created where Dance meets Performance Art in this collaborative event. Eclectic characters weave an illusory world of intrigue as they dance on teacups, suspend from ropes and are transformed by their obsessions.

2006 TEMPO Festival Awards winners, BackLit Productions are a dedicated group of nine choreographers and dancers who reside in Auckland. Since forming at the beginning of 2006, BackLit Productions have continued to impress with their highly professional, slick and original performances.

'Back-Lit Productions created a stir with their polished, confident
works that shifted between poignant, darkly Butoh and entertaining
themes.'

Francesca Horsley, Listener Review of Fuzzy Reception 2006.

"There was an element of risk to the evening that left one feeling slightly tilted as the action and a series of very striking images ......swirled around us in 'The Leaning Tower of Penchant'."
Lyne Pringle, theatrereview.co.nz 2007

The leaning Tower of Penchant
Penchant is a Tower of Indulgence and Desire. The inhabitants of penchant are lost in a world of obsession, acquiring everything they wish to own. Will the tower continue to hold fast or will it topple under the strain?
Witness the weaving of illusion and intrigue in this extraordinary evening of dance.

When: 4th Oct 10pm, 5th Oct 8pm, 6th Oct 10pm
Where: At Tapac, 100 Motions Road, Western Springs.
Cost: $23, $18 concession.

For interviews and full colour images contact:
Janine Parkes - Publicist

021 0605113
09 3600241 (Home)
myspace.com/backlitproductions_ltd

2007-07-12T14:20:00.000+12:00

2007-07-10T10:26:00.000+12:00

Last weekend I spent a hilarious evening with a group of my closest friends drinking vodka and singing cheesy 80's Karaoke - haven't had so much fun in a long time! The photos were taken on my mobile so they are a bit grainy and blurred :-) Adds a kind of warm atmosphere though! CerianRoger and Lee

Rosa

Fleur, Bex, Andrew

2007-07-03T11:41:00.000+12:00

Scott Hamilton and Brett Cross enjoying the Bill Direen gig at the Wine Cellar 29 June '07. Read more about that gig on Scott's blog here View from Mt Eden before the gig on Monday
Scott and Michael Steven larking about at the 'What's in Your backyard?' event last night (2 July) . It was an evening of poetry, performance and music - brought to us by Powertool Records (they produce Bill Direen's music) and Titus Books (they bring us Bill's writing, along with many other talented writers).

It was a cold Auckland night but about 80 of us braved the weather and came down to the Kings Arms to hear cutting edge NZ poets perform. It was also a chance to hear the legendary Bill Direen play (a rare treat for Aucklanders as he spends most of his time in Paris with the odd stint in Dunedin).

The fire was blazing in the pub and everyone was in a relaxed mood - the evening had the feeling of a group of friends hanging around the fire, jamming and sharing ideas and poetry. Looking at all the faces during the evening I saw how happy people were to be part of such a refreshingly original event.

Moments from the event that stand out for me are:
1) Michael Steven reading his Cesar Vallejo translations:

Sacred Defoliation Moon!

Crown of an immense head,
that loses its golden leaves in shadow!
Red crown of a Jesus that thinks
tragically of sweet emeralds!

Moon! Wild celestial heart
is it for you I row, inside a goblet
filled with blue wine, toward the west
away from a stern and powerful beating?

Moon! And to fly by force of vanity,
dispersing opal holocausts,
you have entered my gypsy heart
to walk in my weeping blue verses!..

2) Scott Hamilton's 'Ode to Auckland', backed by Bill Direen and Brett Cross, was a noisy but lyrical bash and was a crowd favourite (Chris Knox couldn't wipe the smile off his face and seemed to enjoy it).

Ode to Auckland

The city wall’s condition varies. In some places it stands twenty feet high, and sprouts concrete watchtowers like sea monsters’ heads. In other places it is three strands of rusty wire, supported by warped and splintering puriri posts. In still other places one finds piles of scoria bricks of an irregular shape and size, padded by lichen and moss. The wall is punctuated by gateways at Orewa, in the north, and Mercer, in the south. The gates are never opened, because barbarians camp outside them, in fighting units of indeterminate size. In the evenings smoke from the barbarians’ campfires and the scent of their roasted opossums can be detected in Silverdale and Pukekohe. The barbarians are as necessary as the wall. The barbarians are part of the wall. Though their muskets have rusted and their hostages have expired, the fearsome reputation they won long ago deters more well-equipped and motivated armies from approaching the city.

but now it is time
and the microbes swarm
like stars in a midsummer sky

The city’s law is impartial. Rich and poor alike are strictly forbidden to sleep under bridges, or beg for bread. Young and old alike are strictly forbidden to drag race down Queen Street, or enter nightclubs without ID. Men and women alike are strictly forbidden to breastfeed in public, or buy gin while pregnant. Healthy and sick alike are strictly forbidden to sneeze in cafeterias, or cough blood on city streets. The law is impartial. Wells may on occasion be poisoned, but the city’s fountains must be kept clean. The law must be defended like a wall.

but now it is time
and the secret policeman advances
stooping to pick up butts

The city’s one hundred and eleven registered poets have three common tasks. They must make young women cry at weddings, make young men shout before football games, and prepare the elderly for dignified deaths. To these ends, each poet is supplied with certain meters and rhymes. In lines for young men, the spondaic beat of the agitated heart is preferred. Anapests are deployed at altars and in geriatric wards. Rhyme is encouraged, but it is forbidden to couple manoeuvre with manhole cover, or blackbird with blackbird. Occasionally a poet goes mad and runs deep into the eleven hectares of wilderness at the park, where he carves winking eyes on the puriri trunks. On returning, he is asked to write a self-criticism in perfect blank verse.

but now it is time
and the insurance salesman advances
with sherry on his breath

The park covers one and a half square kilometres, and includes eleven hectares of wilderness. At the entrance to the wilderness you pause to watch two park rangers fitting a plastic cord and a label written in Latin around a puriri trunk. You remember the morgue two blocks away, tags tied around the blue ankles of tramps and junkies. You have come to the park to admire the city’s protected bird. The bird’s importance has been noted in several volumes of local poetry. You look up, and listen carefully. According to one of the city's poets, the bird’s song consists of a single repeated note, which can be heard at a distance of two kilometres. Up close, the bird's song is reputed to sound like a hammer beating an anvil. You hear a sudden shrill squeal, and look down to see the bird swooping low and shitting on a grateful ranger.

but now it is time
and all the heroes enlist
in a train station’s rush hour crowd

Above the city, the moon goes about in his white coat, like a doctor walking his wards. Sometimes clouds are rolled in front of him, like the stained curtains that separate beds. After every night shift you park, turn off your engine, and listen to the same waves breaking jellyfish and condoms on Bastion Reef. The moon stares back.

but now it is time
and the billboard shouts
in a language you’re afraid to learn

The city’s first governor established extensive grounds around his mansion, but his successors have had little interest in gardening, and today environmental groups lobby to have the whole site turned into a wilderness reserve. Geese fly low, in formations of six or eight, under the radar, over the scummed surfaces of the four rectangular ponds. A silver-gray epiphyte wraps itself around an ageing oak, like an undercover policeman embracing a heckler in the mansion’s banquet hall. Blackberry bushes grow like barbed wire around a memorial to the war dead.

but now it is time
and the pill is placed in your hand
like a coin worn smooth

The city’s public hospitals were long ago consolidated into one super-facility, whose surgeons are noted for their technical brilliance. A middle-aged woman is raised from the underground waiting room, where she has been shaven and sedated. The operation lasts for seven hours, until the chief surgeon holds a blood-coloured cyst aloft and punches his other fist in the air, before accepting the handshakes of his colleagues. The patient expired four hours into the operation. The cyst will be bottled and handed to her family.

but now it is time
and the hated face congeals
into a blissful smile

Now and then a group of citizens assembles in the city’s central square, in the place of the clowns, jugglers, and karaoke singers who are normally gifted to the space. It is sometimes possible, in the interval between the expulsion of the city’s entertainment corps and the arrival of the police, for a particular citizen to make one or two statements from the stage that occupies the middle of the square. Along the edges of the space, statues of previous governors study his countenance, his gestures. When the police and protesters wrestle, they knock each statue off its flimsy plaster base, so that the city fathers appear to be prostrating themselves.

but now it is time
and the microbes swarm
like stars in a midsummer sky

now it is time
and the hated face congeals
into a blissful smile

3) Bill Direen - so much of what he did touched and inspired me. He started the evening by singing a French revolutionary song and his version of Carickfergus brought a tear to my eye. He jammed with friends including Brett Cross and Chris Knox (we all smiled and enjoyed Chris and Bill improvising together and singing children's ditties).

I found it interesting when Bill put his own poetry to music and that of WH Auden as well. Bill's enthusiatic guitar playing saw him break a few strings but he still managed to perform 'America' amazingly - 'Alligator' also got everyone going. Absolutely wonderful Bill - you are a true artist and your voice has such a great range and tone - magnifique!If you want to buy Bill's Cds you can get them through Powertool Records

Read some of Auckland's best writers including Jack Ross, Olwyn Stewart, Bill Direen, Scott Hamilton, David Lyndon Brown, Olivia Macassey, Will Christie, Richard Taylor- you can buy them through Titus Books

2007-06-20T05:33:00.000+12:00

2007-05-16T19:54:00.000+12:00

SMUDGE - our new kitten

2007-05-13T15:24:00.000+12:00

Scott's book 'To the Moon, in Seven Easy Steps' is now out and can be bought through Titus Books and at bookstores like Timeout in Mt Eden, Parsons Bookshop Auckland, Unity Wellington and Auckland, UBS in Dunedin.

Jack Ross wrote on the backcover:"Scott Hamilton's heroes, like WH Auden's 'helmeted airmen', are forever setting out on some doomed quest...Scott delves into the mytho-poetic past of New Zealand, showing that this past is alive and shared"

Katyn (for Cerian)

The soldier stepped out of the pines, and walked

to the centre of the clearing, and knelt

and dug a hole, a long shallow hole, with his hands,

and lay down in his hole

and covered himself with dirt

and had a heart attack.

This happened five thousand times, maybe

more, in Katyn forest, in 1940.

At the Cheeky Kumara Cafe

we choose a window table.

Threshers the size of tanks

level a field of wheat,

a field of barley,

and three moths stick to our window.

They are scraps of paper,

scraps of thin yellow paper,

Polish army stationery issue,

scraps from the same page of a letter,

from Leszek Staff's last letter to Gertrude Boll,

written in Smolensk, on May the 5th, 1940,

and torn up by an NKVD intelligence officer

who got hard reading about troop movements

and resistance cellsnot a pair of silk lace stockings

slipping off freshly shaven legs

in Krakow Municipal Gardens.

You stir the last of the sugar into my tea.

We know how to dispose of our dead

correctly. Follow that gravel road

over a train track, then up a small hill

until the fields part for a red-rooved chapel

and its flock of stones.

Every name there faces north.

Out the back, behind the water tap,

are plots reserved for the elderly, the infirm.

Red earth foams over the newest graves.

This afternoon the reverend's outmaking his rounds,

and relatives are at the races.

Nobody is there to see Leszek Staff

stagger out of the barley, and fall

to his knees, and dig

for four minutes, in the soft red soil,

and lie down comfortably

to die, to be discovered.

Outside the cafe

a truck backfires.

2007-05-13T15:10:00.000+12:00

Delhi, 1857: a bloody warning to today's imperial occupiers

A century and a half after the Indian mutiny, echoes of the arrogance and lies that sparked insurgency could not be clearer

William Dalrymple Thursday May 10, 2007 The Guardian

Soon after dawn on May 11 1857, 150 years ago this week, the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was saying his morning prayers in his oratory overlooking the river Jumna when he saw a cloud of dust rising on the far side of the river. Minutes later, he was able to see its cause: 300 East India Company cavalrymen charging wildly towards his palace...read the rest of this interesting article here

More on the Indian Mutiny here

2007-05-13T15:07:00.000+12:00

Maps and I had fish n chips in Westmere and enjoyed the sunset.

2007-05-13T15:01:00.000+12:00

My first attempt at a poem in 13 years (with assistance from Maps).

the cicada stepped out of its skin

into the breeze

she picks the shell

gently

off the pine sap

the dumpy dripping staligmite

she lets the breeze lift it

drop it

onto broken needles

where a condom leaks

like a punctured jellyfish

2007-02-02T02:17:00.000+13:00

Tibetans tortured by Chinese after failed escape attempt, says survivor

Randeep Ramesh of the Guardian reports today on a 15 year old boy's torture following his capture at Nangpa La pass last September.

Jamyang Samten, 15, was in a 75-strong group making their way over the 5,800-metre-high Nangpa La pass in September when Chinese guards opened fire. At least two people, including a 17-year-old Buddhist nun, were killed. Read more here

More info on the detainees released and the Nangpa La Pass shootings here

New Zealand's own Martin Henderson has shown his support for the release of the detainees. See more photos from the campaign: CHINA: Would You Shoot Me Too? Here

2007-02-01T04:58:00.000+13:00

The Bloody Pursuit of Perfection

I’ve just read an article in the Guardian entitled ‘The Bloody Pursuit of Perfection’.
It’s hard for me to think of a time in my life, at least since the age of about eight, when I wasn’t conscious of my body. I never felt at ease with it and even when I was a healthy size and weight I was always dissecting it and thinking, “I wish my thighs were a bit slimmer or my arms more toned.” This is the experience of many women (if not all women in western societies). It seems that from childhood girls are taught to feel unhappy with their bodies and they try to search for “perfection”, but is that ever achievable or even desirable? I love people to be unique and it’s the quirks and imperfections which we can become most fond of.

The Guardian article pointed out that:
Liposuction is booming - and the vast majority of patients are women. What makes them submit to such a violent procedure - especially when it removes only a few pounds of fat? They do it to try and achieve so called “perfection”.

As a surgeon said in the Guardian article: “If, after dieting and exercise, you haven't achieved what you wanted, and you have some stubborn areas of fat, then you would be a good candidate for liposuction." The maximum amount of fat it is possible to lose from a specific area would be 2-2.5 kg, he adds.

Ironically I’ve spent a lot of my working life around the fashion and media industries. My personal experience can back up the research (and common sense) that tells us that these industries have a lot to answer for in encouraging poor body image among women (especially the young).

So, for instance, late last year, the Mail on Sunday's You magazine ran a survey in which women were asked to assess which part of their body they liked least out of their breasts, thighs, face/neck, bottom, tummy, upper arms, and legs. (The tummy, that long-time foe, romped home with 45.2%.)…

This tendency to pick ourselves apart, put each part of our bodies under the microscope, has been encouraged by celebrity magazines. As a culture, there is plenty of evidence that our body obsessions are making us less and less healthy, with both obesity and eating disorders at an all-time high. And still, in the midst of these two extremes, we remain obsessed with the idea that the human body is perfectible.

Do all cultures seek an ideal of femininity? Why do we as females conform and allow these trends to exist?

In advertising we see that any "imperfections" in the images are airbrushed out. Blemishes, scars, and slight bulges of fat are all erased. What is it in our society that makes us want to rub out imperfections and difference? This sad situation alienates people, and those who may already suffer from low self esteem can be affected so badly that they develop eating disorders and depression.

Maia at Capitalism bad: tree pretty has an interesting piece on body image and hating your body. It seems to me that New Zealand as a society finds it particularly hard to tolerate people who don't fit the mould. Is this one of the reasons why we suffer from one of the world's worst youth suicide rates? Feelings about body are closely related to a woman's sense of self; the body is perceived as acceptable or unacceptable, providing a foundation for self-concept women trying to look their best, it is also a struggle for control, acceptance and success.

I don’t think that we should keep saying it’s ok to be fat when we aren’t happy with it ourselves. I don't buy into what some feminists say that we have to be happy with being fat and by continually saying we are happy with our bodies we will somehow suddenly accept our bodies. I can say I am not happy with my body. I am happy with who I am as a person. I'm not searching for "perfection" in my body just health, so I will continue to loose some weight but I don't have a desire to be skinny or "perfect". I would also like to see women being seen as people and not judged by the way they look.

It is unhealthy to be obese. This is a fact and I don't think we should be afraid to acknowledge that. But, I still disagree with the way that our society makes people feel about themselves and their bodies. What I think we should talk about is the obsession with looking for “perfection” and objectifying and dissecting our bodies. And, I'm worried about women feeling depressed when they can’t live up to an unrealistic body image projected by our society. I’m angry at a media that makes women feel so bad and that motivates them to put their bodies through barbaric surgery so that they can look like Barbie dolls!

We need to shift our society away from the obsession with the material, external, individualised, capitalist model. We need to find ways to make people feel accepted for who they are and connected to their community and wider society. We need to look to more holistic models of being and less dissected and alienated ways of living.

I'm no expert on this topic. I just read an article, got angry at yet more evidence of the insanity of cosmetic surgery and our materialistic society and wrote a blog post about it! Would like to hear other people's ideas on body image + our society + feminism....

2007-01-30T02:22:00.000+13:00

Carnival of Socialism

Maps from Reading the Maps wrote:

My post on Aporo, Te Ua Haumene and Maori resistance to colonisation is part of the latest Carnival of Socialism being hosted by Britain's Stroppyblog. The theme of this carnival is 'The Politics of Liberation', and Stroppy has brought together material on the Celebrity Big Brother controversy, the sex lives of female bloggers, the difficulties of working as a disabilities officer amongst British students, and much more.

I recommend a post called 'The Five Hundred Year Siege' by musician and activist David Rovis, who works with Navajo Indians fighting to protect their ancestral lands from exploitation by giant mining companies. Rovis reminds us that what we condemn in Iraq has been going on for a very long time in remote parts of the United States:

Until 1974, the Black Mesa area was the home of one of the last remaining intact communities of 20,000 or so people living traditionally, speaking mainly Navajo, living as sheep herders, in community, as they had for centuries. But then Peabody decided they wanted to expand their mine and people like Senator John McCain wanted to do their best to make sure this could happen. This meant moving 20,000 people off their land, some at a time, by making their lives impossible if they tried to stay...

The government is just barely too tactful to forcibly remove thousands of Indians from their land in the modern era, so they have employed various other methods. Very much along the lines of the sanctions imposed on Iraq during the 1990’s. Starve them into submission. Make their lives unliveable. Take away their water. Make sure they have to drive dozens of miles down unmaintained roads in order to get water for their sheep. Impound their sheep and make them pay to get them back. Fine them for making repairs on the roofs of their hogans. Fine them for collecting firewood.

Most ultimately moved. Many were sent to live on land that was made radioactive by the Church Rock uranium spill. Their sheep died from drinking the water, and many of the people died soon thereafter. After losing their community, living increasingly isolated lives made miserable by constant harassment by the authorities, some 17 families still refuse to leave their dusty land...

As in Palestine or Colombia, the mostly white supporters are able to be useful largely just because they’re white. The corrupt tribal authorities know who butters their bread, just as Israel or the government of Colombia do. Just being there and being white doesn’t stop the general trends, but it can effectively prevent the authorities from harassing the grandmothers for another day. Also, the fundamental racism of the reservation system is such that the tribal authorities are not allowed to arrest non-native people – the most they can do is escort them off of the reservation. Read it all here.

Skyler:
It is good to see a left blog looking at wider issues, ones that don't get as much attention as they deserve. Stroppyblog has put together a thoughtful Carnival of Socialism - the post that I found most interesting and at the same time disturbing (for the amount of pain and suffering humans can inflict on each other and the political situation created in Iraq - in which we in the west, and especially the American and British governments, are complicit in) is the link to the Iraqi LGBT website. The situation in Iraq for gay and lesbian Iraqis is getting worse with reports of serious human rights violations and killings.

Peter Tatchell, a gay and human rights activist, wrote about the sexual cleansing occuring in Iraq for the New Humanist, you can read his full article here

Some personal stories of victims in Iraq:
'Fourteen-year-old Ahmed Khalil was accused of corrupting the community because he had sex with men. According to his Baghdad neighbour, in April 2006 four men in police uniforms arrived at Ahmed’s house in a four-wheel-drive police pick-up truck. They wore the distinctive facemasks of the Badr militia. The neighbour saw the police drag Ahmed out of the house and shoot him at point-blank range, pumping two bullets into his head and several more bullets into the rest of his body.

Wathiq, aged 29, a gay architect, was kidnapped in Baghdad last March. Soon afterwards, the Badr militia sent his parents death threats, accusing them of allowing their son to lead a gay life and demanding a £11,000 ransom. The parents paid the money, thinking it would save Wathiq’s life. But he was found dead a few days later, with his body mutilated and his head cut off.Wissam Auda was a member of Iraq’s Olympic tennis team. His dream was to play in the Wimbledon championship in London this year. He had been receiving death threats from religious fanatics on account of his homosexuality. On 25 May 2006, his vehicle was ambushed by fundamentalist militias in the al-Saidiya district of Baghdad. Wissam, together with his coach Hussein Ahmed Rashid and teammate Nasser Ali Hatem, were all summarily executed in the street. Their crime? Wissam’s homosexuality was probably what drew him to the attention of the militia’s, but his official crime was: wearing shorts. An Iraqi National Guard checkpoint was about 100m from the site of the ambush, but the soldiers did nothing, according to eye-witnesses.

The father of 23-year-old Baghdad arts student, Karzan, has been told by militias that his son has been sentenced to death for being gay. If his father refuses to hand over Karzan for execution, the militia has threatened to kill the family one by one. This has already happened to Bashar, 34, an actor. Because his parents refuse to reveal his hiding place, the Badr militia murdered two of his family members in retribution.

Nyaz is a 28-year old dentist who lives in Baghdad. She is terrified that her lesbian relationship will be discovered, and that both she and her partner will be killed. They have stopped seeing each other. It is too dangerous. To make matters worse, Nyaz is being forced by the fundamentalist Mahdi militia to marry an older, senior Mullah with close ties the Mahdi leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. If she does not agree to the marriage, or tries to run away, Nyaz and her family will be targeted for ‘honour killing’ by Sadr’s men.

'Doug Ireland , ( 'a longtime radical political journalist and media critic, who considers himself a purveyor of what the great I.F. Stone (at whose feet Doug sat as a lad) called "investigative opinion." Even those with whom Doug has profound disagreements respect him--like Christopher Hitchens, who wrote (in the May, 2004 Vanity Fair) that Doug "is one of the country’s toughest and brightest radical columnists."'), has more articles and comment on his blog on the situation for LGBT in Iraq:
'Life for gay and lesbian citizens in war-torn Iraq has become grave and is getting worse every day. While President Bush hails a new, “democratic” society, thousands of civilians are dying in a low-level civil war—and gays are being targeted just for being gay. The Badr Corps—the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI for short), the country’s most powerful Shiite political group—has launched a campaign of “sexual cleansing,” marshaling death squads to exterminate homosexuality.'.... read more here

2006-12-16T17:56:00.000+13:00

Different narratives in the Middle East

I know it's a bit lame to just copy an article written by Robert Fisk and republish it here. In my defence I am trying to get back into blogging and writing and republishing an important article here is a start...

No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of war crimes
Published: 16 December 2006

Oh how - when it comes to the realities of history - the Muslims of the Middle East exhaust my patience. After years of explaining to Arab friends that the Jewish Holocaust - the systematic, planned murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, is an indisputable fact - I am still met with a state of willing disbelief.

And now, this week, the preposterous President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad of Iran opens up his own country to obloquy and shame by holding a supposedly impartial "conference" on the Jewish Holocaust to repeat the lies of the racists who, if they did not direct their hatred towards Jews, would most assuredly turn venomously against those other Semites, the Arabs of the Middle East.

How, I always ask, can you expect the West to understand and accept the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 men, women and children from Palestine in 1948 when you will not try to comprehend the enormity done the Jews of Europe? And, here, of course, is the wretched irony of the whole affair. For what the Muslims of the Middle East should be doing is pointing out to the world that they were not responsible for the Jewish Holocaust, that, horrific and evil though it was, it is a shameful, outrageous injustice that they, the Palestinians, should suffer for something they had no part in and - even more disgusting - that they should be treated as if they have. But, no, Ahmadinajad has neither the brains nor the honesty to grasp this simple, vital equation.

True, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem shook hands with Hitler. I met his only surviving wartime Palestinian comrade before he died and it is perfectly true that the intemperate, devious Had al-Husseini made some vile anti-Jewish wartime speeches in German, in one of which he advised the Nazis to close Jewish refugee exit routes to Palestine and deport Jews eastwards (why east, I wonder?) and helped to raise a Muslim SS unit in Bosnia. I have copies of his speeches and his photograph hangs in the Yad Vashem Museum. But the downtrodden, crushed, occupied, slaughtered Palestinians of our time - of Sabra and Chatila, of Jenin and Beit Yanoun - were not even alive in the Second World War.

Yet it is to the eternal shame of Israel and its leaders that they should pretend as if the Palestinians were participants in the Second World War. When the Israeli army was advancing on Beirut in 1982, the then Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, wrote a crazed letter to US president, Ronald Reagan, explaining that he felt he was marching on "Berlin" to liquidate "Hitler" (ie Yasser Arafat, who was busy comparing his own guerrillas to the defenders of Stalingrad).

That courageous Israeli writer Uri Avneri wrote an open letter to Begin. "Mr Prime Minister," he began, "Hitler is dead." But this did not stop Ariel Sharon from trying the same trick in 1989. By talking to the US State Department, Arafat was "like Hitler, who also wanted so much to negotiate with the Allies in the second half of the Second World War", Sharon told the Wall Street Journal. "... Arafat is the same kind of enemy."

Needless to say, any comparison between the behaviour of German troops in the Second World War and Israeli soldiers today (with their constantly betrayed claim to "purity of arms") is denounced as anti-Semitic. Generally, I believe that is the correct reaction. Israelis are not committing mass rape, murder or installing gas chambers for the Palestinians.

But the acts of Israeli troops are not always so easy to divorce from such insane parallels. During the Sabra and Chatila massacres - when Israel sent its enraged Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias into the camps after telling them that Palestinians had killed their beloved leader - up to 1,700 Palestinians were slaughtered. Israeli troops watched - and did nothing.

The Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua observed that, even if his country's soldiers had not known what was happening, "then this would be the same lack of knowledge of the Germans who stood outside Buchenwald and Treblinka and did not know what was happening".

After the killings of Jenin, an Israeli officer suggested to his men, according to the Israeli press, that, with close quarter fighting, they might study the tactics of Nazi troops in Warsaw in 1944.
And I have to say - indeed, it needs to be said - that, after the countless Lebanese civilian refugees ruthlessly cut down on the roads of Lebanon by the Israeli air force in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and again this summer, how can one avoid being reminded of the Luftwaffe attacks on the equally helpless French refugees of 1940? Many thousands of Lebanese have been killed in this way over the past 25 years.

And please spare me the nonsense about "human shields". What about the marked ambulance of women and children rocketed by a low-flying Israeli helicopter in 1996? Or the refugee convoy whose women and children were torn to pieces by an equally low-flying Israeli air force helicopter as they fled along the roads after being ordered to leave their homes by the Israelis?
No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of war crimes unless they stop these attacks on refugees. The Arabs are entitled to talk the same way. They should. But they must stop lying about Jewish history - and take a lesson, perhaps, from the Israeli historians who tell the truth about the savagery which attended Israel's birth.

As for the West's reaction to Ahmadinajad's antics, Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was "shocked" into disbelief while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responded with more eloquent contempt. Strangely, no one recalled that, the holocaust deniers of recent years - deniers of the Turkish genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in 1915, that is - include Lord Blair, who originally tried to prevent Armenians from participating in Britain's Holocaust Day and the then Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, who told Turks that their massacre of the victims of the 20th century's first Holocaust did not constitute a genocide.

I've no doubt Ahmadinajad - equally conscious of Iran's precious relationship with Turkey - would gutlessly fail to honour the Armenian Holocaust in Tehran. Who would have thought that the governments of Britain, Israel and Iran had so much in common?

2006-10-27T09:15:00.000+13:00

Distracted by Maps....

If anyone is wondering where I am, I have been writing on the blog Reading The Maps. Which has meant I have been neglecting my on blog alittle. In the meantime check out Reading the Maps and my comments there.

I am hoping that my fellow contributor Sunflower will write something in the not too distant future, once here exams are over....

P.S. This painting, 'Diva', was done by the artist Werner Berges in 1995. In 1992 I spent many days at his family home in Schallstadt, near Freiburg (Germany) , while on student exchange there. His daughter did an exchange to New Zealand with one of my best friends. I have many fond memories of my time there, staying at the Berges' home (an old farm house and artist haven) - their house was always open to everyone and welcoming.

'Born in Cloppenburg in 1941, the artist Werner Berges was among those who first practised and established Pop Art in Germany. He is one of the most renowned German pop artists and is included in numerous public and private collections worldwide.Glowing primary colours, clearly defined contours, the application of halftone dots and grid-lines, which playfully lend the paintings an air of the mechanically reproduced, are all typical of his works. Berges’ works are continually concerned with images of women culled from the world of advertising, which attain a new meaning and status through his artistic handling.Women are his subjects – dazzling models and stars from the worlds of advertising and fashion photography. Erotically posed bodies, seductive looks and radiant faces are rendered in rich colours, halftone dots, grid lines and collage.' (from wernerberges.com)

2006-10-19T18:53:00.000+13:00

Video shows apparent shooting on Tibetans by China
Reuters
Monday, October 16, 2006; 3:22 AM

BEIJING (Reuters) - Video footage shot by a Romanian television station appears to show Chinese soldiers firing at a group of Tibetans as they attempt to cross a mountain pass into Nepal, days after China defended the soldiers' action.
The video, taken by Romania's Pro TV, shows a line of people trekking through the snow when sounds of gunfire are heard and one of the figures crumples to the ground. The footage is shot from too far away to make out identities, but a voice can be heard saying in English, "They are shooting them like dogs."

A group of climbers from Britain and Australia told Reuters last week that on September 30 they watched Chinese border guards take aim at a group of 20 to 30 people as they prepared to cross from Chinese territory into Nepal.

Tibet has been ruled by China since Communist troops invaded in 1950, and the government deals harshly with Tibetans who press for greater political and religious freedoms.
Hundreds of people cross the Himalayas to Nepal every year, most of them en route to the Indian hill station of Dharamsala, the home of their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and Tibet's government-in-exile.

China's state media has confirmed that troops fired on about 70 people near the frontier with Nepal and that one of them died. But it defended the shooting, saying the group was trying to cross the border illegally and attacked the soldiers when they tried to persuade the group to return home.

The video shows no such confrontation, and the London-based International Campaign for Tibet, which said a Tibetan nun was killed in the incident, rejected China's defense.
"It is deplorable that the People's Armed Police act as if shooting Tibetans crossing into Nepal is a legitimate expression of their authority," Mary Beth Markey, the group's executive director, said in a statement.

In another sign of unrest in the isolated region, a group of Tibetans forced the delay of a Canadian mining company's operations, angered over test-drilling. Vancouver-based Continental Minerals Corp. said it was drilling near a village about 3 km (2 miles) from the main area of operations for its Xietongmen copper-gold project, near the Tibet city of Shigatse, on June 19 when residents raised concerns.

But it denied reports from a Tibet independence group that a serious confrontation occurred.
"We delayed work in this particular area until the concerns had been addressed to the satisfaction of all the local community and then the activities resumed," Shari Gardiner, a spokeswoman for Continental, wrote in an e-mail response to Reuters.
"Work in our main area of operations continued as normal throughout this period," she said. "At no time did the villagers ask us to leave Tibet."

Continental, wholly owned by private miner Hunter Dickinson Inc., holds its interests in the Xietongmen site through a local company, Tibet Tian Yuan Minerals Exploration Ltd. The exploration license for the site, also known as Shethongmon, was issued by China's Ministry of Land and Resources.

Students for a Free Tibet called on the company to withdraw from the region.
"This incident again demonstrates that Canadian and other mining firms have no business in Tibet until the Tibetan people are in a position to decide the use of their own natural resources," the group's executive director, Lhadon Tethong, said in a statement.
© 2006 Reuters

2006-10-18T13:07:00.000+13:00

Let me denounce genocide from the dock

Suddenly, those Armenian mass graves opened up before my own eyes

By Robert Fisk10/14/06 "The Independent"

This has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I'm talking about those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks. On Thursday, France's lower house of parliament approved a Bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide. And, within an hour, Turkey's most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk - only recently cleared by a Turkish court for insulting "Turkishness" (sic) by telling a Swiss newspaper that nobody in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacres - won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of Syria and beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have been comforted.

While Turkey continues to blather on about its innocence - the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of "civil war" - Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth new evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve its capital H since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust, some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with all the energy of a gravedigger.

Armenian victims were killed with daggers, swords, hammers and axes to save ammunition. Massive drowning operations were carried out in the Black Sea and the Euphrates rivers - mostly of women and children, so many that the Euphrates became clogged with corpses and changed its course for up to half a mile. But Dadrian, who speaks and reads Turkish fluently, has now discovered that tens of thousands of Armenians were also burned alive in haylofts.

He has produced an affidavit to the Turkish court martial that briefly pursued the Turkish mass murderers after the First World War, a document written by General Mehmet Vehip Pasha, commander of the Turkish Third Army. He testified that, when he visited the Armenian village of Chourig (it means "little water" in Armenian), he found all the houses packed with burned human skeletons, so tightly packed that all were standing upright. "In all the history of Islam," General Vehip wrote, "it is not possible to find any parallel to such savagery."

The Armenian Holocaust, now so "unmentionable" in Turkey, was no secret to the country's population in 1918. Millions of Muslim Turks had witnessed the mass deportation of Armenians three years earlier - a few, with infinite courage, protected Armenian neighbours and friends at the risk of the lives of their own Muslim families - and, on 19 October 1918, Ahmed Riza, the elected president of the Turkish senate and a former supporter of the Young Turk leaders who committed the genocide, stated in his inaugural speech: "Let's face it, we Turks savagely (vahshiane in Turkish) killed off the Armenians."

Dadrian has detailed how two parallel sets of orders were issued, Nazi-style, by Turkish interior minister Talat Pasha. One set solicitously ordered the provision of bread, olives and protection for Armenian deportees but a parallel set instructed Turkish officials to "proceed with your mission" as soon as the deportee convoys were far enough away from population centres for there to be few witnesses to murder. As Turkish senator Reshid Akif Pasha testified on 19 November 1918: "The 'mission' in the circular was: to attack the convoys and massacre the population... I am ashamed as a Muslim, I am ashamed as an Ottoman statesman. What a stain on the reputation of the Ottoman Empire, these criminal people..."

How extraordinary that Turkish dignitaries could speak such truths in 1918, could fully admit in their own parliament to the genocide of the Armenians and could read editorials in Turkish newspapers of the great crimes committed against this Christian people. Yet how much more extraordinary that their successors today maintain that all of this is a myth, that anyone who says in present-day Istanbul what the men of 1918 admitted can find themselves facing prosecution under the notorious Law 301 for "defaming" Turkey.

I'm not sure that Holocaust deniers - of the anti-Armenian or anti-Semitic variety - should be taken to court for their rantings. David Irving is a particularly unpleasant "martyr" for freedom of speech and I am not at all certain that Bernard Lewis's one-franc fine by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in a November 1993 Le Monde article did anything more than give publicity to an elderly historian whose work deteriorates with the years.

But it's gratifying to find French President Jacques Chirac and his interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both announced that Turkey will have to recognise the Armenian death as genocide before it is allowed to join the European Union. True, France has a powerful half-million-strong Armenian community.

But, typically, no such courage has been demonstrated by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, nor by the EU itself, which gutlessly and childishly commented that the new French Bill, if passed by the senate in Paris, will "prohibit dialogue" which is necessary for reconciliation between Turkey and modern-day Armenia. What is the subtext of this, I wonder. No more talk of the Jewish Holocaust lest we hinder "reconciliation" between Germany and the Jews of Europe?

But, suddenly, last week, those Armenian mass graves opened up before my own eyes. Next month, my Turkish publishers are producing my book, The Great War for Civilisation, in the Turkish language, complete with its long chapter on the Armenian genocide entitled "The First Holocaust". On Thursday, I received a fax from Agora Books in Istanbul. Their lawyers, it said, believed it "very likely that they will be sued under Law 301" - which forbids the defaming of Turkey and which right-wing lawyers tried to use against Pamuk - but that, as a foreigner, I would be "out of reach". However, if I wished, I could apply to the court to be included in any Turkish trial.

Personally, I doubt if the Holocaust deniers of Turkey will dare to touch us. But, if they try, it will be an honour to stand in the dock with my Turkish publishers, to denounce a genocide which even Mustafa Kamel Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, condemned.

2006-10-15T14:13:00.000+13:00

Tibetans Shot By Chinese Soldiers

2006-10-12T11:08:00.000+13:00

Tibet Killings

I have just read about recent Chinese atrocities towards Tibetans. The story brought home to me again what a dire situation Tibetans face daily. It has been confirmed that on 30 September 2006 Chinese forces fired on innocent Tibetan refugees (mostly children) on the Nangpa La mountain pass. At least two children were killed and others shot. Chinese officials are reportedly trying to track down and silence Western climbers and Sherpas who witnessed the killings.

Leonard Doyle, Foreign Editor for The Independent, wrote today, …'fears grow for the safety of a group of Tibetan children, aged between six and 10, who were marched away after at least two refugees including a nun, were shot dead. The children were being sent by their parents into exile in Nepal to be educated as part of a group of about 70 refugees crossing the Nangpa Pass. Secretive crossings are usually made at night or in winter. But this time - probably because of the children in their group - the Tibetans crossed in the morning. They were travelling lightly, clad in jackets and boots without any mountaineering equipment, when they were attacked. The nun who was killed, Kelsang Namtso, 17, was leading the children. A 13-year-old boy was also gunned down during 15 minutes of shooting witnessed by Western climbers, including two British policemen, 1,000 yards away at Cho Oyu camp.

Later three Chinese soldiers marched the children through the camp - some 12 miles west of Mount Everest - as climbers and Sherpas looked on. None of the Westerners tried to help the Tibetans. Fears for the safety of Western climbers still in Tibet and worries that China will clamp down on profitable climbing operations - it costs up to £30,000 for an attempt on Everest - have meant that news of the incident has been slow to emerge.

An American climber, who asked not to be identified, told of his revulsion at the failure of other climbers to speak out. "Did it make anyone turn away and go home? Not one," he said. "People are climbing right in front of you to escape persecution while you are trying to climb a mountain. It's insane."’ You can read the rest of the article on the Independent website.

Witnesses say that soldiers fired on the refugees for 15 minutes. It is being reported that up to seven people were shot dead. A Tibetan monk that managed to escape said that the western mountaineers took pictures. The world should see those images – let’s hope that they are not too afraid to make them public. It’s time that China was made accountable for the human rights violations that continue in Tibet.

BACKGROUND (taken from freetibet.org)
Approximately 2,500 Tibetans annually flee over the Himalayas into exile, escaping the brutality of China's occupation. It is difficult to know how many are caught or shot by the Chinese border authorities. Previous similar allegations have remained uninvestigated. MountEverest.net, a climbers' website, was the first to report of the killing and quoted a "trusted source" (a western mountaineer who was climbing at the time) as reporting that he witnessed the Chinese Army shoot at a line of Tibetan refugees as they made their way to the Nangpa La Pass at the border with Nepal. The shooting by the Chinese border guards is in violation of the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials (1990), which requires that "Law enforcement officials shall not use firearms against persons except in self-defence or defence of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury, to prevent the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life, to arrest a person presenting such a danger and resisting their authority, or to prevent his or her escape, and only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives. In any event, intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life." (Principle 9).

Below are links to blogs and further news on this story:
Links
The Independent - China tries to gag climbers who saw Tibet killings
Students for a free tibet blog
http://www.freetibet.org/campaigns/uc061006.html
Reuters - Climbers watched as Chinese guards shot Tibetans
Times UK Online - Mountaineers see nun shot dead near Everest camp
Daily India - Nun was shot dead near Everest camp
International Herald Tribune - Report: China holding Tibetan Children after refugee shooting http://www.savetibet.org/campaigns/refugees/index.php
Free Tibet Blog

2006-10-09T22:29:00.000+13:00

Maps at the blog Reading the Maps has been writing about his 'journey" with the Dalai Lama', but his understanding of Buddhist philosophy and teaching is limited to twenty pages of one book. My own understanding of Buddhism isn’t extensive either, but I have written about my experience of living and travelling in the Buddhist regions of Northern India in 1995 on Map's blog. You can read my piece there....

2006-10-09T11:57:00.000+13:00

Undergound Press/Counterculture/Feminism

I read this article about one woman's views on the birth of the counterculture - you might find it interesting and relevant in this age of blogging.

It was the decade of love and peace. But without its irreverent free press, the Sixties would never have changed the world. Rosie Boycott takes a trip back to the birth of the counterculture
Power to the People
Sunday October 8, 2006The Observer

I turned 17 in the summer of 1967. That summer I smoked my first joint at a Rolling Stones Concert in Hyde Park and walked barefooted through the hot streets of west London, wearing floral bell-bottomed trousers and a coat I'd made out of a silk tablecloth that had belonged to my grandmother, which had long tassels and small daisies embroidered in purple thread.

I was still officially living at home with my parents in the heart of the Shropshire countryside and one sweltering August afternoon I had to meet my mother, who'd come to town for the day, to join her on the train journey home. I hadn't slept for what seemed like days, I'd been up at the Round House listening to Jefferson Airplane and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. I'd been smoking a lot of dope and I'd gone home with the manager, who wore a beautiful blue velvet jacket and drove a matching coloured Saab. I'd been meeting up with some Peruvian radicals in the Troubadour Cafe to help plan a Vietnam march. To my mind, there was no contradiction between the two worlds. My head was full of thoughts of drugs, revolution, the words of Che Guevara and the psychedelic visions of Aldous Huxley.

And my mother went ballistic about my feet.

Standing in Paddington station, the commuter traffic streaming past us - anxious then as now to catch the train to take them home to their suburban life (then my idea of hell) - my mother ranted and raved about the disgrace of walking through London with dirty feet. I remember looking at her, not upset, not angry, just full of sympathy that she didn't get it.

It was a whole new world, as I saw it, freed from bourgeois shackles. The aim of the counterculture was to shake up the existing situation, to change the world of the pinched grey people who lived grey lives in grey bedrooms. We wanted to elevate non-material values through the global power of rock'n'roll, and we believed we could do this through drugs, music, having fun, hanging out. Rules were simple: there were good guys and bad guys, the narcotics police were bad, governments were bad, war was bad, the mainstream media was bad. Under the powerful vibes of the good people all these would somehow fade away.

It was extraordinary arrogance, but we thought that we would be responsible for a moral advance that would match the technological advances of the previous hundred years. And I was having fun, more fun than I could remember, and I couldn't see why it wouldn't last for ever, and I couldn't see why it couldn't be communicated and shared by everyone, including, in that instance, my mother, fretting on the station concourse in a neat blue suit, white blouse and high heels. She may even have been wearing a hat.

My first job was on an underground newspaper called Frendz. We operated from a chaotic office which spanned two floors of a run-down terrace at the top of the Portobello Road. Out on the street, jokers and pranksters with beads, bells and mantras riffled through tatty bargains and baubles on the street stalls. We never had any money and as one holding company went broke, we'd create another, changing the magazine from Friends to Frendz to keep within the law.

Donations came in the strangest shapes: one day a woman arrived with a dirty white handbag stuffed with five pound notes which she proceeded to throw around the office like Kleenex. She needed somewhere to stay and installed her own set of old rusty bed springs under a window, where she lay, naked and exposed, while the office bustled by around her. The contents of her bag paid the print bills, but how we all actually survived is a mystery I cannot fathom to this day. We lived well, but my pay fluctuated between £5 and £10 a week.

We had a naive belief in our right to do things and to do things big. Earlier in the decade, because Allen Ginsberg happened to be in town, it was decided to rent not just a small local community centre but the Albert Hall to stage a poetry reading, The time from idea to event was a mere 10 days. RD Laing, the counterculture hero, brought all the schizophrenic patients from his clinic along to the gig in the belief that poetry might inspire them. At the launch of IT magazine, Britain's first underground newspaper, Paul McCartney came dressed as an Arab. The party was held in the Round House and someone had made a giant jelly using a bathtub as a mould. Pink Floyd's van ran into it before the party even began, leaving sticky liquid oozing across the floor.

We published the magazine every fortnight, pulling together a disorganised collection of stories, reports, jokes and cartoons. Why was the Reading Festival such a disaster (The police? The site? The rain? The faulty PA system?) What was the current world price of dope? And where could you find the best stuff? Where were the latest Vietnam protests taking place? What on earth were auras? Frendz had been started by my then boyfriend, the lexicographer Jonathon Green, and a South African called Alan Marcuson. The original designer was Barney Bubbles, who had been to San Francisco and met the Grateful Dead, which gave him instant street cred. Barney would disappear every week or so, rucksack on his back, and vanish into the countryside, where he'd drop an enormous amount of acid.

People would appear and disappear. Stanislav Demidjuk, a vision in brown leather, a silver belt and an Australian accent, showed up one day and persuaded Alan and Jonathon that blowing up the Paddington Green Police Station was necessary for the Revolution. They all climbed into a cab to carry out the task, but en route Stan stopped off to visit Richard Branson, with whom he'd fallen out over the political direction of Student Magazine (Branson's first business venture). A fight ensued and the mission was abandoned.

I couldn't type so I was given an editorial job. I wrote short pieces, helped lay out pages and one day, six weeks into the job, I was handed a tape recorder and told to get along to the Apple offices in Savile Row to interview John and Yoko. Yoko's book Grapefruit had been disastrously reviewed and England's most famous couple needed soothing words from the underground press. Yoko talked non-stop, small and fierce under her wild black hair, while I worried that the tape recorder wouldn't work. I wanted to talk to John about the Sergeant Pepper album: there was a hippy belief that if you read the album cover upside down, you could discover the secret phone number of the Beatles. By chance, the numbers actually led callers to the Guardian's night newsdesk, which took calls from around the world asking how John and Paul were doing. Had this been part of the plan, I wondered. When I finally managed to break through Yoko's monologue, John looked at me over his famous wire-rimmed spectacles and mumbled, 'Yeah, cool, man, really cool.'

By the time I arrived at Frendz in 1970 the glory days were almost over. In the middle of the Sixties the various factions - spiritual, political, psychedelic and radical - had managed to combine their differences, united in a belief that change, any change, was better than the status quo. By the end of the decade the more radical camps were in ascendance, the hippies with their love and peace life style consigned to a back water. Laid back, in the end, had meant losing out, and the hippy philosophy, which eschewed commercialism, paved the way for the culture's own demise.

When the establishment saw the commercial potential in health food, country-style furniture and kaftans, and produced Laura Ashley and Terence Conran, the hippies thought it was a good joke. Especially laughable was the news that cigarette companies had taken out patents on the brands of dope they intended to sell when marijuana was legalised. In the Frendz office we were visited increasingly by people with political axes to grind: IRA activists, the Black Panthers, the black radical Hakim Jamal, author of From the Dead Level (he was later shot in a gangland killing in Boston). In the winter of 1970 a group of women came who proposed that Frendz should publish a women's issue.

Over that autumn, Angie Weir and Hilary Creek were in and out of the office. For me, it was a revelation. The counterculture had championed change of every kind, but the role of women hadn't changed. Women still made the tea and did the typing: only now they were also expected to have sex with anyone who wanted it: to refuse was uncool and, God forbid, acting like a straight. Richard Neville, the editor of Oz, was quoted as saying, 'You can fuck any time, but ask a girl to make Ovaltine?'

Once the issue had gone to the press, Angie and Hilary disappeared. I saw them next in the Old Bailey where they were facing charges related to the Angry Brigade bombings. Biba had been blown up while the Frendz women's issue was going to press. They called me as a witness, but since I kept no diary and thus couldn't recall the dates accurately enough to provide an alibi, I wasn't much use and they were sent down for eight years.

The women's issue changed my life. Even though in 1969 the International Times, Britain's oldest underground paper, was condemning Miss World, the counterculture remained as male-dominated as the rest of British society. Mecca and Miss World were neat symbols of big business, capitalism and plastic living. The editors could sigh complacently because they weren't asking their girlfriends to parade around in swimsuits - but they weren't encouraging them to become reporters either. By 1970 feminism was becoming fashionable, but in Richard Neville's book, Playpower, the closest the index came to mentioning the women's movement was the 'Female Fuckability Test.' With Marsha Rowe, an Australian working on Oz magazine, I organised a series of meetings for women who worked in the underground press. A calm start soon gave way to animated disclosures about abortions, orgasms and humiliations at work. By the end of the third meeting we'd decided to start a magazine.

Spare Rib was launched in the summer of 1972. I was 21 and Marsha was 28. We had £3,000 in the bank and some old furniture we'd acquired from the offices of INK, a weekly paper that promised to bring a political edge to the counterculture, but collapsed into bankruptcy in under six months. No one thought we had a chance, but the time was right, the cash somehow kept appearing, and Spare Rib went on to publish for the next 20 years, helping to shape and define the feminist debate that has so changed British culture.

Would it have happened without the underground press? Probably, but not so soon and not on so few resources. The culture may have been flaky, but it allowed us to believe that anything was possible. The arrogance that helped bring about the counterculture's demise gave us an extraordinary sense of confidence. Looking back, it is hard to believe that at 21, I thought I had the right to publish a magazine which challenged the very heart of Western social structures. We used to call the established media the straight press and, much to our delight, they took us seriously. Feminism became the first cause which genuinely crossed the divide as it established itself in Britain.

Today, the original feminist beliefs of sisterhood, tolerance and a better world for both the sexes are all but forgotten, except on the net, where blogs unite women living in societies where they have no rights. Our Sixties equivalent of the 'straight press' is now known as 'dead-tree media'. The counterculture in the Sixties came about in response to a need and it is clearly still here today.
· 200 Trips From The Counterculture, by Jean-Francois Bizot, is published by Thames & Hudson at £19.95

2006-10-05T22:16:00.000+13:00

An Empowering Education

I have just posted a slightly different version of the piece below on the blog Reading the Maps if you want to read it there.

Maia at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty has been writing about alternatives in education. It got me thinking about my childhood and education. I spent all of my school life attending an alternative school – one that could be classed as following a holistic curriculum.

'Education should be understood as the art of cultivating the moral, emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of the developing child. A holistic way of thinking seeks to encompass and integrate multiple layers of meaning and experience rather than defining human possibilities narrowly. Every child is more than a future employee; every person's intelligence and abilities are far more complex than his or her scores on standardized tests. Holistic education aims to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning. This is done, not through an academic "curriculum" that condenses the world into instructional packages, but through direct engagement with the environment. Holistic education nurtures a sense of wonder'. http://www.infed.org/biblio/holisticeducation.htm

The aim of my school was to produce well-rounded individuals. Education needs to empower students now. The Education and teachers hopefully develop in the children such power of thought, such depth of feeling, such strength of will that they would emerge from their school years as full members of the Human Community, able to meet and transform the world. As in any organisation the school had its good and bad points but overall I feel extremely happy to have attended the school. I had many rich experiences throughout my school days. One of the strengths of the education was that it built up my self-confidence and ability to think laterally. A great tool for life - any gaps in knowledge could be filled in later, as I had the nous to go out and ask questions, research and discover things for myself. One of the wonderful aspects of my education was the school was like a community. Some of my closest friends now are people I went to school with from kindergarten. The school was co-educational and we were not streamed and so went through the school with the same group of students.

I remember my education as being very full and experiential - we would study topics in depth for a couple of hours a day for 3-4 weeks, e.g. Indian Mythology. We would learn about it using all types of learning e.g. Visual, Kinesthetic, Auditory, and Oral. For example, while studying Indian Mythology we heard stories, learnt music, poetry, cooked Indian food and learnt traditional dancing, learnt some of the language and put on a play as well – so it was an exceedingly full learning experience. This type of learning went all the way through the school from primary to secondary school. Subjects covered in the curriculum ranged from the Philosophy, Norse Mythology, Greek Mythology, History of Architecture, 20th Century History, Physics etc… These ‘Main Lessons’ ran alongside regular classes in English, PE, Maths etc… I remember we went on interesting school camps. As 12 year olds studying Geology we went on a camp to Waitomo and went caving.

The school day, the week and the year had a strong rhythm to it and gave us the sense of stability and connectedness to the world around us. We acknowledged the rhythm of the year by celebrating the change of seasons. For example, in autumn we would dress up in autumnal colours, have a harvest table of food we would give to charity, sing songs and eat a meal together (which we cooked). For winter we made a bonfire, made lanterns and went for a lantern walk at night and sang winter songs – very magical! The early years were full of art, drama, music, stories – the education really encourages the Child’s imagination. The way of teaching and learning engaged the children, acknowledging their world and the culture of childhood.

2006-10-03T16:00:00.000+13:00

Vegetarian Film Fest October 8th to celebrate World Vegetarian Day

I find it a bit strange that there is to be a vegetarian film festival October 8 but it's a great chance to view the documentary feature film by Franny Armstrong, McLibel (see review below).

McLibel (U.K., 2005)
The postman and the gardener who took on McDonalds and won.'McLibel' is the story of two ordinary people who humiliated McDonald's in the biggest corporate PR disaster in history.McDonald's loved using the UK libel laws to suppress criticism. Major media organisations like the BBC and The Guardian crumbled and apologised. But then they sued gardener Helen Steel and postman Dave Morris.In the longest trial in English legal history, the "McLibel Two" represented themselves against McDonald's ?10 million legal team. Every aspect of the corporation's business was cross-examined: from junk food and McJobs, to animal cruelty, environmental damage and advertising to children.Outside the courtroom, Dave brought up his young son alone and Helen supported herself working nights in a bar. McDonald's tried every trick in the book against them. Legal manoeuvres. A visit from Ronald McDonald. Top executives flying to London for secret settlement negotiations. Even spies.Seven years later, in February 2005, the marathon legal battle finally concluded at the European Court of Human Rights. And the result took everyone by surprise - especially the British Government.'McLibel' is not just about hamburgers. It is about the importance of freedom of speech now that multinational corporations are more powerful than countries.Filmed over ten years by no-budget Director Franny Armstrong, 'McLibel' is the David and Goliath story of two people who refused to say sorry. And in doing so, changed the world.An earlier version of the film, 'McLibel: Two Worlds Collide' was released in 1997 and was seen by more than 22 million people worldwide.
"Absolutely unmissable" - The Guardian
"More twists than a John Le Carre novel" - Bermuda Sun
"A landmark documentary" - oneworld.net
"Will satisfy both head and heart" - Time Out
"Intriguing and at times hilarious" - The Scotsman
"The sort of film Michael Moore probably thinks he makes" - The Sunday Times
"Freedom of speech rarely tasted so satisfying. " - The Times Online
"Dynamite. " - Yahoo Movies
"Charming and inspiring" - Radio Times
"Hilarious and engrossing" - BBC website

2006-09-30T13:55:00.000+12:00

Marwahin, 15 July 2006: The anatomy of a massacre
A special report by Robert Fisk for the Independent
Published: 30 September 2006

In antiquity, Pliny wrote of the cliffs of Bayada. The chalk runs down to the Mediterranean in an almost Dover-like cascade of white rock, and the view from the top - just below the little Lebanese village of Chama'a - is breathtaking. To the south lies the United Nations headquarters and the Israeli frontier, to the north the city of Tyre, its long promentary, built by Alexander the Great, lunging out into the green-blue sea. A winding, poorly-made road runs down to the shore below Chama'a and for some reason - perhaps because he had caught sight of the Israeli warship off the coast - 58-year-old Ali Kemal Abdullah took a right turn above the Mediterranean on the morning of 15 July. In the open-topped pick-up behind him, Ali had packed 27 Lebanese refugees, most of them children. Twenty-three of them were to die within the next 15 minutes.
The tragedy of these poor young people and of their desperate attempts to survive their repeated machine-gunning from the air is as well-known in Lebanon as it is already forgotten abroad. War crimes are easy to talk about when they have been committed in Rwanda or Bosnia; less so in Lebanon, especially when the Israelis are involved. But all the evidence suggests that what happened on this blissfully lovely coastline two and a half months ago was a crime against humanity, one that is impossible to justify on any military grounds since the dead and wounded were fleeing their homes on the express orders of the Israelis themselves.
Mohamed Abdullah understands the reality of that terrible morning because his 52-year-old wife Zahra, his sons Hadi, aged six, and 15-year-old Wissam, and his daughters, Marwa, aged 10, and 13-year old Myrna, were in the pick-up. Zahra was to die. So was Hadi and the beautiful little girl Myrna whose photograph - with immensely intelligent, appealing eyes - now haunts the streets of Marwahin. Wissam, a vein in his leg cut open by an Israeli missile as he vainly tried to save Myrna's life, sits next to his father as he talks to me outside their Beirut house, its walls drenched in black cloth.
"From the day of the attack until now, lots of delegations have come to see us," Mohamed says. "They all talk and it is all for nothing. My problem is with a huge nation. Can the international community get me my rights? I am a weak person, unprotected. I am a 53-year-old man and I've been working as a soldier for 29 years, day and night, to be productive and to support a family that can serve society and that can be a force for good in this country. I was able to build a home in my village for my wife and children - with no help from anyone - and I did this in 2000, 23 years after I was driven out of Marwahin and I finished our new home this year." And here Mohamed Abdullah stops speaking and cries.
Marwahin is one of a string of villages opposite the Israeli border and, unlike many others further north, is inhabited by Sunni Muslim Lebanese, followers of the assassinated former prime minister Rafiq Hariri rather than the Shiite-dominated Hizbollah militia, which is supported and supplied by Syria and Iran. Most Sunnis blame Syria for Hariri's murder on 14 February last year.
While no friends of Israel, the Sunni community in Lebanon - especially the few thousand Sunnis of Marwahin who are so close to the frontier that they can see the red roofs of the nearest Jewish settlement - are no threat to Israel. For generations, they have intermarried - which is why most of the people in this tragedy hold the family name of al-Abdullah or Ghanem - and, had their parents been born a few hundred metres further south, they would - like the Sunni Muslim Palestinians who lived there until 1948 - have fled to the refugee camps of Lebanon when Israel was created.
Mohamed recalls with immense tiredness how his wife took his children south from Beirut to their family home in Marwahin on 9 July this year. The date is important because just three days later, Hizbollah members would cross the Israeli border, capture two Israeli soldiers and kill three others - five more were to die in a minefield later the same day - and Israel would respond with 34 days of air-strikes and bombardments that killed more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians. Hizbollah missiles would kill fewer than 200 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Just down the hill from Marwahin, on Israeli territory, stands a tall radio transmission tower and on the morning of 15 July, the Israelis used loudspeakers on the tower to order the villagers to flee their homes. Survivors describe how they visited two nearby UN posts to appeal for protection, one manned by four members of the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organisation - set up after the 1948 war with Israel - and the other by Ghanaian soldiers of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, the same army which, much expanded with French, Italian, Turkish and Chinese troops, is now supposed to police the latest ceasefire in southern Lebanon. Both the UNTSO men and the Ghanaians read the rule-book at the villagers of Marwahin. Ever since the Israelis attacked the UNIFIL barracks at Qana in 1996, slaughtering 106 Lebanese refugees - again, most of them children - the UN has been under orders not to allow civilians into their bases. The UN, it seems, can talk mightily of the need to protect the innocent, f but will do precious little to shield them in southern Lebanon.
Mohamed's four children had travelled south with their mother to buy furniture for their newly-built home; their father and his six other children in Beirut were to join them the following week.
"When the Israeli soldiers were taken, the airport closed down and all the roads became dangerous," Mohamed says. "But the mobile phones still worked and I had constant conversations with my wife. I asked her what was happening in the village. She said the Israelis were bombing in the fields around the village but not in the village itself. She had no car and anyway it was too dangerous to travel on the roads. On 13 and 14 July, we spoke six or seven times. She was asking about those of our children who were with me. You see, she had heard that Beirut had been bombed so we were worried about each other."
Mohamed's calvary began when he turned to the Arabia television station on the morning of the 15th. "I heard that the people of Marwahin had been ordered by the Israelis to leave their homes within two hours. I tried to call my wife and children but I couldn't get through. Then after half an hour, Zahra called me to say she was in the neighbouring village of Um Mtut and that people had gone to the UN to seek help and been turned away."
Mohamed insists - though other villagers do not agree with this - that while the UN were turning the civilians away, a van drove into Marwahin containing missiles. The driver was a member of Hizbollah, he says, and its registration number was 171364 (Lebanese registrations have no letters). If this is true, it clearly created a "crisis" - to use Mohamed al-Abdullah's word - in the village. Certainly, once the ceasefire came into place 32 days later, there was a damaged van beside the equally damaged village mosque with a missile standing next to it. Human rights investigators are unclear of the date of the van's arrival but seem certain that it was attacked by the Israelis - probably by an air-fired rocket - after Marwahin was evacuated.
In her last conversation with her husband, Zahra told Mohamed that the four children were having breakfast in a neighbour's house in Um Mtut. "I told her to stay with these people," Mohamed recalls. "I said that if all the civilians were together, they would be protected. My brother-in-law, Ali Kemal al-Abdullah, had a small pick-up and they could travel in this." First to leave Marwahin was a car driven by Ahmed Kassem who took his children with him and promised to telephone from Tyre if he reached the city safely. He called a couple of hours later to say the road was OK and that he had reached Tyre. "That's when Ali put his children and my children and his own grandchildren in the pick-up. There were 27 people, almost 20 of them children."
Ali Kemal drove north from Marwahin, away from the Israeli border, then west towards the sea. He must have seen the Israeli warship and the Israeli naval crew certainly saw Ali's pick-up. The Israelis had been firing at all vehicles on the roads of southern Lebanon for three days - they hit dozens of civilian cars as well as ambulances and never once explained their actions except to claim that they were shooting at "terrorists". At a corner of the road, where it descends to the sea, Ali Kemal suddenly realised his vehicle was overheating and he pulled to a halt. This was a dangerous place to break down. For seven minutes, he tried to restart the pick-up.
According to Mohamed's son Wissam, Ali - whose elderly mother Sabaha was sitting beside him in the front - turned to the children with the words: "Get out, all you children get out and the Israelis will realise we are civilians." The first two or three children had managed to climb out the back when the Israeli warship fired a shell that exploded in the cab of the pick-up, killing Ali and Sabaha instantly. "I had almost been able to jump from the vehicle -- my mother had told me to jump before the ship hit us," Wissam says. "But the pressure of the explosion blew me out when I had only one leg over the railing and I was wounded. There was blood everywhere."
Within a few seconds, Wissam says, an Israeli Apache helicopter arrived over the f vehicle, very low and hovering just above the children. "I saw Myrna still in the pick-up and she was crying and pleading for help. I went to get her and that's when the helicopter hit us. Its missile hit the back of the vehicle where all the children were and I couldn't hear anything because the blast had damaged my ears. Then the helicopter fired a rocket into the car behind the pick-up. But the pilot must have seen what he was doing. He could see we were mostly children. The pick-up didn't have a roof. All the children were crammed in the back and clearly visible."
Wissam talks slowly but without tears as he describes what happened next. "I lost sight of Myrna. I just couldn't see her any more for the dust flying around. Then the helicopter came back and started firing its guns at the children, at any of them who moved. I ran away behind a tel [a small hill] and lay there and pretended to be dead because I knew the pilot would kill me if I moved. Some of the children were in bits."
Wissam is correct about the mutilations. Hadi was burned to death in Zahra's arms. She died clutching his body to her. Two small girls - Fatmi and Zainab Ghanem - were blasted into such small body parts that they were buried together in the same grave after the war was over. Other children lay wounded by the initial shell burst and rocket explosions as the helicopter attacked them again. Only four survived, Wissam and his sister Marwa among them, hearing the sound of bullets as they "played dead" amid the corpses.
His father Mohamed heard on the radio that a pick-up had been attacked by the Israelis at Bayada, perhaps 10km from Marwahin. "When I heard that the driver was Ali Kemal al-Abdullah, I knew - I knew - that my children were on that truck," he says, "because my brother-in-law would not have left them behind. He would have taken them with him. I had another brother in Tyre and I called him. He had heard the same news and was waiting at the hospital. He said it was too dangerous to travel from Beirut to Tyre. He said that my family were only wounded. I said that if they were only wounded, I wanted to speak to them. I spoke to Marwa. She said Wissam was in the operating theatre. I asked to speak to the others. My brother just said: 'Later.'"
No one who has travelled the roads of southern Lebanon under Israeli air attack can underestimate the dangers. But Mohamed and his nephew Khalil decided to make the run to Tyre in the afternoon. "We just drove fast, all the way," Mohamed remembers. "I got to the Hiram hospital and I found Ali, my brother, waiting for me. I saw Marwa and I asked about her mother and Hadi and Myrna and she said: 'I saw them in the pick-up, sleeping. When the ship hit us, I was blown out of the vehicle. Afterwards, I saw Mummy and my brother sleeping.'" Marwa told Mohamed that she had run from the pick-up with her 19-year-old cousin Zeinab.
When Mohamed drove to the city hospital in Tyre in search of Zahra, Hadi and Myrna, his brother refused to travel with him. "At this point, I knew there was something wrong. So I went to the hospital on my own and I found my wife and children in the fridge. It was a horrible shock. To this day, I feel like I am dreaming. And I cannot believe what happened. No one came to ask me about Marwa or Wissam who lost a vein in his leg. It seems no one knows that this house has martyrs."
Before the ceasefire in southern Lebanon, Mohamed was called to say that the medical authorities in Tyre wished to bury the dead of Marwahin temporarily in a mass grave. He attended their burial and returned to his much-battered village on 15 August - just over a month after his wife and two children were killed and in time for their final interment on 24 August. He found his house partially destroyed in the Israeli bombardment along with the van and its Hizbollah rockets. "Every day is worse than the one before for me," Mohamed says.
And he blames the world. The UN for giving no protection to his family, Hizbollah's "vanity" in starting a war with a more powerful enemy and the Israelis for destroying the life of his family. "Is Israel in a state of war with children? We need an answer, a response to f this question. We ask for a trial for this Israeli pilot who killed the children. He is a war criminal because he killed innocents for no reason. And what has happened? The south has been destroyed. The people were massacred. The Israelis were back on the soil of my land. I could see them when we buried Zahra and Hadi and Myrna. How can I lose my children and then see the Israelis here? We are ignored by the government and treated with neglect by the media and the political parties - including the Hizbollah - who were the cause of what happened."
Almost all the "martyr" pictures of the dead of Marwahin contain a ghostly photograph of Rafiq Hariri, the mightest Sunni Muslim of them all, who was assassinated last year. The martyrs of Marwahin have become identified with a man who sought peace rather than war with Israel. But at the graveyard on the edge of the tobacco-growing village, there is no end to mourning. I found two old women sitting beside the graves, weeping and beating themselves and pulling at their hair. One of them was Ali Kemal's wife.
Adel Abdullah took me round the graves. His sister-in-law Mariam lies in one of them, her body still containing the unborn child she was carrying when she died. So are her five children, Ali, 14, Hamad, 12, Hussein, 10, Hassan, eight, and two-year-old Lama.
"This is Myrna," Adel says, patting his hand gently on the concrete surface of the little girl's still unadorned grave. "This is Zahra, her mother, whom we put just behind her. And here is Hadi." The villagers have written their first names in Arabic in the concrete. "There is Naame Ghanem and her two children. And this is the grave of both Fatmi and Zeinab because we could not tell which bits of them belonged together. That is why the 23 dead of Marwahin have only 22 graves."
On the dirt road to the cemetery on the windy little hill above the village, there still lies a face mask worn by the young men carrying the decomposing bodies to their final grave. And just to the left of the dead, clearly visible to the Israeli settlers in their homes across the border, the villagers have left the remains of Ali Kemal Abdullah's Daihatsu pick-up. It is punctured by a hundred shrapnel holes, bent and distorted and burned. The children in this vehicle had no chance, killed outright or smashed to pieces as they lay wounded afterwards.
"If it is right that these people should be martyred in this way, well fine," Adel says to me. "If not, why did this crime take place? Why can't a country - a single country, your country - say that Israel was responsible for a war crime? But no, you are silent." A woman, watching Adel's anger, was more eloquent. "The problem," she said, "is that these poor people belonged to a country called Lebanon and our lives are worth nothing to anyone else. If this had happened in Israel - if all these children were Israeli and the Hizbollah had killed them all with a helicopter - the US president would travel to the cemetery each year for a memorial service and there would be war crimes trials and the world would denounce this crime. But no president is going to come to Marwahin. There will be no trials."
Mohamed al-Abdullah weeps beside his wounded son in Beirut. "I consider this to have been a useless war and with these atrocious massacres it is innocent civilians who paid the price. Those who died are resting but we who are living are paying a price every day. That price is paid by the living who suffer. Why should I pay the price of something I didn't choose? I will say just one thing to you. God have mercy on Rafiq Hariri, a man of education and reconstruction. In God's name, I hope his children walk in his path. My wife loved Sheikh Rafiq so much. In this house, my wife's whole life changed after his assassination. Before, Zahra was not interested in politics but from the day his car was bombed, she listened to the news every day. Before bed, she wanted to hear any news. And she said to me once, 'I hope I don't die, so I will know who killed Rafiq Hariri'."
A UN investigation is still underway into Hariri's murder. An Israeli investigation is to start into the disastrous performance of its army during the war. The Hizbollah still claims it won a "divine victory" in July and August of this year. UNIFIL, which turned the refugees of Marwahin away on 15 July, stated that when they were removing the children's bodies, their soldiers came under fire. Human Rights Watch is still investigating the killings of civilians at Marwahin and other locations and wrote of them before the war ended. "The Israeli military," it said in its initial report, "did not follow its orders [to civilians] to evacuate with the creation of safe passage routes, and on a daily basis Israeli warplanes and helicopters struck civilians in cars who were trying to flee, many with white flags out the windows, a widely accepted sign of civilian status ... On some days, Israeli war planes hit dozens of civilian cars, showing a clear pattern of failing to distinguish between civilian and military objects." International law makes it clear that it is forbidden in any circumstances to carry out direct attacks against civilians and that to do so is a war crime. Human Rights Watch states that "war crimes" include "making the civilian population or individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities the object of attack".
Lama Abdullah was the youngest victim of the Marwahin 23. Ali Kemal's wife Sabaha was in her eighties. At least six of the children were between the ages of one and 10. The Israeli helicopter pilot's name is, of course, unknown.

2006-09-30T13:25:00.000+12:00

Day the East End said 'No pasaran' to Blackshirts
Audrey Gillan
Saturday September 30, 2006
The Guardian

They built barricades from paving stones, timber and overturned lorries. Women threw the contents of chamber pots on to the heads of policemen and children hurled marbles under their horses and burst bags of pepper in front of their noses.
Next Wednesday marks the 70th anniversary of the day that Jews, communists, trade unionists, Labour party members, Irish Catholic dockers and the people of the East End of London united in defiance of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and refused to let them march through their streets.

Shouting the Spanish civil war slogan "No pasaran" - "They shall not pass" - more than 300,000 people turned back an army of Blackshirts. Their victory over racism and anti-Semitism on Sunday October 4 1936 became known as the Battle of Cable Street and encapsulated the British fight against a fascism that was stomping across Europe.
Mosley planned to send columns of thousands of goose-stepping men throughout the impoverished East End dressed in uniforms that mimicked those of Hitler's Nazis. His target was the large Jewish community.
The Jewish Board of Deputies advised Jews to stay away. The Jewish Chronicle warned: "Jews are urgently warned to keep away from the route of the Blackshirt march and from their meetings. "Jews who, however innocently, become involved in any possible disorders will be actively helping anti-Semitism and Jew-baiting. Unless you want to help the Jew baiters, keep away." The Jews did not keep away. Professor Bill Fishman, now 89, who was 15 on the day, was at Gardner's Corner in Aldgate, the entrance to the East End. "There was masses of marching people. Young people, old people, all shouting 'No Pasaran' and 'One two three four five - we want Mosley, dead or alive'," he said. "It was like a massive army gathering, coming from all the side streets. Mosley was supposed to arrive at lunchtime but the hours were passing and he hadn't come. Between 3pm and 3.30 we could see a big army of Blackshirts marching towards the confluence of Commercial Road and Whitechapel Road."
Marbles
"I pushed myself forward and because I was 6ft I could see Mosley. They were surrounded by an even greater army of police. There was to be this great advance of the police force to get the fascists through. Suddenly, the horses' hooves were flying and the horses were falling down because the young kids were throwing marbles."
Thousands of policemen were sandwiched between the Blackshirts and the anti-fascists. The latter were well organised and through a mole learned that the chief of police had told Mosley that his passage into the East End could be made through Cable Street.
"I heard this loudspeaker say 'They are going to Cable Street'," said Prof Fishman. "Suddenly a barricade was erected there and they put an old lorry in the middle of the road and old mattresses. The people up the top of the flats, mainly Irish Catholic women, were throwing rubbish on to the police. We were all side by side. I was moved to tears to see bearded Jews and Irish Catholic dockers standing up to stop Mosley. I shall never forget that as long as I live, how working-class people could get together to oppose the evil of racism."
Max Levitas, now 91, was a message runner and had already been fined £10 in court for his anti-Mosley activities. Two years before Cable Street, the BUF had called a meeting in Hyde Park and in protest Mr Levitas whitewashed Nelson's column, calling people to the park to drown out the fascists. Mr Levitas went on to become a Communist councillor in Stepney.
"I feel proud that I played a major part in stopping Mosley. When we heard that the march was disbanded, there was a hue and cry and the flags were going wild. They did not pass. The chief of police decided that if the march had taken place there would be death on the road - and there would have been," he said.
"It was a victory for ordinary people against racism and anti-Semitism and it should be instilled in the minds of people today. The Battle of Cable Street is a history lesson for us all. People as people must get together and stop racism and anti-Semitism so people can lead an ordinary life and develop their own ideas and religions."
Beatty Orwell, 89, was scared and excited. "People were fighting and a friend of mine was thrown through a plate glass window."

2006-09-30T11:39:00.000+12:00

An Ode to George Berkeley!

In my last year of high school I had to do a project on George Berkeley, the influential 18th Century Irish Philosopher. At the time I hated the philosophies he espoused and finished the project, very poorly, kicking and screaming. Such was my dislike for the subject matter that as soon as the project was over, I promptly blotted Berkeley from mind and memory.

Today I was having a discussion on philosophy and I was saying that I had studied philosophy as a teenager. I became extremely frustrated when I couldn't remember which philosopher I had done my project on. I immediately started researching philosophers until Berkeley popped into my mind. So, I thought I'd write a quick tribute to George Berkeley for treating him with such disdain as an 18 year old.

George Berkeley was born 12 March 1685 and died 14 January 1753. He sits within in the philosophical schools of Idealism and Empiricism. David Hume of the Scottish Enlightenment movement was one of Berkeley's main influences. His major philosophical achievement was the development of what is now called subjective idealism This theory describes 'a relationship between human experience of the external world, and that world itself, in which objects are nothing more than collections (or bundles) of sense data in those who perceive them.' (From Wikipedia)

'This theory can be summed up in his dictum, "Esse est percipi" ("to be is to be perceived"). The theory states that individuals can only directly know sensations and ideas of objects, not abstractions such as "matter". '(Taken from Wikipedia)

I like the limerick by Ronald Knox summerising Berkeley's philosophy:

There was a young man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
"Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the Quad
And that's why this tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God."

I wont write anymore here but there is further info on his published works and life on Wikipedia

2006-09-25T08:39:00.000+12:00

What do you eat as a vegetarian?!

I often get asked what I eat as a vegetarian. This question shocks me initially (I feel everyone should be enlightened in regards to vegetarianism these days!) but on reflection I realise that everyone is only acting on what they know and how they were raised (how can someone fed meat and three veg everyday know any different?). I thought I would add some interesting vege recipes here to enlighten the meat eaters and provide delicious recipes for us all to use. There are great recipes on the Vegetarian Society website including ideas and recipes for holidays and festivals.

Griddled Aubergine Stacks (suitable for vegans)
This recipe is completely dairy free, but if you like cheese then these vegetable stacks are lovely topped with a slice of griddled Halloumi. The sauce should be dotted with lots of tiny pieces of tomato and pepper, which form the 'confetti'.

A little olive oil
1 large aubergine, cut into rings
2 beef tomatoes, skinned and cut into ringszest of one lemon, finely chopped
Few sprigs of fresh sage, chopped
Few sprigs of fresh thyme, chopped
Few fresh chives, finely chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper
Balsamic vinegar, to taste
4 slices Halloumi cheese, lemon zest, to garnish
chives or chive flowers, to garnish

Tomato confetti sauce:
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, crushed
225g/8oz fresh ripe full-flavoured tomatoes, skinned and finely chopped
15Oml/1/4 pint vegetarian white wine
1 yellow or red pepper, roasted, skin removed and cut into strips, then
across into diamonds
1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper

First make the sauce. Heat the olive oil in a suacepan and fry the onion gently with the garlic. Add half of the chopped tomatoes and the white wine and cook for five minutes. Blend unfit smooth. Mix in the rest of the chopped tomatoes with the pepper pieces and 1 teaspoon of balsamic vinegar. Season to taste.

Brush the griddle with olive oil and cook the aubergine slices so that they are seared with stripes. Put on one side and keep warm. Grill the beef tomato slices gently.

Mix the lemon and herbs together and season well. On individual serving plates, layer the aubergine, tomato and herb mix. Drizzle with a little balsamic vinegar. Repeat until all the layers are used up and top with a slice of tomato and a sprinkling of the herb mixture. Grill the slices of Halloumi and arrange on top of each stack, garnished with lemon zest and chives. Drizzle tomato confetti sauce around the plate and decorate with chives or chive flowers. Serve warm.

2006-09-22T12:49:00.000+12:00

Docherty Wilkins Impresses at NZ Fashion Week

I just want to take this opportunity to congratulate my friends Heather and Rory Docherty on their inaugural show at NZ Fashion Week. It was great to see that TV One's Sharon Fergusson picked their show as the stand out show of the day and an exciting label to watch for the furture. You can see the images from the catwalk on Runway Reporter and a review by Julie Roulston on FashioNZ here.

I previously wrote a post on Docherty Wilkins which you can read here.

2006-09-21T14:15:00.000+12:00

Rise Up Against the Empire

Chavez's speech to the UN has really stirred up a lot of discussion around the world. One of the interesting asides from his speech is that Noam Chomsky's book, 'Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States,' is now #1 on Amazon.com's best-seller list. There are some good reviews of the book on Amazon.

In Hegemony or Survival Chomsky argues that current U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are not specific responses to September 11, but rather the continuation of a foreign policy-an "imperial grand strategy"-in which the United States has attempted to "maintain its hegemony through the threat or use of military force." You can read further opinion on Chavez's speech on the blog Reading The Maps and here is a link to a BBC story

FYI Chavez's speech is reproduced in full below:

President Hugo Chavez, Address to the United Nations
19/09/06 "Information Clearing House"

Representatives of the governments of the world, good morning to all of you. First of all, I would like to invite you, very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it.Noam Chomsky, one of the most prestigious American and world intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, and this is one of his most recent books, 'Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States.'" [Holds up book, waves it in front of General Assembly.] "It's an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century, and what's happening now, and the greatest threat looming over our planet.

The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads. I had considered reading from this book, but, for the sake of time," [flips through the pages, which are numerous] "I will just leave it as a recommendation.It reads easily, it is a very good book, I'm sure Madame [President] you are familiar with it. It appears in English, in Russian, in Arabic, in German. I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house.

The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house."And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here." [crosses himself] "And it smells of sulfur still today.Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday's statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: "The Devil's Recipe."As Chomsky says here, clearly and in depth, the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its system of domination. And we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated.

The world parent's statement -- cynical, hypocritical, full of this imperial hypocrisy from the need they have to control everything.They say they want to impose a democratic model. But that's their democratic model. It's the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that's imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons.What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy.What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs? The president of the United States, yesterday, said to us, right here, in this room, and I'm quoting, "Anywhere you look, you hear extremists telling you can escape from poverty and recover your dignity through violence, terror and martyrdom."Wherever he looks, he sees extremists. And you, my brother -- he looks at your color, and he says, oh, there's an extremist. Evo Morales, the worthy president of Bolivia, looks like an extremist to him. The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It's not that we are extremists. It's that the world is waking up. It's waking up all over. And people are standing up. I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism, who are shouting for equality, for respect, for the sovereignty of nations.

Yes, you can call us extremists, but we are rising up against the empire, against the model of domination.The president then -- and this he said himself, he said: "I have come to speak directly to the populations in the Middle East, to tell them that my country wants peace."That's true. If we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They'll say yes. But the government doesn't want peace. The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war.It wants peace. But what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela -- new threats against Venezuela, against Iran? He spoke to the people of Lebanon. Many of you, he said, have seen how your homes and communities were caught in the crossfire. How cynical can you get? What a capacity to lie shamefacedly. The bombs in Beirut with millimetric precision? This is crossfire? He's thinking of a western, when people would shoot from the hip and somebody would be caught in the crossfire.This is imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal, the empire and Israel firing on the people of Palestine and Lebanon.

That is what happened. And now we hear, "We're suffering because we see homes destroyed.'The president of the United States came to talk to the peoples -- to the peoples of the world. He came to say -- I brought some documents with me, because this morning I was reading some statements, and I see that he talked to the people of Afghanistan, the people of Lebanon, the people of Iran. And he addressed all these peoples directly. And you can wonder, just as the president of the United States addresses those peoples of the world, what would those peoples of the world tell him if they were given the floor? What would they have to say?And I think I have some inkling of what the peoples of the south, the oppressed people think. They would say, "Yankee imperialist, go home." I think that is what those people would say if they were given the microphone and if they could speak with one voice to the American imperialists.

And that is why, Madam President, my colleagues, my friends, last year we came here to this same hall as we have been doing for the past eight years, and we said something that has now been confirmed -- fully, fully confirmed.I don't think anybody in this room could defend the system. Let's accept -- let's be honest. The U.N. system, born after the Second World War, collapsed. It's worthless.Oh, yes, it's good to bring us together once a year, see each other, make statements and prepare all kinds of long documents, and listen to good speeches, like Abel's yesterday, or President Mullah's . Yes, it's good for that. And there are a lot of speeches, and we've heard lots from the president of Sri Lanka, for instance, and the president of Chile. But we, the assembly, have been turned into a merely deliberative organ. We have no power, no power to make any impact on the terrible situation in the world. And that is why Venezuela once again proposes, here, today, 20 September, that we re-establish the United Nations.

Last year, Madam, we made four modest proposals that we felt to be crucially important. We have to assume the responsibility our heads of state, our ambassadors, our representatives, and we have to discuss it.The first is expansion, and Mullah talked about this yesterday right here. The Security Council, both as it has permanent and non-permanent categories, (inaudible) developing countries and LDCs must be given access as new permanent members. That's step one. Second, effective methods to address and resolve world conflicts, transparent decisions.Point three, the immediate suppression -- and that is something everyone's calling for -- of the anti-democratic mechanism known as the veto, the veto on decisions of the Security Council.Let me give you a recent example. The immoral veto of the United States allowed the Israelis, with impunity, to destroy Lebanon. Right in front of all of us as we stood there watching, a resolution in the council was prevented.

Fourthly, we have to strengthen, as we've always said, the role and the powers of the secretary general of the United Nations.Yesterday, the secretary general practically gave us his speech of farewell. And he recognized that over the last 10 years, things have just gotten more complicated; hunger, poverty, violence, human rights violations have just worsened. That is the tremendous consequence of the collapse of the United Nations system and American hegemonistic pretensions. Madam, Venezuela a few years ago decided to wage this battle within the United Nations by recognizing the United Nations, as members of it that we are, and lending it our voice, our thinking. Our voice is an independent voice to represent the dignity and the search for peace and the reformulation of the international system; to denounce persecution and aggression of hegemonistic forces on the planet. This is how Venezuela has presented itself.

Bolivar's home has sought a nonpermanent seat on the Security Council. Let's see. Well, there's been an open attack by the U.S. government, an immoral attack, to try and prevent Venezuela from being freely elected to a post in the Security Council.The imperium is afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices. It calls us extremists, but they are the extremists.And I would like to thank all the countries that have kindly announced their support for Venezuela, even though the ballot is a secret one and there's no need to announce things.But since the imperium has attacked, openly, they strengthened the convictions of many countries. And their support strengthens us. Mercosur, as a bloc, has expressed its support, our brothers in Mercosur. Venezuela, with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, is a full member of Mercosur. And many other Latin American countries, CARICOM, Bolivia have expressed their support for Venezuela. The Arab League, the full Arab League has voiced its support. And I am immensely grateful to the Arab world, to our Arab brothers, our Caribbean brothers, the African Union. Almost all of Africa has expressed its support for Venezuela and countries such as Russia or China and many others.I thank you all warmly on behalf of Venezuela, on behalf of our people, and on behalf of the truth, because Venezuela, with a seat on the Security Council, will be expressing not only Venezuela's thoughts, but it will also be the voice of all the peoples of the world, and we will defend dignity and truth.Over and above all of this, Madam President, I think there are reasons to be optimistic. A poet would have said "helplessly optimistic," because over and above the wars and the bombs and the aggressive and the preventive war and the destruction of entire peoples, one can see that a new era is dawning.As Sylvia Rodriguez says, the era is giving birth to a heart. There are alternative ways of thinking. There are young people who think differently. And this has already been seen within the space of a mere decade. It was shown that the end of history was a totally false assumption, and the same was shown about Pax Americana and the establishment of the capitalist neo-liberal world. It has been shown, this system, to generate mere poverty. Who believes in it now?What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceanea. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision.We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.Venezuela joins that struggle, and that's why we are threatened.

The U.S. has already planned, financed and set in motion a coup in Venezuela, and it continues to support coup attempts in Venezuela and elsewhere.President Michelle Bachelet reminded us just a moment ago of the horrendous assassination of the former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier.And I would just add one thing: Those who perpetrated this crime are free. And that other event where an American citizen also died were American themselves. They were CIA killers, terrorists.And we must recall in this room that in just a few days there will be another anniversary. Thirty years will have passed from this other horrendous terrorist attack on the Cuban plane, where 73 innocents died, a Cubana de Aviacion airliner.And where is the biggest terrorist of this continent who took the responsibility for blowing up the plane? He spent a few years in jail in Venezuela. Thanks to CIA and then government officials, he was allowed to escape, and he lives here in this country, protected by the government.And he was convicted. He has confessed to his crime. But the U.S. government has double standards. It protects terrorism when it wants to. And this is to say that Venezuela is fully committed to combating terrorism and violence. And we are one of the people who are fighting for peace.Luis Posada Carriles is the name of that terrorist who is protected here. And other tremendously corrupt people who escaped from Venezuela are also living here under protection: a group that bombed various embassies, that assassinated people during the coup. They kidnapped me and they were going to kill me, but I think God reached down and our people came out into the streets and the army was too, and so I'm here today.But these people who led that coup are here today in this country protected by the American government. And I accuse the American government of protecting terrorists and of having a completely cynical discourse.We mentioned Cuba. Yes, we were just there a few days ago. We just came from there happily.And there you see another era born.

The Summit of the 15, the Summit of the Nonaligned, adopted a historic resolution. This is the outcome document. Don't worry, I'm not going to read it.But you have a whole set of resolutions here that were adopted after open debate in a transparent matter -- more than 50 heads of state. Havana was the capital of the south for a few weeks, and we have now launched, once again, the group of the nonaligned with new momentum.And if there is anything I could ask all of you here, my companions, my brothers and sisters, it is to please lend your good will to lend momentum to the Nonaligned Movement for the birth of the new era, to prevent hegemony and prevent further advances of imperialism.And as you know, Fidel Castro is the president of the nonaligned for the next three years, and we can trust him to lead the charge very efficiently.Unfortunately they thought, "Oh, Fidel was going to die." But they're going to be disappointed because he didn't. And he's not only alive, he's back in his green fatigues, and he's now presiding the nonaligned.So, my dear colleagues, Madam President, a new, strong movement has been born, a movement of the south. We are men and women of the south.With this document, with these ideas, with these criticisms, I'm now closing my file. I'm taking the book with me. And, don't forget, I'm recommending it very warmly and very humbly to all of you.We want ideas to save our planet, to save the planet from the imperialist threat. And hopefully in this very century, in not too long a time, we will see this, we will see this new era, and for our children and our grandchildren a world of peace based on the fundamental principles of the United Nations, but a renewed United Nations.And maybe we have to change location. Maybe we have to put the United Nations somewhere else; maybe a city of the south. We've proposed Venezuela.You know that my personal doctor had to stay in the plane. The chief of security had to be left in a locked plane. Neither of these gentlemen was allowed to arrive and attend the U.N. meeting. This is another abuse and another abuse of power on the part of the Devil. It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us and I embrace you all.May God bless us all. Good day to you.

2006-09-18T11:55:00.000+12:00

War on Junk food continued...

New Zealand is following the UK's crusade to ban junk food in schools. The NZ governenment is banning foods such as sugery drinks and pies in schools, in a bid to combate NZ's growing child obesity problem. Reproduced below is a NZ Herald article on the new governemnt policy and another article on Jamie Oliver's continued campaign for healthy eating in UK schools.

Unhealthy foods get chop from tuck shops
Friday September 22, 2006
By Martin Johnston
Unhealthy food will be banned from school tuck shops next year under policies designed to help control a worsening obesity epidemic.
Pies, sugary soft drinks and chips face the chop under the policies unveiled yesterday.
They also aim to cut TV watching and encourage more physical activity.
Underlining the policies' significance, five Government ministers lined up to announce them at the Aotea Centre alongside the World Health Organisation's week-long Asia-Pacific regional meeting.
Main changes will be:
* Development of national nutritional guidelines for schools and early childhood centres. These will identify food and drinks in three categories - suitable for everyday consumption and to be promoted, for limited provision during the school day and not recommended to be provided.
* Enforcement of the guidelines by school boards, to be audited by the Education Review Office.
"It essentially is a banning," said Education Minister Steve Maharey. "The guidelines mean that something like the high level of sugar, salt and fat on the shelves of some schools won't be able to be there in future."
Health Minister Pete Hodgson said the three-tier classification system was yet to be developed but could be the "traffic-light" system of red, orange or green labels now used in Europe.
This could later be applied to the country's whole food supply.
He expects the new school system to be operating by the start of the next academic year.
The regulations will require school boards "to develop policies that promote and achieve healthy nutrition and reduce the consumption of unhealthy foods and drinks".
They will also apply to children's lunch boxes although, unlike for canteens, schools will not be expected to "achieve" healthy foods. The requirement will be to have policies on bringing healthy food and drink.
"We're not policing what goes into a [lunch] box," said Mr Maharey.
"It's really about trying to develop a good, positive lifestyle that kids will want to live, not brow-beating them into not having a cookie now and again."
The nutrition guidelines and regulations are among 10 schemes announced yesterday in a $67 million attack on obesity.
It is part of the $76.1 million committed in this year's Budget for anti-obesity work over four years.
Others are nutrition training for teachers, guidelines - yet to be written - on food advertising to children, expanding the Push-Play social marketing campaign to promote "screen-free" time, encouraging public servants, including at the Ministry of Health, to lead by example in being more physically active and using music, screen and sport stars to promote healthy choices to young people.
The Government is worried about a blow-out in public health system costs from the escalation of obesity-caused type 2 diabetes, a problem which may mean the current generation of children will live shorter lives than their parents.
The adult rate of obesity has more than doubled since 1977 - 21 per cent are now classified as obese, a further 35 per cent as overweight. Among children, 10 per cent are obese and 21 per cent are overweight.
Principals Federation national president Pat Newman said schools supported improving nutrition and many were doing so - most primary schools had removed sugary soft drinks - but he objected to the Government forcing nutrition rules on schools and to the lack of consultation.
"Before [this] we could do as much as we can; now we're legally the meat in the sandwich."
The Food Industry Group's executive director, Rob Bree, said it was involved in developing the school food classification system and doubted the Government would ban any food.
Greens health spokeswoman Sue Kedgley said the school nutrition policies were "a great start in transforming school food".
Junk-food ban in schools leaves nasty taste for some
Ashleigh Webster and her friends don't see the sense in banning unhealthy foods from schools.
"I think it's dumb," the 15-year-old Auckland Girls' Grammar School student said yesterday.
"It's our own choice really. It's up to the school if they want to let us eat unhealthy food.
"I get enough healthy food at home. I normally bring lunch - a sandwich of salad and meat, fruits, something that's not healthy to balance it out, like a muesli bar or chips."
Ashleigh sometimes buys a pie on the way to school, which is cheaper than buying one at school.
But older pupils Rachelle Peterson, 18, and Jacquelyn Myocevich, 17, can see good reason for removing unhealthy foods such as pies.
"All those studies show fat food makes you tired," said Jacquelyn.
"Eat fruit and it will make you more enthusiastic about going to class for the last two periods rather than going home to sleep.
"Our cafe has a lot of variety. Salads. Sandwiches. We have more healthy food available than junk foods. We have pies."
Sandwiches cost more than $3, she said, and pies $2.
Rachelle: "If someone has got $2 they will buy whatever is cheaper, which is the pie."

'Idiot' junk-food parents feel the wrath of Jamie
TV chef Oliver accuses adults of sabotaging healthy eating crusade
By Lauren Veevers and Anthony Barnes
Published: 17 September 2006

Jamie Oliver last night vented his anger at parents who wilfully ignore and even "sabotage" his healthy eating manifesto.
The TV chef-turned-nutrition campaigner has convinced the Government and schools to revamp children's menus, but there has been continuing resistance from some parents.
The latest evidence of a backlash came on Friday when two mothers from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, collected fast food orders and made deliveries at the gates of a school. They claimed Oliver's regime made kids too picky. Julie Critchlow, one of the mums, said: "Food is cheaper and better at local takeaways."
In a one-off programme, Return to Jamie's School Dinners, to be screened on Channel Four tomorrow night, Oliver rants about how parents are "arseholes" and "tossers" for giving their children fizzy drinks and crisps. His fury was prompted by an off-screen exchange with a mother he met during filming who was giving her one-year-old child Coca-Cola and said she would not make shepherd's pie because it was "too posh".
Many children around the UK are turning away from hot dinners. Figures from the School Food Trust show the number of children who had school dinners last year has dropped by 5.8 per cent in primary schools and 4.9 per cent in secondary schools.
A spokesman for Oliver said he had come up against parents who gave their children nothing but crisps, chocolate and fizzy drinks for lunch, never cooked from scratch and had never given their children fruit.
"All of these things made him angry," the spokesman said. "That's why he wants to see all kids having a nutritious hot school meal... even if they're eating rubbish when they get home."
At Thomas Tallis school in Greenwich, south-east London, Oliver ordered a junk food amnesty and the pupils, grudgingly, gave up their junk food in return for a burger bar where they could get salads and freshly cooked burgers.
The burger bar has been successful. Takings for meals at the school reached £4,000 in the first three days of this term - compared with around £2,400 in the first three days of last term.
However, research commissioned by Tesco revealed last week that more than two million children skip school dinners and use the money to buy junk food. One in four aged four to 16 preferred to have chips for lunch, and 14 per cent admitted binning fruit.
Jamie Oliver last night vented his anger at parents who wilfully ignore and even "sabotage" his healthy eating manifesto.
The TV chef-turned-nutrition campaigner has convinced the Government and schools to revamp children's menus, but there has been continuing resistance from some parents.
The latest evidence of a backlash came on Friday when two mothers from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, collected fast food orders and made deliveries at the gates of a school. They claimed Oliver's regime made kids too picky. Julie Critchlow, one of the mums, said: "Food is cheaper and better at local takeaways."
In a one-off programme, Return to Jamie's School Dinners, to be screened on Channel Four tomorrow night, Oliver rants about how parents are "arseholes" and "tossers" for giving their children fizzy drinks and crisps. His fury was prompted by an off-screen exchange with a mother he met during filming who was giving her one-year-old child Coca-Cola and said she would not make shepherd's pie because it was "too posh".
Many children around the UK are turning away from hot dinners. Figures from the School Food Trust show the number of children who had school dinners last year has dropped by 5.8 per cent in primary schools and 4.9 per cent in secondary schools.
A spokesman for Oliver said he had come up against parents who gave their children nothing but crisps, chocolate and fizzy drinks for lunch, never cooked from scratch and had never given their children fruit.
"All of these things made him angry," the spokesman said. "That's why he wants to see all kids having a nutritious hot school meal... even if they're eating rubbish when they get home."
At Thomas Tallis school in Greenwich, south-east London, Oliver ordered a junk food amnesty and the pupils, grudgingly, gave up their junk food in return for a burger bar where they could get salads and freshly cooked burgers.
The burger bar has been successful. Takings for meals at the school reached £4,000 in the first three days of this term - compared with around £2,400 in the first three days of last term.
However, research commissioned by Tesco revealed last week that more than two million children skip school dinners and use the money to buy junk food. One in four aged four to 16 preferred to have chips for lunch, and 14 per cent admitted binning fruit.

2006-09-17T10:11:00.000+12:00

Conflict Resolution
BBC World is running a Peacemakers Season throughout September and posing the question, “can conflicts be resolved through peaceful means?"

This question is one I have been thinking about for a while, not an easy question to answer. My background is, I did a degree in International Communication and I am currently considering doing my masters in International Relations/Politics/ Conflict Resolution/Peace Studies. I don’t have any answers, only still half formed opinions. I would like to start a discussion here and gather others’ points of view on this topic.
Some of the skills that can be developed to help resolve conflict in a peaceful and constructive way are:
· Building bridges not walls – looking for common ground.
· Understanding that not all conflict is bad, it can be constructive and lead to a better situation for all, if dealt with in the correct way. Differences can stimulate social progress, rather than precipitate violence.
· Develop self understanding and understanding of others.
· Develop Empathy - walk in their shoes. Don’t let differing viewpoints overwhelm the respect for one another and shared interests and concerns.
· Develop listening skills - listen, state your feelings, and offer a plan of action.
· Be Assertive but do not personally attack.
So, please give your opinions and I will add more to this discussion too....

2006-09-13T07:48:00.000+12:00

The debate over junk food and childrearing continues in Britain. I have commented in previous posts about healthy eating and Jamie Oliver's new TV series 'Return to School Dinners.' Here's some more food for thought:

Junk culture killing childhood, experts warn
Helen Mooney, Tuesday September 12, 2006 EducationGuardian.co.uk

British children are being "poisoned" by a culture of processed food, computer games and over-competitive education, a group of academics and authors claimed today.
In an open letter to the Daily Telegraph, 110 teachers, psychologists and children's authors have called on the government to prevent the death of childhood.
The authors of the letter - who include children's writers Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson, the former children's laureate Michael Morpurgo and the director of the Royal Institution, Baroness Greenfield - warn that children need to develop as human beings.
"Since children's brains are still developing, they cannot adjust as full-grown adults can, to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change," the letter says.
"They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to 'junk'), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives," they write.
The experts condemn Britain's increasingly "target-driven" education system and urge the government to recognise children's need for more time and space to develop, demanding an urgent public debate on child rearing in the 21st century.
"They also need time. In a fast-moving, hyper-competitive culture, today's children are expected to cope with an ever earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum," they say.
Mr Morpurgo said there was a "drip, drip, drip effect" of academic pressure and marketing which was killing childhood.
"It's gradually soaking like a poison into the culture," he said. "There is less room for reading, for dreaming, for music, for drama, for art, and simply for playing."
The letter was circulated by Sue Palmer, an ex-headteacher and author of the book Toxic Childhood, and Richard House, a senior lecturer at the research centre for therapeutic education at Roehampton University in London.
"Children's development is being drastically affected by the kind of world they are brought up in," Ms Palmer told the Daily Telegraph. "It is shocking."
"A child's physical and psychological growth cannot be accelerated. It changes in biological time, not at electrical speed. Childhood is not a race."

Personally I agree that we need to give children a more holistic, healthy, creative childhood. There has been debate already over this letter to the Daily Telegraph - read some comments here.

2006-09-13T07:32:00.000+12:00

The Big Question: What is neo-conservatism, and how influential is it today?
By Rupert Cornwell, Washington Correspondent
Published: 12 September 2006
Why are we asking this question now?
David Cameron yesterday delivered a major foreign policy speech warning against the spread of anti-Americanism, yet distancing himself from the neo-conservatives who have dominated US foreign policy under President Bush. Mr Cameron describes himself as a "liberal conservative" rather than a neo-conservative.
But what is neo-conservatism?
The ideology is difficult to define. It used to be a blend of liberal democracy and hawkish foreign policy. Today the term refers to idealistic hawkishness. The philosophy has been around since the middle of the 20th century, if not earlier. Some trace its origins to the liberals and social progressives who strongly backed the Second World War. One of its founders was the US intellectual and writer Irving Kristol, a former Trotskyist who later described himself as "a liberal mugged by reality". In the 1950s and 1960s the neo-conservatives adopted a similarly robust view towards the Soviet Union, breaking first with the anti-capitalist New Left, then with the Washington foreign policy establishment that came to support Cold War détente with Moscow.
How did it become identified with the Republicans?
For a long period it wasn't. Harry Truman and John Kennedy in some respects could have been labelled neo-conservatives. What changed things was the more dovish national security stance of the Democrats, after George McGovern won the party's presidential nomination in 1972. Thereafter Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, an anti-Soviet hawk, became a focus for the movement. Among his staffers were Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, intensely pro-Israeli and later two of the most influential neo-cons under Ronald Reagan and George W Bush. They opposed not only the McGovernite Democrats, but also the "pragmatist" détente policy of Nixon, Kissinger and Ford.
What happened after that?
The neo-conservatives first really came into their own under Ronald Reagan, who decided to challenge the Soviet "evil empire" head on. But they gradually parted ways with Reagan as he shifted towards détente with the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. More idealistic neo-conservatives were also dismayed by President Reagan's backing for anti-democratic regimes simply because they were US allies and anti-Soviet. Reagan's support for Israel also fell short of neo-con expectations.
Why did the neo-cons triumph?
Ideologically, because of the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union. This was seen as vindication for the neo-conservatives - even though the great moment came when the supremely pragmatic George Bush senior was President. They remained in opposition under Bill Clinton, but in the 1990s quietly came to dominate Republican foreign policy. Their manifesto was A Project for the New American Century, their mouthpiece the Weekly Standard magazine, edited by Bill Kristol (son of Irving). Among the signatories of PNAC were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld the present Defence Secretary, as well as Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Cheney when the latter became Vice-President. PNAC called for higher defence spending, the promotion of democracy and freedom around the world, and the creation of a world order "friendly to our security, prosperity and values". George W Bush's victory in 2000 gave them power; 9/11 and the "war on terror" gave them their cause.
What effects has it had?
Enormous, and most would say, disastrous effects. The ousting of Saddam Hussein had been on the mind of Paul Wolfowitz, for one, since the early 1990s when he was a senior Pentagon official under the first President Bush. The decision to allow Saddam to stay in power after the 1991 Gulf War was a mistake, he believed. The "war on terror" gave Wolfowitz - now deputy Defence Secretary - and his fellow believers their chance. Neo-cons at the Pentagon and the Vice-President's office twisted the intelligence to prove that Saddam had WMDs and imply he had a hand in 9/11. For neo-cons, Iraq was to be a test run for the reform of the entire Middle East and the spread of democracy in the region.
By any yardstick, the policy has been a failure. Iraq is in chaos, and the Middle East has become less rather than more stable. Around the world, anti-Americanism has increased hugely. Neo-conservatives in their turn have been "mugged by reality" - the reality being that even the sole superpower America is not omnipotent, and that ancient civilisations are not to be transformed by elections alone. Above all, they stand guilty of naivete.
How does George Bush fit in?
After September 11, the administration's security policy was powered by the alliance of Cheney and Rumsfeld (both, incidentally, hardline "realists" rather than conservatives with an ideological mission), who dominated an inexperienced President. But the balance shifted as Iraq went wrong. Bush realised the US could not go it alone. Condoleezza Rice, a more moderate figure, gained influence, as the stars of both Cheney and Rumsfeld waned. Wolfowitz left to become chairman of the World Bank, while Libby resigned after his indictment in the CIA leak affair.
Have the neo-cons been discredited?
Not necessarily. Their credibility has been shredded by Iraq, but Kristol and others blame the failure not on the original grand design, but on the poor organisation of the occupation by Rumsfeld and his minions at the Pentagon. The original principles of PNAC are still very much the cornerstone of US foreign policy.
The crucial test case of neo-con influence is now Iran. In contrast with Iraq, Bush's instinct seems to be to let diplomacy run its course in the dispute over Tehran's suspected nuclear weapons programme. But neo-cons are urging him (and/or Israel) to take no chances and bomb Iran, just as Iraq was attacked three years ago.
Do the neo-cons have a British equivalent?
Most certainly, in the person of Tony Blair. The Labour leader is in many respects an identikit US neo-con. Obviously Britain, unlike America, doesn't have the power to reshape the world. Nor is Mr Blair as unabashedly pro-Israel as Mr Bush. But he is a left-of-centre politician who espouses a robust and ideals-driven foreign policy, despite being fully aware of the unpopularity of his chief ally, and of UK domestic opposition to the neo-cons' main policy, the invasion of Iraq. If that isn't neo-conservatism, what is?
Has neo-conservatism proved successful in practice?
Yes...
* The neo-cons have to their credit the expulsion of Saddam from Kuwait, and the defeat of Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo
* The "war on terror" has largely destroyed al-Qa'ida - or at least its capacity to strike directly at targets on US soil
* It cemented Republican dominance in the battle of ideas in the US, and helped the party win the elections of 2002 and 2004
No...
* Neo-conservative policies have led to a geo-strategic disaster for the US in Iraq and, possibly, in Afghanistan
* It is responsible for a worldwide surge in anti-Americanism, giving the impression the US did not care what anyone else thought
* It inspired the US tilt towards Israel which has made a settlement of the Palestinian dispute all but unimaginable

2006-09-12T13:35:00.000+12:00

The bitter legacy of 9/11
Published: 11 September 2006 (Independent)

2,973 Total number of people killed (excluding the 19 hijackers) in the September 11, 2001 attacks
72,000 Estimated number of civilians killed worldwide since September 11, 2001 as a result of the war on terror
2 Number of years since US intelligence had any credible lead to Osama bin Laden's whereabouts
2,932 Total number of US servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since September 2001
1,248 Number of published books relating to the September 11 attacks
$119m Ticket sales for anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11
$40bn Airline industry losses since September 2001
2009 Date when the official memorial will open at the World Trade Centre site
0 Hours of intelligence training provided to new FBI agents before 9/11. Now they get 24.
91 per cent Terror cases from FBI and others that US Justice Dept declined to prosecute in first eight months of 2006
11 Weeks the 9/11 commission's final report was top of New York Times' non-fiction best-seller list
117 Number of UK service personnel killed in Iraq since invasion
40 Number of UK personnel killed in Afghanistan since invasion
7 per cent People in UK who think US-led war on terror is being won, according to YouGov
1 Those charged in US with a crime in connection with 9/11
455 Number of detainees at Guantanamo Bay
77 per cent Percentage of people in the UK who believe Tony Blair's Middle East policy has made Britain a terrorist target (YouGov)
4,000 Number of UK troops left in Iraq after British-controlled provinceshanded back to Baghdad
18 The number of times that undercover investigators with fake IDs have breezed through US border checkpoints in a test by the Government Accountability Office
$8bn The amount the US will spend this year on hunting Bin Laden and other terrorists
2,973 Total number of people killed (excluding the 19 hijackers) in the September 11, 2001 attacks
72,000 Estimated number of civilians killed worldwide since September 11, 2001 as a result of the war on terror
2 Number of years since US intelligence had any credible lead to Osama bin Laden's whereabouts
2,932 Total number of US servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since September 2001
1,248 Number of published books relating to the September 11 attacks
$119m Ticket sales for anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11
$40bn Airline industry losses since September 2001
2009 Date when the official memorial will open at the World Trade Centre site
0 Hours of intelligence training provided to new FBI agents before 9/11. Now they get 24.
91 per cent Terror cases from FBI and others that US Justice Dept declined to prosecute in first eight months of 2006
11 Weeks the 9/11 commission's final report was top of New York Times' non-fiction best-seller list
117 Number of UK service personnel killed in Iraq since invasion
40 Number of UK personnel killed in Afghanistan since invasion
7 per cent People in UK who think US-led war on terror is being won, according to YouGov
1 Those charged in US with a crime in connection with 9/11
455 Number of detainees at Guantanamo Bay
77 per cent Percentage of people in the UK who believe Tony Blair's Middle East policy has made Britain a terrorist target (YouGov)
4,000 Number of UK troops left in Iraq after British-controlled provinceshanded back to Baghdad
18 The number of times that undercover investigators with fake IDs have breezed through US border checkpoints in a test by the Government Accountability Office
$8bn The amount the US will spend this year on hunting Bin Laden and other terrorists

2006-09-11T09:18:00.000+12:00

Quinoa, Soul Food of the Andes
Last night I had a lovely dinner with friends and learnt a good recipe using Qunioa. Called a supergrain, quinoa is highly nutritious and can supply us with all of the body's requirements: carbohydrates, fats, protein, vitamins, minerals, and fiber.
Quinoa is gluten free and considered an ideal food for those prone to food allergies. Common allergens include grains from the grass family such as corn and wheat. Quinoa, a leafy grain, is not in the grass family, making it beneficial for people who cannot tolerate common grains like wheat, corn, rye, barley, and oats.
For more information on Quinoa click here

Quinoa and Cashew Nut Pilau
Ingredients
1 large or 2 medium
onions
4
cloves garlic
15 ml
cooking oil
1 each
red and green pepper
10 ml
ground cumin
10 ml
ground coriander
200 gms
Quinoa
400 ml
water
10 ml
basil
200 gm
frozen sweetcorn
salt and pepper
50 gm
Cashew Nuts

Method
Preparation
Top, tail and chop fine the onions and the garlic.De-pith, de-stalk and chop small the peppers.Rinse the quinoa under cold water in a fine sieve for 2 minutes or more.In a small bowl, cover the frozen corn with boiling water from the kettle.
Cooking
Put the cashews in the oven on a tray, and toast at Gas Mark 3 for about 20 minutes, or until they are golden brown.In a le Creuset pan, saute the onions and garlic in the cooking oil until the onions are translucent.Add the peppers, cumin, and coriander and continue to stir fry for a few minutes.Add the rinsed quinoa and water to the pan, bring to the boil, turn down and simmer for 15 minutes.Drain the corn and add it to the quinau with the basil.Continue to cook until all of the water has been absorbed.
Assembly
Turn the quinoa out into a serving dish and sprinkle with the toasted cashews.
To serve
Often served as a side dish (e.g. to a curry) but we had it last night as the main course, accompanied by a salad that had avocado and chickpeas in it (very yummy!).

2006-09-11T08:38:00.000+12:00

Images of and by women

2006-09-10T08:01:00.000+12:00

TV One is playing a docu-drama, Sunday 10th September, that is coming under fire for being inaccurate and misleading. Read the Scoop article below and the useful links for further commentary. Keep your wits about you tonight if you are planning to watch it! A modified poster for the tele-movie scheduled for world wide release starting tonight in New Zealand.
Source URL

INTRODUCTION: NZ's state broadcaster Television One is tonight and tomorrow screening an ABC Television docu-drama series called "Path to 9/11". The docu-drama series - starring Harvey Keitel and being released simultaneously around the globe - is currently under attack in the United States because it contains historically inaccurate information but claims to be based on the official "9/11 Commission Report".
Research in recent days in the liberal blogosphere shows it was produced – seemingly in secret – by a shadowy organization connected to the Christian Right. According to those who have seen advance copies of the docu-drama it seeks to attribute blame for the events of 9/11 to failures in counter terrorism under the watch of former Democratic Party president Bill Clinton.
In recent days leading Democrats (including Al Gore, Bill Clinton and John Kerry) and senior US historians have called for the docu-drama to be yanked and a concerted effort to put commercial pressure on Disney and ABC to get the series pulled is also underway. A similar advertising boycott campaign run by Republicans was attributed with getting a miniseries critical of the Reagans pulled last year.
Leading educational provider Scholastic has even circulated a note to School teachers encouraging them to use the show to point out the ways in which propaganda sometimes distorts history for political ends (the full note to social studies teachers is included below).
The following material was all found on the liberal US political forum website DemocraticUnderground.Com where the story has been running hot for several days. Click on the headlines below for more source material and discussion.

For further background see also... William Rivers Pitt: Clinton, 9/11 and the Facts.
- Alastair Thompson - Scoop Co-Editor
******************
"Path to 9/11" produced by RW activists: goal to "transform Hollywood"
This morning, an interview with Harvey Keitel (who stars in "The Path to 9/11") reveals the following:
Keitel: Yea, I had questions about events – material I was given in the Path to 9/11 that I did raise questions about. Yes, I had some conflicts there.
Q: How was that met?
Keitel: With discussion... ummm with argument. When I received the script it said ABC history project – I took it to be exactly what they presented to me. History – and that facts were correct. It turned out not all the facts were correct and ABC set about trying to heal that problem. In some instances it was too late because we had begun.
Yesterday, DUer shewhomustbeobeyed discovered that David Cunningham, director of "The Path to 9/11," is the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the worldwide evangelical group Youth With a Mission.
Youth With a Mission has an "auxiliary branch" called The Film Institute.
Members of The Film Institute write:
TFI's first project is a doozy: simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project, it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!
Our goal is to help filmmakers, actors, technicians, etc. realize their God given potential and purpose in perhaps the most influential sphere of modern culture - film and television.
Here's more information on the "Untitled History Project":
Our next big project is to assist in the development of the new YWAM auxiliary - The Film Institute (TFI). The Film Institute is dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Television industry;
TO it, by serving, living humbly with integrity in what is often a world driven by selfish ambition, power an money - transforming lives from within, and THROUGH it, by creating relevant and evocative content which promotes Godly principles of Truth married with Love.
The Untitled History Project Begins Production July 25th.
Mysteriously, the pages containing those quotes - which were freely available on the Internet until yesterday - have been deleted. Here are links to the now-deleted originals:
http://www.markandkrista.com/4559.html http://www.markandkrista.com/30257.html
… to see much more… CLICK HERE
******************
Albright and Berger Call On ABC To ‘Withdraw’ Path to 9/11
An excerpt:
"Whether your broadcast purports to be based on the 9/11 Report in whole - or only in part - is increasingly beside the point. The dramatic impact of a costly but carelessly produced film will invariably overwhelm the impression of any government document.
Amidst alarming reports that irresponsible theories about the events of 9/11 have begun to gain currency with the American people, you should not want to lend your personal reputation to a production which seems likely to instigate new and dangerous falsehoods. And so we ask that you use your influence to persuade ABC to withdraw the broadcast altogether. Failing that, we urge you to sever your relationship with this grossly misleading production."
******************
Variety: ABC Considering Pulling "Path to 9/11"
Under Fire, ABC Mulls Yanking MiniBy WILLIAM TRIPLETT
"The Path to 9/11" is looking a lot like "The Reagans, Part II."
Bill Clinton loyalists are demanding wholesale changes to the upcoming miniseries -- and while ABC is making some snips, the alterations, insiders say, may not please the Dems.
But a bombshell decision may happen anyway: Sources close to the project say the network, which has been in a media maelstrom over the pic, is mulling the idea of yanking the mini altogether.
As for specific criticisms -- and changes -- the original mini contained a scene in which then-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger declines to give the CIA authority to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, even when CIA operatives know where the al-Qaeda leader is.
more at:http://www.variety.com/VR1117949675.html
******************
Gore on Path to 9/11
By all accounts, “The Path to 9/11″ is riddled with inaccuracies and contains material that directly contradicts the factual findings of the 9/11 Commission. I am deeply concerned that ABC is considering going forward with their plans to broadcast this so-called docudrama. The lessons from the events leading up to that tragedy are too important to trivialize, and it would be fundamentally irresponsible to air such distortions.
******************
ABC Is Now Exposed for What They Are
The veil is now gone. The pretense that ABC is a news organization is gone. The myth of the “liberal news media” is dead.
Our national corporate news media have been screwing the Democrats and our country for years. They receive free licenses from the federal government and in return they have the responsibility to provide news in “the public interest”. Yet they don’t care at all about that sacred responsibility. Instead, they use their privilege to provide slanted news that ensures that pro-corporate Republicans will stay in power and in return will enact legislation that ensures ever more accumulation of wealth and power to themselves. It now should be evident to all: ABC “News” is not a news organization. Rather, they are a propaganda machine that exists for the benefit of their parent corporation.
ABC’s so-called “docudrama” of the 9-11 attacks, which they intend to air this Sunday, should prove all of this once and for all. They are about to air a film that pretends to be informative and based on facts. Yet it should be abundantly clear by now that ABC’s only purpose in airing “The path to 9-11” is to influence this November’s elections in favor of the Republican Party. Over the past several years they have perpetrated one outrage after another (along with much of the rest of the corporate news media). This time they have hopefully gone too far and unmasked themselves. This should be the end of the great myth of the “liberal media”.
The film’s chief script writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, is an ultra-conservative political hack and friend of Rush Limbaugh. The film was shown only to a conservative audience. The executive producer of the film is a member of the Bush administration’s PR team. ABC provided right wing bloggers with an advanced copy of the film, while excluding progressive bloggers from participating in a conference call about the film. And when faced with mounting criticism of the file, they yanked the official film blog in an effort to cut off further discussion. The film has been criticized by Richard Clarke, the man in charge of counter-terrorism during the time in question, as being inaccurate and biased. It has been disavowed by Richard Ben-Veniste of the 9-11 Commission. It has been criticized as inaccurate by members of the Clinton administration with first hand knowledge of the matter, and ex-President Clinton’s lawyer has written a letter to ABC that explains in detail how the film deviates from the truth as contained in the 9-11 Commission Report – and yet ABC continues to refuse to let anyone from the Clinton administration view the film. An FBI agent who consulted on the film resigned as a consultant because ABC refused to remove the inaccuracies. And the families of the 9-11 victims have criticized ABC for impairing the ability to compose an historically accurate accounting of the facts surrounding the 9-11 attacks because of their insistence on mixing revisionist history with entertainment.
Yet after all of this ABC remains obstinate. Their lame excuse for continuing to plan to air the film is that it is not a documentary, but a “dramatization”. Yet they still claim that it is based on the 9-11 Commission Report, which clearly is a lie, and they even bill it as a “public service.”
This is just the latest in a long line of abuses of their public trust
Consider how ABC’s daily political briefing, The Note, has handled a series of issues, as described by Eric Boehlert in “Lapdogs”:
They made a great big deal out of the trial of Senator Hillary Clinton’s former campaign finance director, David Rosen, for his handling of a fundraiser during Clinton’s 2000 campaign for the Senate, writing about it for 14 days in one month, including this entry: “The Justice Department case against David Rosen, national finance chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate race, is getting stronger … which could be disastrous for the Senator’s ambitions.” Yet when Rosen was acquitted they didn’t find that news important enough to mention.
When the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” (SBVFT) came out with their transparently phony allegations against John Kerry, right before the 2004 Presidential election, The Note posted nearly a hundred links to the story during one 17 day stretch. And when the New York Times published the results of an investigation which identified the Republican operatives behind the story, as well as many of the contradictions in the stories of SBVFT, The Note mocked the Times story as irrelevant.
But any news unfavorable to Republicans is either ignored or criticized by The Note. With regard to the Iraq war, they lost interest after things began turning sour, and they mocked the Downing Street Memo (“The left is unappeasable on the issue of the Downing Street Memo”) and Cindy Sheehan. They dismissed stories of Ken Starr’s conflict of interest during his investigation of Bill Clinton. They ignored the Jeff Gannon story and the news of Karl Rove’s role in the CIA leak investigation. They put positive spin on Bush’s handling of the Katrina disaster. And as the story of Tom DeLay’s corrupt activities began to emerge, The Note had this to say:
There is an iron triangle of liberal interest groups, Democratic congressional staffers, and media jackals… who have never identified with or liked Tom DeLay (and what he stands for) and are enjoying every minute of their conspiring to bring him down. Almost every accusation swirling around DeLay involves actions by him that have exact analogues among other members of Congress of both parties.
The list goes on and on. The main difference between ABC and FOX News would appear to be that ABC does a better job of pretending to be a real news organization, rather than a propaganda machine for the Republican Party.
What now?
I am so happy to see the Democrats responding aggressively to the outrage that ABC intends to start propagating on Monday. After years of being subjected to all means of abuse by the corporate news media, this may be the closest thing to open warfare between them and the Democratic Party that has yet occurred.
I believe that that is a good thing. The Democrats have undergone the torture of a thousand cuts by the corporate media over the last several years. They are in a terrible dilemma because, given the great power of our corporate news media, attacking them poses great risks.
Yet, Democrats may have no reasonable alternative choice other than to come out swinging against the corporate media. If not for consistently biased news coverage the Democrats would now control both Houses of Congress and the Presidency, and be represented by a much more progressive U.S. Supreme Court (by at least two seats) than we now have. The Democrats are the Party of the people, and the Republicans are the Party of the corporations, the wealthy and the powerful. A great deal of their power rests with the slanted news of the corporate news media, without which they would either have to begin to adopt a pro-people agenda or they could not win another election.
It may be that Democrats now have an opportunity to go over the heads of those who provide biased news to our country, directly to the people, to expose our corporate media for what they are. I pray that they can do that.
******************
GOV DEAN: Calls On Disney/ABC To REVEAL-$$$-FUNDERS Of "Path To 9/11"
Today, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called on ABC/Disney to reveal who poured $40 million into the slanderous 9/11 propoganda film they plan to start airing starting Sunday, and issued the following statement:
"It's deeply disappointing that ABC would put something on the air that has been proven to have factual inaccuracies about one of the most important events in our nation's history. ABC should not air this distortion of history.
"The fact that the writer/producer of the piece is a well known conservative raises additional concerns and questions. The American people deserve to know who funded this $40 million dollar slanderous propaganda. Use of the public airwaves is a privilege conferred upon broadcasters in the public interest. It comes with a responsibility to the American people and a responsibility to the truth."
******************
Top Historians Demand ABC Yank 9/11 Film
Historian's Letter to ABC chief Robert Iger
Dear Robert Iger:
We write as professional historians, who are deeply concerned by the continuing reports about ABC’s scheduled broadcast of “The Path to 9/11.” These reports document that this drama contains numerous flagrant falsehoods about critical events in recent American history. The key participants and eyewitnesses to these events state that the script distorts and even fabricates evidence into order to mislead viewers about the responsibility of numerous American officials for allegedly ignoring the terrorist threat before 2000.
The claim by the show’s producers, broadcaster, and defenders, that these falsehoods are permissible because the show is merely a dramatization, is disingenuous and dangerous given their assertions that the show is also based on authoritative historical evidence. Whatever ABC’s motivations might be, broadcasting these falsehoods, connected to the most traumatic historical event of our times, would be a gross disservice to the public. A responsible broadcast network should have nothing to do with the falsification of history, except to expose it. We strongly urge you to halt the show’s broadcast and prevent misinforming Americans about their history.
Sincerely,
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.Sean Wilentz, Princeton UniversityMichael Kazin, Georgetown UniversityLizbeth Cohen, Harvard University,Nicholas Salvatore, Cornell University;Ted Widmer, Washington College;Rick Perlstein, Independent Scholar;David Blight, Yale University;Eric Alterman, City University of New York.
******************
Scholastic Material Now Tells Students Look 4 ABC Fibs
Dear Teacher of Social Studies, grades 9-12
As you know, Scholastic has provided to teachers and students information, background, and explanations of current U.S. and world issues since our first Scholastic magazine was published in 1920 by my father, M.R. Robinson, the founder of our company.
Since then, Scholastic has explained the contemporary world in a clear, understandable way that is balanced and free of bias. Our mission is well-captured in our credo and editorial platform which includes the statement: “Good citizens may honestly differ on important public questions. We believe that all sides of the issues of our times should be fairly discussed—with deep respect for facts and logical thinking—in classroom magazines, books and other educational materials used in schools and homes.”
We also strongly believe that students should discuss the important issues of the day in classrooms so that they may gain the critical thinking skills which will help them become participating citizens and voters.
In that context, because the ABC docudrama The Path to 9/11 will be watched by many people in the U.S., including some of your students, we believe we should provide you with teaching ideas and background information on this series which will provide a “teachable moment” for an important issue of our time.
This program is highly controversial because:
As a docudrama, it contains imagined scenes that some of the political figures who lived through the period say are misleading and inaccurate.
It is an emotional portrayal of a period leading up to one of the searing events of our time—one which I personally witnessed first-hand from our Scholastic offices (less than a mile from the World Trade Center site). Several of our employees’ family members died in the attack.
It is being broadcast in a period just before the 2006 elections. A major election issue is the relationship between terrorism, the war in Iraq, and other conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan. As such, The Path to 9/11 is viewed by some as political and partisan.
The events leading up to 9/11 are important issues of our time. The docudrama, which covers the background of the period 1993-2001, is said to be largely based on the 9/11 Commission Report, and former Governor Tom Kean, Chair of the 9/11 Commission, is an advisor to the series.
We posted a discussion guide on Wednesday, August 23, which we believe was not in keeping with our high standards—and we took down that guide on Wednesday, September 6. We have rewritten this guide to focus more sharply on the issues of the docudrama as well as the background events.
The guide helps teachers to discuss these important questions:
What are the matters of dispute in the docudrama? What are the scenes that were altered or did not happen? How do these scenes affect your understanding? Are the changes part of an effort by the producers to shape your beliefs about these events? In your view, is this an appropriate way to treat an event such as this?
What are the different views of the relationship between the attacks of 9/11, the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, and the unrest in the Middle East? Many people believe that there is no connection between Iraq and the events of 9/11. Others believe that the broadly defined “War on Terror” justified the invasion of Iraq. As you study the background of events leading up to and following 9/11, what do you think?
There is a long history of conflict in the Middle East. How well do you understand each of the countries involved and what influences their behavior?
We believe that the rewritten discussion guide presented herewith will help your students interpret the ABC docudrama, The Path to 9/11, and hope that you will find it helpful in understanding the relationship between facts and drama, and the background of the different views about 9/11 in the U.S. and around the world.
Richard RobinsonChairman, President and CEOScholastic
http://www.scholastic.com/medialiteracy /
******************
John Kerry BLASTS ABC’s Desperate Docudrama !!!
Instead of the fiction written to excuse the invasion of Iraq by exploiting the 3,000 mothers and fathers, sons and daughters who were lost that day — they were attacked and killed not by Saddam Hussein but by Osama bin Laden – we need the truth.
Here’s a little truth: The President pretends Iraq is the central front on the war on terror. It is not now, and never has been. His disastrous decisions have made Iraq a fuel depot for terror – fanning the flames of conflict around the world.
The terrorists are not on the run. Worldwide, terrorist acts are at an all-time high, more than tripling between 2004 and 2005. Al Qaeda has spawned a vast and decentralized network operating in 65 countries, most of them joining since 9/11. The Taliban now controls entire portions of southern Afghanistan, and just across the border Pakistan is just one coup away from becoming a radical jihadist state with nuclear weapons. The Middle East is more unstable than it has been in decades. Hezbollah flags fly from rooftops in Shiia slums of Sadr City and Iran is rebuilding Southern Lebanon. We have an Iraqi Prime Minister sustained in power by our forces, who will not speak against the Hezbollah terrorists, who will not say that Israel has a right to exist, and who will not condemn the Iranian nuclear program, who will not even as a national leader support the national army over the Shiite militia. In other words, the Iraq government that the administration cites as the front-line force in the fight against terrorism won’t even take our side when we are fighting terrorists. No American soldier should be asked to stand up for an Iraqi government that won’t stand up for the values and interests that draw them into battle every day. Oh, and the 9/11 commission recently gave our government a failing grade on implementing intelligence reforms.
I love watching movies, but with the world looking the way it is right now I think this is a good time to stick with just the facts. After Iraq, we’ve all had enough fiction to last a lifetime.
Senator John Kerry
********ENDS*********

2006-09-09T11:37:00.000+12:00

2006-09-09T10:14:00.000+12:00

Jamie Oliver is fighting against junk food again with the launch in Britain of his new TV series 'Jamie's Return to School Dinners', the follow-up to his successful Channel 4 series on improving school meals. Though Jamie may be a little aggressive and condescending in his comments on parents feeding their children junk food, it is time that our western society took responsibility for the food we feed ourselves and our children. There is a reason that it is labelled "JUNK" food! I have previously posted on healthy eating, vegetarianism and a raw food diet and while I am not advocating that everyone becomes a vegetarian, it is important for us to cut out junk foods and go back to cooking healthy meals (as natural and unprocessed as possible). The Independent has also published an interesting article warning us about sugar levels in sports drinks
Link to Jamie's website and a recipe - 'hot and kickin chicken' - that kids & adults will enjoy!

Jamie Oliver rages against 'crime' of junk-food diets
By Sarah Cassidy, Education Correspondent, Independent
Published: 08 September 2006

The television chef Jamie Oliver has fiercely criticised parents who feed their children "junk", describing some youngsters' diets as a crime.
He said 70 per cent of packed lunches given to schoolchildren were "disgraceful" and he would like to see them banned.
Oliver said headteachers were too frightened of some parents to tell them what they should be giving their child to bring to school. He called on the Government to take the lead and give teachers the power to confiscate junk food at the school gates, because schools lacked the confidence to take such radical steps on their own.
He expressed disappointment at the Government's announcement this week that voluntary cookery lessons will be provided for secondary pupils arguing that only compulsory classes would be effective.
Oliver criticises parents in his new television show Jamie's Return to School Dinners, the follow-up to his successful Channel 4 series on improving school meals.
In the programme Oliver says: "I've spent two years being PC about parents, now is the time to say, 'If you're giving your young children fizzy drinks you're an arsehole, you're a tosser. If you give them bags of crisps you're an idiot. If you aren't cooking them a hot meal, sort it out.' If they truly care they've got to take control."
Speaking after a preview screening of the new programme, Oliver said: "I have seen kids of the ages of four or five, the same age as mine, open their lunchbox and inside is a cold, half-eaten McDonald's, multiple packets of crisps and a can of Red Bull. We laugh and then want to cry.
"I have no doubts that these parents love their children," he said. But he added that if a teacher told a parent that their child tended to get very tired at the end of the day, it was wrong to think the solution was "a can of Red Bull because it gives you wings - you might as well give them a line of coke".
He said it was a problem he had seen across the country in both rich and poor schools. Asked whether he would like to see a ban on packed lunches he said: "Many of us would like to say 'yes, if there were facilities for better hot meals in all schools'. I would love it but that will not happen."
He said: "Packed lunches are a problem. Most of them, whatever anyone says, aren't appropriate."
Oliver also called for a ban on junk food advertising for children and in the new programme tells Tony Blair that a voluntary code sounds "a bit wet". Mr Blair promises Oliver an extra £240m to improve school dinners for another three years and a package of measures which were announced earlier this week.
After a huge campaign sparked by the first series Mr Blair agreed to commit £280m for proper ingredients and training. But Oliver said he was "pissed off" because £45m of that was based on a Lottery promise that hadn't actually been signed off.
In Jamie's Return to School Dinners, he goes to Lincolnshire, where kitchens were removed from schools to save money during the Thatcher years and where nearly 50,000 children take a packed lunch. The programme sees him attempt to reintroduce hot meals into the county by collaborating with local pubs and restaurants.
Oliver said he was "not saying parents are bad" but that the problem was they had not been taught how to provide healthy meals.
"These young parents haven't been taught from the family unit which is the best teacher. For whatever reason, be it work or whatever, they haven't done that."
Jamie's Return To School Dinners will be shown on Channel 4 in England on September 18

2006-09-09T08:02:00.000+12:00

Below is an article posted on Scoop regarding NZ Unions working together to support the Progressive supermarket workers:

NZ Workers Band Together Against Aussie Corporate

Friday, 8 September 2006, 4:00 pm
Article: Kevin List

NZ Workers Band Together Against Aussie Corporate

NDU national secretary Laila Harre with locked out supermarket workers Quentin Thompson and Carly Pedersen in the background
*********

The crude use of the power of a corporate against vulnerable workers was how Ross Wilson, the Council of Trade Unions president described the battle between the locked out supermarket workers and their boss Progressive Enterprises – Progressive's parent company is the Australian corporate giant Woolworths.
Mr Wilson and National Distribution Union national secretary Laila Harre told the media that they were engaged in a David And Goliath struggle with the Australian corporate giant and that the tactics of Progressive Enterprises were to starve its New Zealand workers into submission.

Locked out workers Carl Skivington, Darren Johnson and Quentin Thompson now have the not only the entire NZ union movement behind them but also many Australian unions actively and financially supporting their struggle with Progressive Enterprises
*******

This afternoon the unions that have been on the front lines in the battle for a collective agreement - the NDU and the Engineering Printing and Manufacturing union - were joined in their battle against Woolworth Australia's NZ subsidiary Progressive Enterprises by the entire New Zealand union movement.
Donations of money to assist the locked out NZ workers were also coming into union coffers from fellow workers in Australia. At an emergency meeting in Wellington various union delegates from across New Zealand heard how an Australian transport union had already donated $10,000 to assist the Kiwi workers who have been locked out of the workforce for more than two weeks.

After the NDU took industrial action in late August Progressive Enterprises issued lockout notices to all the striking workers that stopped them from rejoining the workforce until they gave up on their claim for a national collective agreement.
The action taken by Progressive Enterprises was a feature of employer behaviour through the early 1990s but one that had rarely been seen since the late 1990s.according to Mr Wilson
NDU national secretary Laila Harre explained that the NDU was in touch with unions in the United States who had been fighting against US corporate Walmart who - according to Ms Harre - went so far as to close a supermarket where workers had won the right to join a union. Ms Harre also explained to the media that the anti-union Walmart and Woolworths Australia had a management exchange program.
Every single course of action was being explored by the NZCTU according to Mr Wilson.
"I think they should be seriously considering how the impact on their reputation as an employer in NZ is going to impact on their business interests here," warned Ms Harre.
Customers of Foodtown, Woolworths and Countdown were also urged by various union delegates to boycott these supermarkets. Earlier this week the Green Party also called for a boycott of supermarkets owned by Progressive Enterprises.

The NZ union movement is prepared to battle it out with Australian company Progressive Enterprises for as long as it takes to win according to todays' media conference
*******

The Maritime Union has swung in behind the locked out workers offering "practical" assistance
"It's just a game for the management who get paid fat salaries - and can afford full page ads - but it is the low paid workers in this battle who are putting themselves on the line to ensure a decent income for their families," said Maritime Union General Secretary Trevor Hanson in a press statement.
Mr Hanson was referring to Progressive Enterprises ability to wage a well-funded PR campaign against the locked out workers.
The pay of Woolworths Australian CEO Roger Corbett was alleged to be more than $8 million dollars per annum and the profits from New Zealand supermarkets a big part of the highly profitable Australian company.
Progressive Enterprises today threatened that any action the Maritime Union took to disrupt supplies of goods would be "irresponsible".
" [It would be] a very serious matter for the nation when third parties not involved in industrial action are unlawfully impeded in their rights to go about their daily business. Were this action to proceed we would regard it as irresponsible," said Progressive Enterprises in a press statement.

Quentin Thompson and Carly Pedersen – NZ Communities are being split by the lockout
********

Relations on the frontlines of the picket were causing tension between workers with some of the locked out workers explaining to media that they no longer spoke to (former) friends that had buckled under financial pressure and signed away their right to a collective agreement.
*********
Listen to the full media conference with Ross Wilson and Laila Harre initially taking questions followed by the locked out workers:
Scoop Streaming Audio: Union conference regarding locked out workers and Progressive Enterprises
Click here to download file (mp3)
ENDS

2006-09-08T09:02:00.000+12:00

Steve Maharey Supports Progressive Workers on Strike

As I watched Breakfast on TV One this morning I was disgusted to see Wayne Mapp (National Party Spokesman for Labour & Industrial Relations) giving Steve Maharey a hard time for donating $200 of his personal money to striking Progressive workers. Mapp said it is a case of a "hard left member of the Labour government allying himself to the hard left union." Mapp is trying to use this opportunity to paint Maharey as a "radical" lefty unionist and himself and the National party as the sane/pro-business alternative. Mapp looked ridiculous and petty and weak, especially as his beloved 90 day probationary period for new workers bill looks set to fail. He seems to be out of touch with the feelings of most New Zealanders who support the supermarket workers and their right to earn decent wages.
Maharey's local electorate in Palmeston North is affected by the lockout and some families have been without pay for two weeks and are struggling to feed their families. It is a good thing that Maharey is moved to help support his local electorate office, which is raising money to help the strikers' families.

You can see the TV One News story here: TV One News Story

You can read about the Greens support for the striking workers here:
Greens support Progressive boycott

Read Indymedia for on the picketline updates and news on the strike

Read about the Shelf Respect campaign

To help the campaign boycott Progressive supermarkets (Foodtown, Woolworths and countdown)

Automatically donate $20 to support striking workers by ringing 0900 LOCK OUT

2006-09-05T11:32:00.000+12:00

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the 1981 Springbok Tour of New Zealand. Last night I watched the TV One documentary ‘EXPOSÉ: TRY REVOLUTION.’

The documentary focused on how the Springbok tour affected South Africans. The 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand was hugely anticipated by rugby-mad white South Africans. New Zealand was their favourite rival and for the first time the tour was to be screened live on South African TV. But when the country tuned into the first broadcast, the Hamilton match, and saw hundreds of protestors standing on the field, South Africans went into a kind of collective shock.

"To see strife between families in New Zealand and how it really ripped the country apart, well I think that's quite bad and then realising this isn't the way it should be& that was big eye opener."Wynand Claasen, Springbok Captain 1981

Try Revolution explores what happened over the ensuing months and indeed years as the impact of the "The Tour" was fully realised. From a prison mate of Nelson Mandela to the Captain of the '81 Springboks, the documentary uncovers how the actions of the New Zealand protestors were perceived, understood, and used to help in the struggle against the apartheid regime.

"We'd be having a beer when the game was cancelled and actually discussing the politics behind the rugby and not just the fact that somebody had run onto the field and that we should just drag them off, beat them up and toss them into the back of a van." South African Rugby Fan

In the documentary South Africans from Archbishop Desmond Tutu to the Captain of the 1981 Springboks, and ordinary rugby fans talk about how the games, the images, the reports and the conversations that surrounded “The Tour” affected them personally.

"You really can't even compute its value, it said the world has not forgotten us, we are not alone" Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Watching this doco made me feel proud to be a New Zealander. It would be good to see New Zealanders that fired up about some current world issues - we may be a small nation but working collectively and with a strong voice we can have an impact.

2006-09-05T08:34:00.000+12:00

Flowers left by fans in memory of Steve Irwin outside the zoo he ran with his family in Queensland. Photograph: Steve Holland/AP

Australian icon Steve Irwin was killed in an accident yesterday when a giant stingray pierced his heart while he was filming near Port Douglas. Here is an article published by he Guardian:

'Crocodile hunter' killed by stingray

Roger Maynard in Sydney

Monday September 4, 2006The Guardian

Steve Irwin, the passionate conservationist who shot to international fame as the Crocodile Hunter, was killed today in a freak accident while diving off the north Queensland coast.
In a bitter irony, the man who risked his life handling one of the world's most dangerous reptiles was mortally wounded by a stingray, a usually passive sea creature which attacks only if threatened. Irwin, 44, was stung in the chest by the stingray's barbed tail, which whips up in a reflex action. The accident happened while he was filming a TV documentary called Oceans' Deadliest at Batt Reef, near Port Douglas.

A member of the production team said he had gone out to film a sequence on stingrays when he swam over the venomous bottom-dweller, which has large pectoral fins like wings and can grow up to 4 metres long.
His producer, John Stainton, said: "He came over the top of the stingray and the barb went up into his chest and put a hole in his heart." Barely conscious, he was hauled back on to his research vessel, Croc One, and taken to the nearby Low Isles.
Irwin, whose infectious enthusiasm and catchphrase "crikey" made him popular with television audiences around the world, was treated by paramedics who were flown to his boat by helicopter, but they were unable to revive him.
Dr Ed Loughlin, who arrived less than an hour after the incident, said nothing could be done to save him. "It became clear fairly soon that he had non-survivable injuries. He had a penetrating injury to the left front of his chest. He had lost his pulse and wasn't breathing."
The death of Irwin, who leaves a wife and two children, has shocked Australians, many of them jamming radio station phone lines to air their grief. Fans laid flowers in his memory outside the zoo he ran with his family north of Brisbane on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.
The prime minister, John Howard, described him as an Australian larrikin - a wild-spirited person - who brought joy to millions. "It's a huge loss to Australia," he said. "I am quite shocked and distressed at Steve Irwin's sudden, untimely and freakish death."
Chris Brown, the chief executive of a tourism lobbying group, said: "As an ambassador for Australia there are few who came anywhere near this wonderful, delightfully semi-mad sort of bloke."
It is only the third recorded fatal stingray attack in Australia. Normally the fish, which can weigh up to two tonnes, swims away from divers, but if provoked will automatically strike with its barbed tail. Usually victims are stung on the arm or leg, leaving a wound that while painful, can usually be treated.
Dr Meredith Peach, a marine biologist, said it was unusual for stingrays to attack a diver, unless they handled or accidentally stepped on the fish.
Irwin's father, Bob, was a plumber by trade but spent his free time rescuing and rehabilitating animals. Steve shared his father's passion for wildlife and the family founded Australia Zoo in Queensland. Bob Irwin taught his son how to "second-guess" crocodiles in their natural habitat and Steve quickly put his experience to use by relocating rogue crocodiles under a project run by the Queensland government.
Shortly after he married his wife, Terri, in 1992, he turned his crocodile hunting exploits into a television series that made him a household name in her native United States. He even appeared as a cartoon character in The Simpsons.
When George Bush made an official visit to Canberra, Irwin arrived at the reception in his customary khaki shorts and shirt. "I got my absolute best khakis out and was having a yarn to Johnny Howard and George Bush and no one mentioned it [my clothes]," he said in a TV interview afterwards.

His only fall from favour came in 2004 when he was shown on television carrying his infant son Robert in one arm while feeding a chicken carcass to a crocodile with the other. Child welfare groups accused him of endangering the child's life, but he insisted the boy was never in danger because he had control of the situation.

Irwin acknowledged that some fellow Australians cringed when they saw him. "They actually see a little bit of themselves when they see me and they find that a little embarrassing," he said.
"I'm fair dinkum, like kangaroos, winged keels and bloody flies," he added. "I think I've got animals so genetically inside me that there's no way I could actually be anything else."

Special reportAustralia

Archived articlesMore on Australia

World news guideAustralia

Useful linksAustralian Broadcasting Corporation

Sydney Morning Herald

The Age

2006-08-29T09:23:00.000+12:00

The Garden Diet!

A friend of mine recently sent me the link to a website created by a raw-vegan family. The site offers lots of suggestions on living a healthy and natural life. They introduce their website here: 'Our whole family is 100% raw-vegan (with no supplements or dehydrated foods) and thriving! This website started out as a small personal homepage 9 years ago when there were only two other raw vegans online! Now there are hundreds of thousands! Our site has grown too. On this site we offer our before and after photos and stories of how we found the raw diet, photo journalsof the children growing up as raw vegans over the years, articles about raw vegan nutrition from a scientific standpoint, and video clips of raw vegan cuisine being prepared. We offer our 11 raw vegan ebooks and now a movie about our family on DVD!

Our Raw-Vegan Family

Storm, 57 /Raven, 12 /Jome, 9 /Shale, 5 /Adagio, 2 /Jinjee, 39

They have recently released a DVD about their family. 'This film aims to show that a raw-vegan lifestyle is not just a diet, not just a new way to live, but a "breakthrough" in the maximizing of human potential!! This is not an instructional film (our eBooks provide that) but is more of a feel-good film with a "proof is in the raw pudding" attitude. Watch a Preview Online! ' It's worth a look at!

Here's a review of the DVD:
Breakthrough - A Raw Film Documentary - A movie review by Jim Carey
This documentary was assembled from footage that Storm and Jinjee collected over the years. They have four raw vegan children. In the film they share the challenges that they've faced, both personally and with friends and families, and the differences that cooked vegan and raw vegan have made in their lives. They share nutrition information and information about the growth and development of their children, with taped visits to the doctor, and comparisons to CDC height and weight charts. There is a good section on raw vegans and exercise requirements.There is impressive footage of Jinjee during a raw vegan pregnancy, exercising, and walking 5 miles a day, even as she came to term. There is footage of her taken ten days after her child was born, with Jinjee healthy, radiant, active and thin... There is an interview with Jinjee discussing her four pregnancies, both cooked vegan and raw vegan, and how the raw vegan deliveries went much smoother and faster.For anybody raising raw vegan children, or considering doing so, I heartily recommend this film. There are enough beautiful women and hunky men in the movie to keep even the most non-raw spouse interested in the film. (Yep, weightlifters and Swedish blondes.)I understand that the movie will be coming out at theaters soon. You can get a copy now at www.thegardendiet.com. I purchased their "complete package" and found it well worth the money.-- Jim Carey Director, www.chiDiet.com Former Director, Creative Health Institute

Here is a featured recipe from their website:
Bok Choy Salad
Chop up and put in a bowl:~ 4 bunches Bok Choy~ 2 tomatos~ 2 avocados~ 1/2 bunch cilantro
Dressing:~ 4 tablespoons raw tahini~ 2 tablespoons raw honey~ 1/8 cup apple cider vinegar~ 4 tablespoons olive oil~ herbs and spices (experiment with what you have available)~ salt to taste with unrefined sea salt

Another recipe from San Francisco Living Foods Enthusiasts website:

Simple Wakame Salad

1 clove garlic, grated

1/2 teaspoon grated ginger

1/2 avocado

Bragg's to taste

3 cups greens (sunflower, buckwheat, spinach, lettuce, etc)

1 cip soaked wakame seaweek

optional: tomatoes, walnuts, pecans, almonds or pine nuts

Grate the ginger and garlic. In a small bowl, mash the avocado, ginger, garlic and Bragg's together. Break greens and wakame up into bite size pieces. Toss all ingredients together thoroughly.

This is a good link for more recipes http://www.living-foods.com/rawgourmet/recipes.html
It has recipes from the book 'The Raw Gourmet' by Nomi Shannon

Here's one of the recipes from the book:

Mango-Lime Parfait

A soft, cool and smooth dessert. For a strong citrus flavor, add one whole peeled lemon or lime to the blender, along with the lemon or lime juice called for in the recipe. This will result in a tart citrus-y dessert, much like lemon or lime pie. Before adding the dates, taste themango mixture, you may not want to add too many if the mangoes are already sweet.
Almond maple crust mixture (set aside in a bowl) 4 cups coarsely chopped mango (about 5 mangoes)1 cup lime juice (or lemon juice)1 teaspoon of lime (or lemon) zest4-8 dates, pitted and chopped
In a blender, place mango pieces and blend until smooth. Add lime juice,zest and dates and process until smooth. Be patient. Mango is a very fibrous fruit and you want to achieve smooth, pudding-like results.
In a parfait or wine glass, layer the crust mixture and the mango lime mixture. Start with some crust mixture in the bottom of the glass, then mango mixture, a bit of crust mixture and so on, ending with crust mixture on top. Yield: 4 glasses of parfait.
Variation: substitute papaya or persimmon
Variation: Add another layer, made up of thinly sliced Kiwi fruit or strawberries.

Basic Almond Maple Crust

This is a delicate crust that is good for soft fillings or frozen pies because it doesn't overwhelm the subtle taste or texture of the filling.Because the fillings are very rich, this crust is designed to fit a round 1 layer cake pan, or a shallow pie tin.
1-2 cups almonds, soaked 8-12 hours3-4 teaspoons maple syrup
Soak almonds 8-12 hours, drain, rinse then drain again. Put nuts briefly(30 minutes) in the sun or dehydrator (30-60 minutes) to dry off, or dry them off with a towel. In food processor, process almonds until uniformly very fine. Gradually add the maple syrup, only enough until the almond meal holds together. Sprinkle and then gently press the crustinto the bottom and sides of pie plate. Don't worry about getting the crust all the way up the sides.
Note: This is a very thin crust. If you want a thicker crust, increase the amounts in the recipe.

This webpage has links to lots of Raw Food, Raw-Vegan Diet and Lifestyle, and Live/Living Food Information and websites - check them out!

2006-08-25T10:58:00.000+12:00

New Zealand's Hottest New Label - Docherty Wilkins

Now for some true creativity -

Docherty Wilkins is to debut at Air New Zealand Fashion Week 19 - 22 September 2006. You can read an interview with Heather (Docherty Wilkins' designer) on Runway Reporter

Docherty Wilkins' beautiful clothes are the intelligent choice for the self-assured, independent woman. Polished and sophisticated yet effortlessly sexy, each piece is hand finished giving an authentic crafted edge. A meticulous sequence of design and fit culminates in a delicately balanced range of striking feminine elegance. An emphasis on the selection of each individual component results in an intrinsic depth of quality within each garment.

Designer: Heather Docherty
Based: Auckland, New Zealand

Docherty Wilkins draws on over 15 years of international and local industry experience for brands from Yohji Yamamoto, to Topshop and Swanndri.
Heather has recently returned from five years in the United Kingdom where she specialised in women's tailoring and pattern cutting. Formerly the design room assistant of Ashley Fogel, Heather's strengths lie in making her designs come to life, and refining them to perfection from the sample stage to the finished product. Each collection develops from a highly conceptual beginning which is then refined and realised with her husband Rory.
Born and raised in Auckland, Heather moved to Wellington at the age of 18 to pursue her interest in fashion. She graduated from the Massey University Bachelor of Design (Fashion) programme in 2000, which at that time had only recently been established.
Heather enjoys all facets of fashion design, and is grateful for her UK experiences which allowed her to focus and fine tune her skills in tailoring and pattern cutting on various CAD systems, for both designer labels and High Street suppliers.
Heather, who will make her debut in 2006 with the support of her husband Rory, is excited about bringing the premier Docherty Wilkins collection to the Air New Zealand Fashion Week runway in September 2006.

2006-08-24T11:23:00.000+12:00

Ethical Eating Part 2

Further to my previous post......The Observer has produced its Food Monthly with tips on healthy eating. It has articles on the evils of 'E' numbers, ethical eating tips, processed food, salt etc. It's aimed at the UK market but there are some good ideas to go from for the rest of us. I have reproduced below the ethical eating article:

Is this the most ethical meal on earth? We asked Joanna Blythman, the author of Bad Food Britain, to whip up a supper with a conscience. Share your ethical eating tips here Sunday August 20, 2006The Observer

Argan oil
Extreme drought and exploitation of the ancient Argan forest of North Africa has destroyed a third of it. A further 40 per cent of what's left could go by 2008. Unesco is trying to protect it. Argan oil is loaded with vitamin E and essential fatty acids. By using Argan oil, you encourage people to cherish their life-sustaining Argan trees. Wild Wood Groves imports the oil from its purpose-built ethical-trade production centre in the Argan forest in southwest Morocco.
http://www.wildwoodgroves.com/
Innocent smoothies
Innocent drinkers indirectly back projects like helping Irula women displaced by floods in Tamil Nadu. Innocent don't air-freight fruit, and it is about to change its packaging to corn starch-based bottles that can be composted in just eight weeks.
Line-caught Cornish sea bass
The South West Fishermen's Association (http://www.linecaught.org.uk/) has come up with the idea of a tag inserted into the gills or mouth of fish that guarantees to the end user that it has been caught using sustainable methods. Wild Cornish sea bass with this tag is hand-lined, not netted, so there is no unwanted by-catch of endangered fish. Cornish bass also have a bigger minimum landing size so the fish caught off Cornwall are larger because they have had more chance to reproduce. The South West Fishermen's Association also tags hand-lined pollack, an under-used fish that is a good substitute for cod and haddock.
http://www.linecaught.org.uk/
Yeo Valley organic yogurt
Yeo Valley impresses with its environmental record. At its farms thousands of new trees have been planted, while unploughed strips around its fields encourage wildlife, and wind and solar power is used to reduce energy consumption. Plus its polypropylene pots are supported by unbleached and uncoated card wrapping. Because the card can be easily peeled away, the two layers can be separated for recycling.
Windward Isles bananas
The small-scale, family farmers of the Caribbean have been forced to compete on the open market with more cheaply produced fruits grown on the intensively-farmed plantations of Latin America and West Africa. Caribbean bananas can't compete on price. To protect their livelihoods, the Windward Isles have converted their production to Fairtrade. When you buy Windward Isles bananas you honour Britain's historic commitment to the people of the Windward Isles, you support more enlightened trade, and you encourage supermarket chains to keep on selling them.
Nyetimber wine
By drinking English wine you encourage the planting of vines on land that might otherwise fall into the hands of property developers. And you cut down on wine miles.
Dickinson & Morris pork pies
Dickinson & Morris uses meat and fat from higher welfare British pigs. The pork in its pies is grey, not an unnatural pink, because it uses fresh, not cured meat. It doesn't use hydrogenated fats and the company is campaigning for Melton Mowbray pies to be given Protected Geographical Indication status within European law.
Abel & Cole vegetable box
Now there's a funny thing. Both Sainsbury's and Tesco are piloting organic vegetable box schemes! Why sign up for a box from a supermarket that is still air-freighting produce so that it can put Kenyan green beans on its shelves 52 weeks of the year, when you can get one from this company that supplies food that is ethical through and through? Abel & Cole (http://www.abel-cole.co.uk/) never air-freights anything. It picks up its delivery boxes and re-uses them. It pays growers a fair price and makes a contract with them to take their products. In the box last week: peaches, courgettes, broad beans, potatoes, onions and delicious chard.

2006-08-24T10:36:00.000+12:00

Creative Industries - Poor Working Conditions and Wages

I was looking at Indymedia this morning and saw a press release from the NDU Union regarding the clothing industry. I have spent much of my career working within the apparel industry and some of the business practices and the treatment of employees really upset me. I understand that the NZ manufacturers are competing with cheaper imports but the way they cut costs is to treat their workers poorly. In the high "fashion" end of the industry employers rely on the "glamour" factor of their labels to counter the fact that they demand long hours on minimum wages. This is a trend that is seen within a lot of "creative" industries. For example, Television and Film (industries I have also worked in) where workers are treated poorly because it is seen that working for these industries is an honour and we should do anything to get into them.

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Strike at Oldest Kiwi Made Clothing Manufacturer
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Monday, 21 August 2006
by S Oosterman
Email: soosterman@nduunion.org.nz
Phone: 021 922 551

Summary: Sixty striking Cambridge Clothing workers will air their demands on a clothes (picket) line from 7.30am until 12 noon today at 3094 Great North Rd New Lynn, says the National Distribution Union.
Press Release: National Distribution Union
Monday, August 21, 2006 6am

SIXTY WORKERS STRIKE TO STOP SECOND SHUTDOWN
Sixty striking Cambridge Clothing workers will air their demands on a clothes (picket) line from 7.30am until 12 noon today at 3094 Great North Rd New Lynn, says the National Distribution Union.
The first strike in living memory at New Zealand’s 139 year old manufacturer of men’s clothing follows controversy surrounding the Greens "Buy Kiwi Made" campaign.
Workers want a 1 year agreement for 5% but the company has offered a 2 year contract for 2.2% in the first year with the right to choose the second year’s percentage, the end to service leave and a second 5 day shutdown period.
Site delegate, Monica Anness, said that New Zealanders wanted to know that Buy Kiwi Made meant quality clothing with quality pay and conditions.
"I press men’s tailored suits that sell for up to $1500 and believe Cambridge Clothing have got the money to pay us fairly," she said. "For the past 12 years that I’ve been working here we’ve helped the company out by accepting pay rises at or below inflation. But enough is enough – many of us earn just above the minimum wage and they’ve offered us 1.8% below inflation. We want 5%."
Monica said that she beleives the proposed second week-long shutdown is an attempt by the company to get around the Government’s introduction of an extra weeks annual leave next year.
"For 5 days of the year the company shuts down are we are forced to take annual leave if we have any left or we won’t get paid. It’s great that the Government is giving us an extra week next year, but a second shutdown would mean that the company could take away that extra time I could be spending with my grandchildren during their holidays."
Maria, a machinist and delegate, is one of the many older workers who also faces losing her extra week's service leave that she has received for 25 of her 32 years at the company.
"I stood up at the union meeting and told the younger workers that I would be retiring in three years. I’ve never been on strike before but I told them now was the time to strike, that it’s their life and their future. That’s when they stood up and agreed that it was better to do something to wake the company up rather than to keep waking up without earning enough to survive. "
National Secretary Laila Harré that it is was by taking a stand like Monica and Maria that workers could guarantee quality jobs in New Zealand.
"The Cambridge Clothing workers strike highlights the need for the Buy Kiwi campaign to protect quality local manufacturing jobs, not New Zealand designers who pay Chinese workers appalling poverty wages."
Ms Harré said that ‘buy kiwi made’ means preserving well paid jobs in New Zealand to help create better minimum standards for clothing workers everywhere.
"New Zealand should be leading the race to the top, not following the race to the bottom."
ENDS
Contact:
Simon Oosterman (Media Liaison) on 021 922 551 Laila Harré (National Secretary) is available for interview on 021 839 661 http://www.nduunion.org.nz
COMMENTS ABOUT THIS ARTICLE
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Re: Strike at Oldest Kiwi Made Clothing Manufacturer
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Monday, 21 August 2006
by SImon

That has to have been the best picket I've ever been on. These workers had never been on strike before but we ended up marching through the factory! Awesome. These guys were inspirational! I'll get some photos as soon as possible.
Aotearoa IMC: http://indymedia.org.nz/

2006-08-20T08:34:00.000+12:00

Ethical Eating

I have been a vegetarian my whole life. I often find myself in the position of having to explain to people my choice not to eat meat. I don't want to go into too much depth here, but for me I am a vegetarian for three main reasons:

Taste - I simply do not like the smell or taste of eating meat
Health
Mass slaughter of animals

The UK Vegetarian Society has a good definition of vegetarianism and why some people become vegetarians:

Definitions
A vegetarian is someone living on a diet of grains, pulses, nuts, seeds, vegetables and fruits with or without the use of dairy products and eggs (preferably free-range).
A vegetarian does not eat any meat, poultry, game, fish, shellfish or crustacea, or slaughter by-products such as gelatine or animal fats.

Types of Vegetarian
Lacto-ovo-vegetarian. Eats both dairy products and eggs. This is the most common type of vegetarian diet.
Lacto-vegetarian. Eats dairy products but not eggs.
Vegan. Does not eat dairy products, eggs, or any other animal product.
Fruitarian. A type of vegan diet where very few processed or cooked foods are eaten. Consists mainly of raw fruit, grains and nuts. Fruitarians believe only plant foods that can be harvested without killing the plant should be eaten.
Macrobiotic. A diet followed for spiritual and philosophical reasons. Aims to maintain a balance between foods seen as ying (positive) or yang (negative). The diet progresses through ten levels, becoming increasingly restrictive. Not all levels are vegetarian, though each level gradually eliminates animal products. The highest levels eliminate fruit and vegetables, eventually reaching the level of a brown rice diet. Other terms can be used in describing various vegetarian diets, though their exact meaning can differ. The term strict vegetarian may refer to a vegan diet, though in other cases it may simply mean a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet. The terms common or broad vegetarian may be used to refer to lacto-ovo-vegetarians. Demi-vegetarian is a term sometimes used to describe persons who eat no or little meat but may eat fish. Persons consuming fish but no meat are sometimes called pescetarians.

Stumbling Blocks

Many foods contain ingredients derived from the slaughter of animals. Gelatine is made from animal ligaments, tendons, bones etc. which have been boiled in water. It is often found in confectionery, ice cream, and other dairy products. Animal fats refer to carcass fats and may be present in a wide range of foods, including biscuits, cakes, and margarines. Suet and lard are types of animal fats. Certain food additives (E numbers) may be derived from animal sources.
Cheese is generally made with rennet extracted from the stomach lining of slaughtered calves. Vegetarian cheese is made with rennet from a microbial source.
The Vegetarian Society has a separate Information Sheet, Stumbling Blocks, listing ingredients which may be unsuitable for vegetarians.
Many vegetarians that eat eggs will eat only free-range eggs. This is due to moral objections to the battery farming of hens. The Vegetarian Society only endorses products containing eggs if the eggs are certified as free-range.

Vegetarian Foods

A well balanced vegetarian diet can provide all the nutrients your body needs and there is much scientific evidence to indicate vegetarians may be healthier than meat-eaters.
A vegetarian diet is healthy because it is typically low in saturated and total fat, high in dietary fibre and complex carbohydrate, and high in protective minerals and vitamins present in fresh fruit and vegetables. See the Health and Nutrition Index

Vegetarian food groups are:
Cereals/grains - wheat (bread & pasta), oats, maize, barley, rye, rice, etc. Potatoes are a useful cereal alternative.
Pulses - kidney beans, baked beans, chick peas, lentils, etc.
Nuts & Seeds - almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, etc.
Fruit & vegetables.
Dairy products or Soya products - tofu, tempeh, soya protein etc.
Vegetable oils and fats - margarine or butter.

Reasons for Becoming Vegetarian

Most people become vegetarian because they believe it is wrong to slaughter animals for food and because they are opposed to the cruelty and suffering inflicted upon the billions of animals reared for food. See the Information Sheets on Farm Animals for further details.
The effect of meat production on the environment, such as the destruction of vast areas of rainforest for cattle ranching, is another reason commonly cited for becoming vegetarian. Others may become vegetarian because of the links between meat production and poverty and famine in developing countries.
The health advantages of a vegetarian diet are another commonly cited reason to become vegetarian, particularly among adults. A dislike of the taste of meat and religious reasons may also be a factor.

Another useful website if you are thinking of becoming a vegetarian is the New Zealand Vegetarian Society one.

Becoming a vegetarian is a personal choice and one I wouldn't like to force on anyone but it's something I have been thinking about a lot lately as I have had to defend my choice. It has also lead to me thinking about the wider issue of ethical eating. I was browsing the Guardian website this morning and came across this discussion entitled 'Food for the thoughtful'

It looks at the issues around ethical eating from a health standpoint, fairtrade, environment etc. Below is the opening to the blog debate, checkout the 'Food for the thoughtful' link to read more. It makes for interesting reading and will hopefully get us all talking with our friends and family about what we can put in our mouths with at least a certain degree of peace of mind.

Food for the thoughtful
By Observer / Food 09:55am
How can you tell what's really on your plate?
You may be trying to ensure you get five portions of fruit and veg a day, but how can you tell whether that apple you're biting into is having a detrimental impact on the livelihoods of farmers in the developing world, asks Rebecca Seal.
Is the sugar in your cup of fairtrade coffee helping growers to put money back into community projects? Does the production of your morning yoghurt harm the environment or is it made by a company who uses solar power?
Before you find yourself dizzy with confusion in the supermarket, fear not. Observer Food Monthly examines what's on your plate this month, in an attempt to find the most ethical meal you can eat - as well as the least.
Britain's top food experts tell us what they would never eat and what we should go for when we're out shopping. We've also investigated what's in our food - where there's hidden sugar, salt and additives in food for adults and food for kids.
The question is, are we worrying too much? Do you think it's possible to get what you eat right - to be both healthy and ethical - or have the food industry got us over a barrel? Is there a sure-fire way of knowing what we are eating, what it might do to us and how it affects others?
Do you have any tips about how to strike a balance?

2006-08-19T09:33:00.000+12:00

War or Peace

This is an old article produced by the UK Green Party but one I have just reread and it raises some interesting points in regards to the global economy and capitalism.

War or Peace

A Stark Choice for the Direction of the Global Economy

Green Party Budget Briefing 2004

Whatever happened to the peace dividend? A few years ago we heard much about the extra cash that would be available to spend on improving the quality of our lives now that the Cold War had ended. But there was merely the blink of an eye between the ending of that war and the finding of a new enemy and the creation of a new war. With Communism defeated Islam became the new enemy, and the war on terror was born.

This process was driven not by foreign policy objectives but by economic objectives. Our economic system has competition at its heart, and that competition leads to war. The engine of the global economy is profit, and the profits from the buying and selling of arms are huge. The threat to the US on September 11 was not primarily a threat to its citizens but a threat to its corporate heart: the symbolic target of the World Trade Center was chosen with care. The real cause of the war on terror was not Osama bin Laden and radical Islamicists but an economic system that is based in gross inequality and aggressive exploitation.

It is time that as citizens of one of the richest economies in the world we decide to spend that wealth to improve the quality of our lives, the lives of those in the poorest countries, and the lives of future generations. It is time we chose a peace economy rather than a war economy.

War and the Dominance of the Dollar

Liberals the world over shrink from the vision of US imperialism bestriding the world from Venezuela to Equatorial Guinea. Moral arguments aside one is forced to ask how on earth can they pay for it. In terms of its debt-to-GDP ratio the US is in a worse position than countries generally perceived as basket-cases and regularly breaks the strict Eurozone rules. The US owes a total of $2,500 billion and runs a massive trade deficit with the rest of the world. So how can it afford to prosecute foreign wars and spend more on military equipment than the next 14 biggest spending countries combined?

The explanation lies in the world trading system established at Bretton Woods in the wake of the Second World War. It is not an accident that this system was designed at a conference in the US and that its three controlling bodies¾the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO (formerly GATT)¾are all based there. Because the system guarantees the US a dominant role in the global economy. There were two controls in the system that prevented the USA from excessive economic domination The first was its obligation to maintain a link between its currency and gold, which was abandoned in 1971, when the costs of the Vietnam War made it impossible for Nixon to continue to prosecute the war and maintain national solvency. The second was the controls over currency that countries abandoned when financial markets were deregulated during the 1980s. Since these controls were abandoned the US has literally had a licence to print money: the dollar all the world’s economies use for trade. It makes the dollars, it controls them and it spends them, largely on arms.

This currency domination is well understood amongst Washington policy-makers. Professor Thomas Barnett of the US Naval War College wrote in January of 2003: ‘We trade little pieces of paper (our currency, in the form of a trade deficit) for Asia’s amazing array of products and services. We are smart enough to know this is a patently unfair deal unless we offer something of great value along with those little pieces of paper. That product is a strong US Pacific Fleet, which squares the transaction nicely.’¹ Barnett’s argument is that an implicit exchange is being made: we allow the US all the consumer goods and military materiel it wishes to have, in exchange for which it guarantees global security.

According to green economist Richard Douthwaite:

The US plans to spend $379bn on its armed forces next year. This is almost exactly equal to its trade deficit in 2001, so the transaction would indeed be ‘squared nicely’ if the rest of the world was happy to have the US play the role of global policeman and also to pay that policeman by allowing him to fill in a blank cheque for pretty well whatever sum he likes. But, given the policeman’s record of destabilising or overthrowing governments with which he has had ideological differences and the fact that he would continue to put his ‘particularistic national interests’ ahead of those of the rest of the world, I doubt if many countries would be entirely happy with the arrangement.²

The Real Costs of War

War is no longer a tool of foreign policy it is a major industry. The Green Deputy Mayor of London Jenny Jones revealed that she was shocked and horrified after her visit to this year’s Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition at Docklands:

Over the years I’ve read reports of how the arms trade operates, but seeing at first hand this host of men from all over the world bargaining over weapons systems which bring death and misery to millions brings home how inhumane this industry is. This fair encourages the sale of weapons which kill hundreds of civilians just because they happen to be in the wrong place. I saw delegations from countries wracked with civil unrest, repression and poverty, and I couldn’t help thinking of the millions of people in those countries who don’t have clean water or adequate food but do have expensively-equipped armies.

Quoted in Green World 42, Autumn/Winter 2003.

In the UK the arms industry is subsidised to the value of £420 million pounds. This means that a substantial part of our taxes, that could be spent on hospitals, schools or sent as aid to the poorer countries of the world ends up in the pocket’s of arms industry executives.

Let’s take the example of South Africa. In spite of its urgent development needs including an epidemic of AIDS and unemployment rates as high as 50 per cent in some of the black townships, in January 1999 Deputy Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki announced the cabinet’s provisional approval of the decision to re-equip the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). The items to be procured include;

· 28 Gripen fighters from BAe/SAAB for £1.09bn

· 24 Hawks trainer fighters from BAe for £470m

· 4 corvettes-class patrol boats from a German shipbuilding consortium

· 3 diesel submarines from the German submarine consortium

· 4 super Lynx helicopters from GKN-Westland

· 40 light helicopters from the Italian firm Agusta in which GKN-Westland has a stake

The total programme is valued at £3bn or R29bn. The costs, spread over fifteen years, will amount to an extra £200m (or R2bn) per annum, representing a 20% increase in the military budget. Tony Blair has promised £4bn. worth of investments in South Africa in order to ensure that a sizeable proportion of the value of these purchases will go to UK companies. Export credit guarantees will be supplied to underwrite the risks inherent in the deal; in other words, we, as taxpayers, will be subsidising it.³

How Global Capitalism was Saved by the War on Terror

Remember Enron? When it went bust in November 2001 with debts of $20bn. backed by only $2bn. of assets it was the worst scandal capitalism had ever had to explain away. Fortunately for the executives at Enron, and other US corporations that had inflated their stock-market value with ‘future value captured in the form of market capitalisation’ as Anderson call it in the fraudsters’ training manual,⁴ such explanations were drowned out in the clamour over the need to defend the ‘homeland’ and the launching of the ‘war on terror’. But this distraction was only one way in which this war prevented the collapse of several massive US corporations, and the potentially terminal destabilisation of the global economy this might cause.

Halliburton, with its $998m. debt, and the same taste in accounting advice, might have been next. It had used the same technique of ‘unbilled receivables’ to inflate the profits it reported to shareholders and the stock-market. The two companies shared many similarities: their place in the energy sector, vast borrowing, and close political ties with the White House. Like Enron they had postponed losses and counted money they had not even invoiced for as revenue, according to the pressure group Judicial Watch overstating profits to the value of $445m during 1999 to 2001. Living on the accounting edge like this might have worked during the boom of the 1990s but was becoming impossible in the insecure new century, especially once the foundations of the corporate world were cracked by the World Trade Center attack and the fall of Enron.

Dick Cheney, chief executive of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000, and now Vice-President of the US was no doubt a keen supporter of the fantasticial ‘war on terror’ and the huge increase in defence spending it required. Halliburton almost immediately received billion-dollar contracts from the Pentagon to build operational bases. It was also saved from lawsuits it was facing from former employees who had been poisoned by asbestos, via a legal reform capping the value of such suits, causing Halliburton shares to rise by 43%. Cheney is not entirely in the clear: he is still facing a fraud case filed by Halliburton investors in the Dallas court.

But Halliburton the company is now returned to the sorts of profits its shareholders enjoy. When Keynes’s said that capitalism was about digging holes and filling them in again he didn’t have the war in Iraq in mind, but the aphorism fits. Bush’s cronies have profited from the weapons that destroyed the country and are now gaining on the other side of the coin by winning multi-billion dollar contracts, paid for by Iraqi oil wealth, to repair the damage they caused against the will of the Iraqi people. War is a certainly a profitable business.

Best of all, of course, you can declare a country a ‘failed state’ and take it over yourself. This allows you to set the prices of the tasty assets on display, and privilege your friends and family in the asset acquisition that follows. When the Guardian writer Julian Borger recently called his article ‘Bush Cronies Advise on Buying Up Iraq’, again he was not talking figuratively. Here is how his colleague Rory McCarthy in Baghdad,⁵ explained what is going on:

Under the new rules, announced by the finance minister, Kamil Mubdir al-Gailani, in Dubai, foreign firms will have the right to wholly own Iraqi companies, except those in the oil, gas and mineral industries. There will be no restrictions on the amount of profits that can be repatriated or on using local products. Corporate tax will be set at 15%.

And here again we see Halliburton, this time in the guise of its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, where Dick Cheney cut his corporate teeth, winning a big contract, this time worth $7bn. and again to repair Iraq’s oil infrastructure. A company that was on the verge of a spectacular crash is now making good business again. Just one example of how the ‘war on terror’ has been a life-saver for US capitalism, with US growth figures moving from negative territory up to 4 per cent.

The Testosterone Economy: Thriving on Risk and Fear

The late phase of capitalism that we are living through prioritises risk. Risk-taking is now lauded and rewarded more than any other quality. Success stories under globalisation are based in borrowing money that you cannot possibly hope to pay back, and just hoping you will get away with it. The explanation for this extraordinary behaviour lies in the structure of our economic system and primarily the way money is created.

In the modern economy almost all money is created by being borrowed. So those who are prepared to borrow outrageous sums, unjustified by any assets they may have to back them up, are lauded and rewarded for their willingness to take risks. Without them the banks would not be able to bring money into existence and would not gain the face value of that money by doing so. Hence the sacred status of the entrepreneur. Because this money is lent with interest due, the entrepreneur must be able to find not only the lump sum, but also the additional value of the interest, hence his company must grow. Capitalism’s obsession with growth is not an economic inevitability, only an inevitable consequence of a money system based on interest-bearing debt.

The other motivator for the enterpreneur is fear: fear of the risks he has taken, fear of failure, and above all fear of being a loser. Since our economy is typified by hierarchy nobody wants to end up anywhere else but on top of the dung-heap. Capitalism operates like a pump, where the energy of those who have least pushes them upwards to become those who have most; inequality is the motor that operates this pump.

This inequality has damaging psychological consequences. There is understandable anxiety in the medical community surrounding the statistical evidence that those in professional occupations live considerably longer than those in manual occupations. Data from the Office for National Statistics indicate that men in social class I live 7.4 years longer than men in social class V; for women the difference is 5.7 years.⁶ More surprisingly, US researchers have found that inequality is bad for life expectancy of all in a society, since the relationship they found between a measure of inequality across society as a whole (the Gini coefficient) and the life expectancy of that society remained after they had controlled for poverty. They called this finding the Robin Hood Index, suggesting that Robin Hood’s redistribution deserves the warmth it has always received. The authors conclude:

The paper suggests that that there is a relation between income distribution and life expectancy. It concluded that variations between states in the inequality of income were associated with increased mortality from several causes. Relative poverty, i.e. the size of the gap between the wealthy and less well off, seems to matter in its own right: the greater the gap between the rich and poor, the lower the average life expectancy. This association is independent of that between absolute income and life expectancy. Therefore it matters, not only how affluent a country is, but also how economic gains are distributed among its members.⁷

Jeremy Seabrook argues that what is so damaging about inequality under capitalism is that it is used to spur us to greater economic effort and to do this we must feel ashamed of our relative lack of affluence. Our desire to remove the shame of poverty is what generates our energy to engage in capitalism, to increase our monetary holdings, to ensure that we are on the winning side of the unequal distribution:

If at the earlier moment of industrialization the persistence of poverty could be explained by a productive capacity only rudimentarily established, such an excuse is no longer possible. It becomes clear, therefore, that the survival of poverty is essential for ideological and not material reasons. Indeed, the maintenance of a felt experience of insufficiency is essential to any capitalist version of development.⁸

The feeling of insufficiency, what has elsewhere been called ‘the ethic of scarcity’ becomes part of our drive to accumulate more, in a rat-race that we can never win. The advertising industry plays its own part in increasing our feeling of ‘deprivation’ and our felt need for a range of wholly worthless gadgets that we are sure the person behind the Leylandia hedge must already own. Oliver James identifies this endless struggle to keep up with the Jones’s as a primary cause of the epidemic of depression afflicting Western societies.

Peace and the Steady State Economy

We need to step off the treadmill of growth and competition and build a steady-state economy. This means an end to economic growth and in many sectors it will mean a contraction of activity. A respect for planetary limits makes this inevitable. The addiction to economic growth is killing us all. In spite of the squeals from those who benefit from this economic system, surely your children’s ability to breathe fresh air is worth more than a battery-powered cocktail stirrer? Do you really need a plasma TV if it means that the whole of the population of Kiribati will be displaced and thousands will drown in Bangladesh? These are the choices we are actually making every day. We should make the moral choice to cut our consumption and stop and smell the roses instead.

The competition for resources that is generating the wars and the injustice that gives rise to terrorism could also be ended by the move to the steady state. The economic energy that we have available without destroying the planet should be used to meet real human needs in the South as well as the West. Such a global compact based on fairness and justice would be an important step towards the peace that would give us more satisfaction than any number of consumer goods.

And finally, we need to build up strong local economies that would give us real security rather than leaving us at the mercy of corporations. The impulse towards increasing the quantity of goods produced locally and reducing the expansion of international trade came as a result of concern about the huge levels of carbon dioxide needlessly produced as biscuit-carrying juggernauts pass each other on Europe’s congested road network, or as we find vegetables on our supermarket shelves grown in countries whose people are starving. As well as improving our quality of life and our human relationships a system of strong local economies would reinforce our identities as part of a functioning human community.

Notes

1. Asia: The Military-Market Link’ The U.S. Naval Institute, January, 2002 pp. 53-56. See http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/AsiaTheMilitary-MarketLink.htm

2. ‘Defence and the Dollar’, Feasta Review, 2004.

3. Information from Campaign Against the Arms Trade website: caat.org.uk.

4. Libert, B. D., Samek, S. S. and Boulton, R. E. S. (2000), Cracking the Value Code: How Successful Businesses are Creating Wealth in the New Economy (New York: HarperBusiness).

5. McCarthy, R. (2003), ‘Foreign firms to bid in huge Iraqi sale’, Guardian online, 22 Sept.

6. ONS (2002), Trends in Life Expectancy by Social Class 1972-1999 (London: SO), Tables 1-4.

7. Kennedy, B.P., Ichiro, K., and Prothrow-Stith, D. (1996) ‘Income Distribution and Mortality: Cross Sectional Ecological Study of the Robin Hood Index in the United States’,. British Medical Journal, 312:1004-1007.

8. Seabrook, J. (2001), Landscapes of Poverty, p. 4.

2006-08-19T09:17:00.000+12:00

Achtung Bono!

For something slightly trivial and amusing but which raises a point worth thinking about...
'In response to the fact that the Irish government has recently changed its notoriously cuddly fiscal regime, so that creative types can only earn a trifling £170,000 before paying tax, Bono and his friends have moved part of their empire to the Netherlands. This may seem like a rather cruel interpretation of the news, but I don't think I can help it: though Bono is very keen on feeding, watering and healing the world, he and his group - collectively worth £460m, it says here - don't seem to be too keen on paying for Irish schools and hospitals. That's good, isn't it?'

Here's the full article from the Guardian website:

Achtung Bono!

John Harris
Friday August 18, 2006

Not worthy ... Bono. Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty

Fidel Castro is not the only icon who has just turned 80. Tony Bennett, he of the urbane demeanour, velveteen voice and surprisingly lustrous barnet, became an octogenarian on August 3 - and, to celebrate, his record company are about to bow to the inevitable and issue an album of freshly recorded duets, featuring the likes of Sting, Paul McCartney and the Dixie Chicks. Like all such albums, it will surely be bought by the odd twerp as a Christmas gift, played a bit in Starbucks and then swiftly placed in the historical bin.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/Params.richmedia=yes&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;spacedesc=mpu&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;site=Arts&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;navsection=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;section=117421&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;country=nzl&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;rand=5107230"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/Params.richmedia=yes&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;spacedesc=mpu&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;site=Arts&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;navsection=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;section=117421&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;country=nzl&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;rand=5107230" width="300" height="250" border="0" alt="Advertisement"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Anyway, it also features Paul "Bono" Hewson of U2, who commemorated his collaboration with Tone by taking out an ad in a special Bennett-themed issue of Billboard. And what a hoot it was. It went like this:

Tony,

Trying to sing with you was a humbling, if not humiliating experience. You're like A HOUSE YOU CAN'T BREAK INTO, at least not by force. You can run at the door, but the doors are locked ... you can bang on the windows ... I got into the HOUSE OF BENNETT, but only as the cat burglar ... looking to steal a place in this incredible legacy.

I've had the pleasure of singing with you, AND FOR YOU ... I broke in through the bathroom window, up a drainpipe ... I'm not leaving

Bono

Did you see that? Not just the keray-zee use of his PC's text toolbar, but the subtle Beatles reference? But never mind that. If this flatly bizarre bit of prose evokes anything, it is a picture of poor old Tone returning from a night out drinking vodka martinis to find the singer of U2 sitting guiltily on his couch, amid broken glass, humming one of his own songs. "Oh jeez, it's that Bonio guy, and he's broken in," says Tone. "I'm not leaving," Bono repeats. "You fucking are," says Tone, and calls security.

Now, I have never much liked U2, neither in their Pained Artists in String Vests phase, nor the Ironic Media Studies Project on a Big Budget period that followed it, nor the post-All That You Can't Leave Behind incarnation that seems to lie somewhere between the two. And somewhere in Bono's Tony tribute - the silly metaphors, the slight whiff of hubris, the buttock-clenching image of Bennett clapping eyes on the advert and wondering what it might mean - lies much of the explanation. I recognise it as the work of the same man whose last album contained the gnomic contention that "freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby's head"; who has attempted to bolt himself into history via songs written in clumsy tribute to Martin Luther King, Billie Holiday and John Lennon; who is good friends with a 45-year-old man who calls himself The Edge. This, I would argue, will not do. It reeks of the kind of "cool" that might play well in, say, Austria, but that is known in slightly more sceptical territories as Trying Far Too Hard.

But last week, there came rather more grave news. In response to the fact that the Irish government has recently changed its notoriously cuddly fiscal regime, so that creative types can only earn a trifling £170,000 before paying tax, Bono and his friends have moved part of their empire to the Netherlands. This may seem like a rather cruel interpretation of the news, but I don't think I can help it: though Bono is very keen on feeding, watering and healing the world, he and his group - collectively worth £460m, it says here - don't seem to be too keen on paying for Irish schools and hospitals. That's good, isn't it?

By way of registering a protest, my one U2 album - Achtung Baby, because I actually think The Fly is not that bad - is on its way to the Record and Tape Exchange. To use the Bono argot, I'm leaving. In fact, I'm leaving. No, make that LEAVING.

2006-08-05T21:40:00.000+12:00

Parade
Olivia Macassey

Pick up the stick pick up the stick pick
up the stick

pick up the stick. Pick up the stick pick
up the stick:

You picked up the stick.

They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old,
and names will never hurt me.

Age shall not weary them
nor the years condemn, condemn
as do we that are left to grow old.
Your grandson squints in a lemon-juice dawn
at a monument holding your wound like a flag.

He will pick it up because they said.
He will use it: use it on my back
and wonder that it does not break.
And he will take it home again;
they say that it is his to take.

I saw your spine all marked with dust
when I picked up the stick.

Oh Johnny I knew you all too well,
passing through hell’s needling eye
out into hills and the green-ferned ground
and never once to speak of it -

what was not remembered
we will not forget; forget as do we
that are left to grow weary.

They say
you exchanged blood for blood and mud
for the glum mud of the Waikato, and stilled
your tongue beside the waters.
Now heedless youths drink beer in Turkish sun,
watch it gild their skin, and believe
that false old alchemy.

Carry the stick carry the stick carry the
stick
carry the stick. Carry the stick oh
carry it —

I carried the stick.

At the going down of the sun and in the evening
(he-will-pick-it-up-because-they-said)
sticks and stones have built my bones,
(and-he-will-pick-it-up-because-they-said)
built of bones my house on sand.
(and he-will-pick-it-up-because-they-said)

At the set of memory our sight will fade
to the nation-blue of hell’s good eye
and land where the dead and the living lie

naming them hurts me, soldier boy —
shall I not remember what they said?

I stumbled accross a website today - Poets Against War - and the first poem I read was a poem by Olivia Macassey an Auckland poet I discovered this week. Her first collection of poems, Love In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, was published by Titus in 2005.