Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari was held in a Tehran jail for 118 days in 2009. His arrest came as he worked for western media outlets, including BBC Panorama. In this analysis, Mr Bahari explains why the regime fears information, the internet and a free press.
“Information is a weapon, and in the wrong hands it is even more dangerous than a real gun!”
This was my torturer's message to me in the summer of 2009 after my arrest.
Relying on a UN Security Council Resolution, but without asking Congress or the American people, President Obama attacked Libya on 19 Mar 2011. He finally got around to explaining his actions on 28 March 2011 in a nationally televised speech given at the National Defense University. Attached below are two analyses of that speech:
Story 1 by Ed Felien appeared in The Rag Blog on April 5, a spunky left-leaning website based in the hinterlands of Austen Texas. It is harshly critical of the speech by comparing Obama's assertions to conditions in Libya and the tensions within Libya that have created a civil war.
Story 2 by Anne Marie Slaughter appeared in the the New York Review of Books blog on 20 March 2011. The New York Review of Books appeals to a far more high-falutin readership than The Rag Blog, and is a kind of a forum for the panjandrums in what's left of the American Left. Dr. Slaughter gushes over Obama's speech, saying it made an “important contribution to the Libya debate.” She bases her conclusion (“let us protect the Libya's civilians by any means necessary”) by analyzing (a word I use charitably) some impenetrable comparisons of interests versus interests to interests versus values, but curiously, she says nothing about actual conditions in Libya, or who is fighting whom, or why they are fighting.
The contrast between information and puffery in these two essays is stunning and says a lot about what's wrong with the American Left.
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Slaughter means well, but has drunk the kool-aid. No one in Washington appears capable of reconnecting with reality and using clarity, diversity, and integrity to actually understand how far the US Government has diverged from core values of the Republic, and the public interest. The right/neo-conservatives have cost the US tens of trillions of dollars in fraud, waste, and abuse–Dick Cheney and the Iraq/Afghanistan faux wars on terror being the current classic–but so also has the left/Demopublicans so intent on keeping their own money flowing they have completely lost sight of basic principles of governance. These are all good people trapped in a bad system–all it takes to fix this is ONE LEADER committed to transparency, the truth, and trust. Barack Obama is clearly NOT that leader.
Here are the concise references focused on revolution. For corruption, collective intelligence, open space and other methods of non-violent consensus building and emergence, see the lists at the end of this post.
For the second time, Icelanders voted down a deal to repay Britain and the Netherlands billions of euros lost in the island nation's 2008 financial collapse—at once a bold popular rejection of the notion that taxpayers must bear the burden for bankers' woes and a risky outcome that will complicate Iceland's efforts to rejoin global markets.
Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (December 3, 1842 – March 30, 1911) was the foremost female industrial and environmental chemist in the United States in the 19th century, pioneering the field of home economics. Richards graduated from Westford Academy (2nd oldest secondary school in Westford, MA). She was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its first female instructor, the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, and the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry.
The first is “A revolution against neoliberalism” by Abu Atris, it appeared in Al Jazeera on 24 Feb. The second is “Of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%” by Joseph Stiglitz. One is about the Arab Revolt in Egypt and the other is about income inequality in the United States … they raise stunningly similar — and very disturbing — themes when compared to each other. I urge readers to read each carefully and think about the likenesses and differences between them.
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.
Apocalypse (Greek: Apokálypsis; “lifting of the veil”) is a term applied to the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the majority of humankind. Today the term is often used to refer to the end of the world, which may be a shortening of the phrase apokalupsis eschaton, which literally means “revelation at the end of the æon, or age.[1]”
The unraveling of the US and global financial system should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, doubted the news headlines over the past decade, or plunged into an odyssey of self- and world-discovery by reading books, studying history, or seeking the truth behind the cultural myths that cocoon Americans into the notion that they live in the world’s beacon of democracy and freedom. The most surprising factor is that people who have created the crisis think that they can continue the scam by stealing another $850,000,000,000 overtly through the bailout, and even larger amounts covertly, to keep the game going for the world’s wealthiest people at the expense of everyone else.
In the past, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and Rome fell when a small percentage of the population controlled nearly all of the wealth. [2] Today, the rich have never been richer nor the poor poorer. The concentration of wealth has been achieved by conquest, as well as by one of the most powerful tools of empire: money.
Maziar Bahari faces jail if he returns to Iran
