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Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Gulf Times: Not honouring Gandhi was mistake - Nobel Prize panel

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pays homage at the Mahatma Gandhi memorial in New Delhi yesterday

NEW DELHI: The Nobel Foundation has admitted that it was a “mistake” not to have honoured Mahatma Gandhi, whose birth anniversary yesterday was celebrated as International Day of Non-Violence.
Gandhi was nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize but the Norwegian Nobel Committee believed that he could not be selected as he was “neither a real politician nor a humanitarian relief worker.”
Talking to an Indian TV news channel, Michael Sohlman, executive director of the Nobel Foundation in Sweden, said missing out on the Mahatma was a mistake by the Norwegian Peace Committee.
“We missed a great laureate and that’s Gandhi. It’s a big regret,” Sohlman told CNN-IBN.
“I usually don’t comment on what the Nobel Committees or prize awarding institutions decide. But here, they themselves think he is the one missing,” he added.
Nobel Museum curator Anders Barany said the irony was that eminent personalities, who were guided by the Gandhi’s teachings, were awarded the Nobel in later years though the apostle of peace and non-violence himself did not figure on the list of awardees.
“Mahatma Gandhi is the one we miss the most at the Nobel museum. I think that’s a big empty space where we should have had Mahatma Gandhi. I think it was a mistake. I think they could have made up for that little difference,” Barany said.
The Nobel Committee made amends to some extent by not awarding the peace prize to anybody in 1948 - the year Gandhi was assassinated.
According to the rules in existence then, only those who were living as on February 1 in the given year could be considered for nomination, but Gandhi was killed on January 30. The committee then skipped the award, saying there was no suitable living candidate.
Meanwhile, India and the international community paid rich tributes to Gandhi, celebrating his 138th birth anniversary with peace marches, hymns and pledges, and recalling his credo of non-violence in an era of marked violence.
At the United Nations in New York, the world community leaders dedicated the day as the International Day of Non-Violence, pledging its annual observance.
In New Delhi, many solemn ceremonies were held at Gandhi’s memorial Raj Ghat and elsewhere, and President Pratibha Patil launched a nationwide campaign to save the girl-child.
People from all walks of life thronged Raj Ghat after Patil and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh paid floral tributes early in the morning.
“For as long as there is temptation to resort to violence in the human mind, the Mahatma’s message of non-violence will tug at our hearts. The fact that the international community has today come to observe this day as the International Day of Non-Violence in memory of Mahatma Gandhi, should ensure that generations to come would never forget the eternal message of the Mahatma,” the prime minister said.
Several dignitaries and hundreds of common people visited Raj Ghat to offer floral tributes. The memorial was decorated with flowers and Gandhi’s favourite hymns were played in the backdrop. A large number of foreigners also turned up.
Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams, along with her father Deepak Pandya and other family members, also visited the memorial. “I respect Gandhiji. He stood for entire humanity and is eternally relevant,” Williams said as she came out of Raj Ghat along with veteran Gandhian Nirmala Deshpande, after paying floral tributes.
“Mahatma Gandhi’s message lay in some key words associated with him — tolerance, truth, transparency, non-violence and self-respect,” the prime minister said. He stressed that Gandhi was not some “lofty saint” but a great “political leader”. “He was regarded as a Mahatma because he practised what he preached. Because he cared for the poorest of the poor, the weakest of the weak,” Singh said.- IANS

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Censorship in the Anglosphere: the UK and Australia

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Deep Links section:

The growing global censorship of the Internet often goes unseen in the English-speaking Net, because so much of it takes place in other countries, and in other languages. But that doesn't mean that there aren't contemporary threats to Internet free speech in the English-speaking world.

In the United Kingdom, two prominent blogs went dark this week after publishing accusations regarding the Uzbek billionaire, Alisher Usmanov. Lawyers representing Usmanov contacted the blogs' webhost, Fasthosts, and after threats to sue under Britain's expansive libel laws, the blogs were removed. The sites included Tim Ireland's popular "Bloggerheads" site, and site of Craig Murray, the ex-Ambassador for Uzbekistan. Murray's hosting provider even intervened to take down individual entries and alter the text of Murray's blog to avoid further legal action. As Murray charitably noted on the now deleted site:

... One of the edits to this log my webhost made at Schillings' [Usmanov's lawyers] behest was to say that my claim was "regarded as false by many people". I have altered that edit, because there is no justification for such a claim. I have yet to see evidence of anybody, not one solitary person, arguing that I am wrong about Usmanov, other than his lawyers. Who are these "Many people", and why are they peculiarly silent?

I am very sympathetic to my webhost having to change things for Schillings, but not to the extent of altering things to become defamatory of me!!!

It's a chilling reminder that censorship doesn't just mean that entire sites can be removed from the Net, or that self-censorship will become rife. It even means that other, commercial third parties - whom you pay for service - might alter the very words credited to you online.

Few subjects of criticism have as enthusiastic lawyers as Usmanov. But in Australia this week, the government introduced a bill that would let the Australian government intervene in the Internet speech of all its citizens, on the flimsiest of pretexts.

The Communications Legislation Amendment (Crime or Terrorism Related Internet Content) Bill would, as Electronic Frontiers Australia says, give the Australian police powers to ban access to Internet content which "they have reasons to believe":

  • encourages, incites, or induces the commission of a Commonwealth offence; or
  • was published in part to facilitate the commission of such an offence; or
  • that it is likely to have the effect of facilitating the commission of such an offence.

In other words, entire sites can be banned in Australia for the merest suspicion of potentially assisting a crime. Such a low threshold for censorship, combined by the repeated calls by Australian politicians of all stripes for a centralized, federal filtering of the net, poses a real threat to speech and access to the Net in Australia. It's good to see groups like Electronic Frontiers Australia stand up to it.

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Who Runs The World

Another great article from Information Clearing House:
 

Who Runs The World

Why You Need To Know Immediately

By Carolyn Baker

10/02/07 A review of The True Story Of The Bilderberg Group, By Daniel Estulin

It is difficult to re-educate people who have been brought up on nationalism to the idea of relinquishing part of their sovereignty to a supra-national body. ~ Bilderberg Group founder, Prince Bernhard

As a rhetorical question, can someone please explain to me how it is that progressive liberals such as John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, as well as do-gooder humanitarians with multiple social projects ongoing such as the Rockefellers and every Royal House in Europe, can perennially attend Bilderberg meetings apparently knowing that the final objective of this despicable group of hoodlums is a fascist One World Empire? ~ Daniel Estulin (P.318)~

Daniel Estulin is a Madrid-based journalist and an investigative reporter who took on the daunting and dangerous task of researching the Bildeberg Group, and who offers his findings in The True Story Of The Bilderberg Group, recently published by Trine Day. Equally intriguing as his harrowing tales of being followed and nearly killed on a couple of occasions while working on the book, is the manner in which Estulin connects the dots between the Bilderberg Group, world events, notable politicians and corporate tycoons and the two other secretive monsters of the ruling elite, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC). The project lasted fifteen years and was motivated by Estulin's curiosity about how it is that the mainstream media has never covered in depth the meetings of the Bilderberg Group whose combined wealth exceeds the combined wealth of all U.S. citizens.

What Estulin's book makes clear is that the group, along with the CFR and TC, has become a shadow government whose top priority is to erase the sovereignty of all nation-states and supplant them with global corporate control of their economies under the surveillance of "an electronic global police state." (xv)

The author emphasizes that not all members of the group are "bad" people, and he implies that membership is structured somewhat like concentric circles in a target scheme with in inner core and various levels of relationship between that core and the outer circles of membership. Almost every famous player in politics and finance in the world is a member of one of the three organizations mentioned above, and their political affiliations range from liberal to conservative, for example, George W. Bush, George Soros, Gerald Ford, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter. Of this private club, Estulin says:

This parallel world remains unseen in the daily struggles of most of humanity, but, believe me, it is there: a cesspool of duplicity and lies and double-speak and innuendo and blackmail and bribery. It is a surreal world of double and triple agents, of changing loyalties, of professional psychotic assassins, brainwashed black ops agents, soldiers of fortune and mercenaries, whose primary sources of income are the dirtiest and most despicable government-run subversive missions-the kind that can never be exposed.(15)

This world, according to Estulin, is so perverse and evil that "it has left an indelible mark on my soul". (16) How not? Because the Bilderberg Group and its two other triplets, the CFR and the TC have set about to loot the entire planet. Their members run the central banks of the world and are poised to control discount rates, money-supply, interest rates, gold prices, and which countries receive or do not receive loans. Membership is by invitation only, many of the earliest members being handpicked, not from right-wing groups but from among none other than the Fabian Socialists who ultimately supported global government.

Another chilling quote Estulin includes is from William Shannon:

The Bilderbergers are searching for the age of post-nationalism: when we won't have countries, but rather regions of the Earth surrounded by Universal values. That is to say, a global economy; one World government (selected rather than elected) and a universal religion. To assure themselves of reaching these objectives, the Bilderbergers focus on a 'greater technical approach' and less awareness on behalf of the general public.

THE BILDERBERG BAPTISM OF BILL CLINTON

In 1991 Bill Clinton attended the Bilderberg Conference in Baden-Baden where Estulin asserts that he was "anointed" to the U.S. presidency, and shortly thereafter he took an unexpected, unannounced trip to Moscow. It appears, says Estulin, that he was sent there to get his KGB student-era, anti-Vietnam war files "buried" before he announced his candidacy for president which happened some two-and-a-half months later. Today, Clinton is a member of all three groups: Bilderberg, CFR, and TC. Hillary Clinton is a member of the Bilderberg Group.

Estulin points out that "almost all of the presidential candidates for both parties have belonged to at least one of these organizations, many of the U.S. congressmen and senators, most major policy-making positions, especially in the field of foreign relations, much of the press, most of the leadership of the CIA, FBI, IRS, and many of the remaining governmental organizations in Washington. CFR members occupy nearly all White House cabinet positions."(80) When one considers that most prominent members of mainstream media are also members of what Edith Kermit Roosevelt, granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt called "this legitimate Mafia", how can we assert that Americans obtain their news from independent sources?

For example, The News Hour with Jim Leher is the cornerstone of PBS's programming. Leher is a CFR member, and when one examines the funding of the news hour by: Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) whose chairman Dwayne Andreas was a member of the Trilateral Commission; Pepsico, whose CEO Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi is a Bilderberger and TC Executive Committee member; and Smith Barney which is interlocked with Citigroup, a global financial services company that is a member of the Bilderberg Group, the CFR, and the TC, what kind of "news" should one expect from Leher's News Hour? Consider also that many of the journalists on the News Hour: Paul Gigot, David Gergen, William Kristol, and William Safire are members of one or more of the three groups. (153)

Likewise, when we consider the membership in one or more of these groups of almost every American president since the inception of these organizations, we can no longer pretend that any Democratic or Republican presidential candidate offers the American people an alternative to ruling elite global hegemony.

In fact, Estulin's research reveals that "the Council on Foreign Relations creates and delivers psycho-political operations by manipulating people's reality through a 'tactic of deception', placing Council members on both sides of an issue. The deception is complete when the public is led to believe that its own best interests are being served while the CFR policy is being carried out."(117)

And what happens if the "anointed ones" become too autonomous? One chapter in the book, "The Watergate Con-Game", answers that question. In it Estulin suggests that Richard Nixon was set up by the Council on Foreign Relations of which he was a member because of his insubordination and unwillingness to submit to the shadow government. Presumably, Nixon's demise was carefully crafted to demonstrate to subsequent Chief Executives the price they would pay for disregarding the agenda of those who anointed them.

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW

In the book's final pages, Estulin's research waxes increasingly relevant to the present moment in history. He asks: "Why would David Rockefeller and other U.S. Trilateralists, Bilderbergers and the CFR members want to dismantle the industrial might of the United States?" (184). He then launches into a summary of the economic history of the twentieth century and makes one of the most powerful statements of the entire book: "What we have witnessed from this 'cabal' is the gradual collapsing of the U.S. economy that began in the 1980s." (187)

In case you haven't noticed, this "gradual collapse of the U.S. economy" is no longer gradual, and what Estulin is asserting confirms a great deal of the assertions made by Catherine Austin Fitts that the current housing bubble explosion/credit crunch/mortgage meltdown has its roots in the 1980s. James Howard Kunstler has also written recently in his blog entitled "Shock and Awe" that the great American yard sale has begun. In other words, as an engineered economic meltdown drives hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of businesses and individuals into bankruptcy, key players in the Big Three ruling elite organizations can buy up the train wreck left behind for pennies on the dollar-a brilliant fast-track strategy for owning the world.

In the final months of 2007 we are witnessing the stupendous success of the Big Three's strategy for planetary economic hegemony as the cacophony of their carefully engineered global economic cataclysm reverberates across America and around the world. It was never about buyers who didn't read the fine print when taking out liar loans. It was always about silver-tongued, ruling elite politicians and central bankers, anointed by the shadow government, who ultimately and skillfully stole and continue to steal governments from people and replace them with transnational corporations.

No one could have said it better than David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, a Bilderberg member and board member of the Council On Foreign Relations in his Memoirs:

Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure-one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.

If you want to know who really runs the world and the lengths to which they will go to establish their globalist hegemony, you must read Estulin's well-documented The True Story of The Bilderberg Group.

October 2, 2007 By Carolyn Baker, Coming Out Of Fundamentalist Christianity: An Autobiography Affirming Sensuality, Social Justice, and The Sacred, is now available for order at Amazon. The book will also be available very soon at http://www.carolynbaker.net  

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ICH: "But what can we do?"

I used to give thought to what historical time and place I would like to have lived in. Europe in the 1930s was usually my first choice. As the war clouds darkened, I'd be surrounded by intrigue, spies omnipresent, matters of life and death pressing down, the opportunity to be courageous and principled. I pictured myself helping desperate people escape to America. It was real Hollywood stuff; think "Casablanca". And when the Spanish Republic fell to Franco and his fascist forces, aided by the German and Italian fascists (while the United States and Britain stood aside, when not actually aiding the fascists), everything in my imaginary scenario would have heightened -- the fate of Europe hung in the balance. Then the Nazis marched into Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland ... one could have devoted one's life to working against all this, trying to hold back the fascist tide; what could be more thrilling, more noble?

Miracle of miracles, miracle of time machines, I'm actually living in this imagined period, watching as the Bush fascists march into Afghanistan, bombing it into a "failed state"; then Iraq: death, destruction, and utterly ruined lives for 24 million human beings; threatening more of the same endless night of hell for the people of Iran; overthrowing Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti; bombing helpless refugees in Somalia; relentless attempts to destabilize and punish Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Gaza, and other non-believers in the empire's god-given mission. Sadly, my most common reaction to this real-life scenario, daily in fact, is less heroic and more feeling scared or depressed; not for myself personally but for our one and only world. The news every day, which I consume in large portions, slashes away at my joie de vivre; it's not just the horror stories of American military power run amok abroad and the injustices of the ever-expanding police state at home, but all the lies and stupidity which drive me up the wall. I'm constantly changing stations, turning the TV or radio off, turning the newspaper page, to escape the words of the King of Lies and the King of Stupidity -- those two twisted creatures who happen to occupy the same humanoid body -- and a hundred minions.

Nonetheless, I must tell you, comrades, that at the same time, our contemporary period also brings out in me a measure of what I imagined for my 1930s life. Our present world is in just as great peril, even more so when one considers the impending environmental catastrophe (which the King of Capitalism refuses to confront lest it harm the profits of those who lavish him with royal bribes). The Bush fascist tide must be stopped.

Usually when I'm asked "But what can we do?", my reply is something along the lines of: Inasmuch as I can not see violent revolution succeeding in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn't quite match the government's firepower, not to mention their viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial beast other than: Educate yourself and as many others as you can, increasing the number of those in the opposition until it reaches a critical mass, at which point ... I can't predict the form the explosion will take. ...

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London: Tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, yet 80% of crime unsolved

London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.

But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

The figures were obtained by the Liberal Democrats on the London Assembly using the Freedom of Information Act. ... 

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Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Artist spotlight: 'She creates'

Mumbai: The world will watch as She Creates ...

SHEIn the spirit of Gandhi Jayanti, please join us for the first screening of the 5 films made by 25 girls from Dharavi slums to private schools who came together to make a difference through films. What started as an experiment, resulted in heartfelt short films on girl child issues.

On 2nd October MAM Movies invite you all to witness their little dreams taking shape in the big screen.

The girls attended workshops in film making, so that they could create these stories. Some are about themselves, some are about their family, their neighbours, their nightmares, and their dreams to rise above these...

 

"Transplant tourism" and offshore organ transplants

Organ transplants move offshore as patients pursue "transplant tourism"

Wednesday, September 19, 2007 by: David Gutierrez
 
(NewsTarget) The United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO) has expressed concern over a dramatic rise in the incidence of "transplant tourism," in which wealthier medical patients -- usually from First World countries -- travel to poor countries for transplants from people who have been persuaded to trade their organs for money.

According to Luc Noel of the WHO's health technology and pharmaceuticals unit, the prevalence of transplant tourism has increased over the past 10 years to the point where it accounted for five to 10 percent of worldwide kidney transplants in 2005.

Poor people in countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and the Philippines are commonly convinced by organ brokers to sell their body parts.

"There are villages that are in the poorer parts of Pakistan where as many as 40 to 50 percent of the population of the village we know only has one kidney," said Farhat Moazam of the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation in Karachi, Pakistan. While organ donors may be promised as much is 150,000 rupees ($2,500), she said, the amount they see may be drastically lower once brokers' fees and medical costs are deducted.

In addition, many such donors do not receive the needed follow-up care after their major surgery, which often leads to serious health complications.

According to Jeremy Chapman, a doctor at Westmead Hospital in Sydney, Australia, advances in surgical techniques have led to an explosion in the demand for organ transplants. This, in turn, has led to a shortage of organs, most of which are donated by people only after their deaths. If a living relative is not available to donate the needed organ, many people are now turning to other countries to find what they want.

"The wealthy, in search of their own survival, will sometimes seek organs from the poor," Chapman said, summing up the troubling dynamic.

In response to this trend, the WHO has recommended stricter international rules on organ donation and transplantation.
 
 

Open Letters to George W. Bush

Letters to the president from his ardent admirer Belacqua Jones

 

Dear George,

 

Two words explain why victory is ours in Iraq: pathological rationalism. This dynamic allows us to pursue a linear course of action driven by a series of if/then constructions that move us forward regardless of the consequences of these actions. Translation: staying the course no matter how deep the shit is.

 

Take Iraq. The logic of it all sings. Controlling oil in the Middle East is a matter of national security. We lost a client state when the Iranian revolution swept the shah out of office. So when the Neocons came to power, it seemed only logical to replace Iran with Iraq, especially since between the first gulf war and our draconian sanctions, the regime was too weak to stand. A cakewalk, as one sage put it.

 

And, what the hell, while we were at it, why not democratize and secularize the whole region, another cakewalk for the world’s sole surviving superpower.

 

It is a basic precept of pathological rationalism that once an action is initiated, it continues even if all the premises upon which the action was based turn out to be wrong. And when it came to Iraq, they were about as dead wrong as you could get. 

 

But, that doesn’t matter. It is far better to bleed slowly to death than to lose face by admitting a mistake. 

 

Besides, as a western democracy we are entitled to take whatever we want because the purity of our motives are always above reproach regardless of our actions. Columbus established this precedence when he Christianized the natives by enslaving them. 

 

It’s only right. We are rational; they are irrational. We practice the serene violence of the civilized; they practice the savage violence of the barbarian. We practice policy while they practice passion.

 

Policy is the sand we spread to absorb and conceal the pools of blood we leave in our wake. Madness poured into the mold of policy is no longer madness. As policy, madness becomes clarity of vision as seen through the opaque lens of ideology.

 

The reason you have christened this The Long War is because we will plod on and on until we have shed so much blood that we finally see a return on our success, no matter how small or insignificant that success is. 

 

To the pathologically rational mind, whatever is posited is. A policy promulgated defines reality and in doing so transcends the grim, unpredictable concreteness of fire, earth, water and air as it orbits in the ethereal realm of fantasy where all is well that ends well.

 

Your admirer,

Belacqua Jones

 

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