the guy by the door …

Thomas Becker in class 1A Gitmo drag seems to have the right idea. He confronts Harvard Law School Alums because

Torture Alum Alberto Gonzales was there.

Ok. I’m being just a bit melodramatic. I discovered that Harvard Law School is not totally a branch office of the Federalist Society, when the Legal Left took me to dinner¹, again when Unbound had their Resistance and the Law conference, and again on the 4th anniversary of the invasion. But I am still getting over the Milgram reception given to Chertoff.

Actually, I picked a bad week to be home taking care of domestic matters. The Harvard Coalition to End Torture [great pictures! including the two above] demonstrated for a full week and I missed it. I don’t watch mainstream media much, but Yahoo doesn’t show anything until Torture Alum showed up. The guy in orange has the right idea. What’s wrong with all those other people? Maybe Dean Elena [endearingly Brooklyn²] is right, a single required course in the third year isn’t quite enough to set folks’ moral compass straight.

Missed it by that much!

The reunion was on Saturday in Austin Hall [next to the Littauer building]. i went a little bit, but had to go guard the library. Sounds like the demonstration occurred during my shift.
I watched Dean Elena on the overflow. Aside from straightening out folks’ moral compass, she’s gonna build a lot of really, really, big stuff. What is it with law types and big furniture? Judges and their big desks? Some kind of compensation thing goin’ on? The wavefunction of the universe will fit in the pencil drawer of a regular desk.³
But I gotta go with Professor Janet, them big Hauser windows are glorious.

¹It was heartening that they took care to feed the help who were on duty. I’m sorry I didn’t quite get the recycling regime. I can tell you from years in the library - there’s no sign everyone will understand; you need a guy by the sign to explain it. And it helps if you’ve thought about it in advance.

²On beginning grad school, I lived just west of Park Slope on the ‘transition’ block. A coupla three days there, we heard a popping noise outside. Some guy had a gun. At least that’s what Gil said. I was hugging the floor boards. My first experience of buying dirt in a plastic bag was there.

³Of course, all the “human degrees of freedom” are “integrated out.”

If you end a line with a superscript and put the “more” break imediately after, the tag that generates the “more”  is inserted  before the  closing “sup” tag. This leads to  unpredictable results in subsequent  posts on the page.

Does anyone know how to embed html in a post title? My e-mail moniker is “randy.f”. It liveth in the duchy of “earthlink.net”.

Thanks to Mathew Cardinale of the Atlanta Progressive News for a slightly polished version of the full text and Representative Dennis Kucinich for the original. -30-

The Thai government has issued a compulsory license for production of a generic version of an Aids drug. Abbot Labs has threatened reprisal. In the aftermath of 9/11, when 6 people had died of Anthrax, the Bush Administration proposed to issue a compulsory license for parallel importing of Cipro. The Aids toll is a bit higher. Democracy Now!

Also, morning becomes Μήδεια. Some people think she’s a cut up, but she makes me feel young. Code Pink had a card carrrying girlie-man with them. He was wearing a pink hat. I haven’t seen that since I left New York City. I got’s to get me one.

Bill Moyers returns to the air tonight with, “Buying the War,” a study of the press during the run-up to the war in Iraq. It airs tonight on PBS. Amy Goodman interviews him for the full hour [after the headlines: bill of impeachment filed] today.

David Halberstam [’55 ] was the one reporter who, over time, made me realize that it’s not how close you are to power. … The further you get from power the closer you can get to the truth.*

Democracy has become a racket, when it comes to money and politics and the media.*

*Bill Moyers on Democracy Now! April 25, 2007.

Headlines and archived streams.

… simply to try to vilify and defame him in the hope that maybe what he’s writing will disappear.

Part II of the joint interview with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now! included this remark by Noam. He is referring to the Dersh’s attempts first to stop publication [according to Chomsky] of Finkelstein’s book Beyond Chutzpah¹ then failing that, to cause Finkelstein to be denied tenure. Noam claims that DePaul University has complained to Harvard administration about Dersh’s kibitzing. In an April 12 article [w. correction 4/14], A Bitter Spat Over Ideas, Israel and Tenure, Patricia Cohen of the New York Times says:

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A Patriots Day special report Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now! for the full hour.

• Patriotism to me means doing what you think your country should be doing… supporting your government when you think it’s doing right, opposing your government when you think it’s doing wrong. [Howard]
• Howard recently asked a class of young students, “Who here has heard of My Lai?” No one had.
• This [the war in Iraq] is one of the worst catastrophes in military history and also in political history. [Noam]

Archived video and audio streams available from Democracy Now!

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• The first casualty of war is truth.¹
• The truth continues to die after the war. There are plenty of truths to kill.²
• Any president is going to feel he needs to compete for time on TV and so what he’s [Bush] going to entertain us with is what I call Republican superbowl played by the lower classes with live ammunition.²

• Religion is the opiate of the masses.³
• He [Marx] said it at a time when opium was the only pain killer. You took it for a tootache. … He might have said religion was the aspirin of the people.²

• There was a time when I could vote for economic justice, now I can’t.²

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At the time of the Gulf War, we acquired irrefutable proof that Iraq’s designs were not limited to the chemical weapons it had used against Iran and its own people, but also extended to the acquisition of nuclear weapons and biological agents. — National Security Strategy [September 2002] Section V. Paragraph 6

The Iraq Survey Group also found that pre-war intelligence estimates of Iraqi WMD stockpiles were wrong – a conclusion that has been confirmed by a bipartisan commission and congressional investigations. We must learn from this experience if we are to counter successfully the very real threat of proliferation. — National Security Strategy [March 2006] Section V. 4th Paragraph from the bottom.

And yet, two paragraphs later:

Indeed, prior to the 1991 Gulf War, many intelligence analysts underestimated the WMD threat posed by the Iraqi regime. After that conflict, they were surprised to learn how far Iraq had progressed along various pathways to try to produce fissile material.

Apparently Noam is the only person who reads these things. In Resort to Power from his book Hegemony or Survival, Noam says,

…Bush and colleagues declared the right to resort to force even if a country does not have WMD or even programs to develop them. It is sufficient that it have the “intent and ability” to do so. Just about every country has the ability, and intent is in the eye of the beholder.

All three groups of Harvard students weighed in heavily on intent. It misses the point.

bbiab

On Democracy Now! An MP was giving a TV interview at the time of the bombing. The footage comes from U.S. Government financed Al-hurra. Sourcewatch, a wiki-hosted project of the Center for Media and Democracy has a fairly extensive Al Hurra page [with stuff not on Wikipedia], and an apparently orphaned Alhurra page.

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The New York Times reports that a significant number of students and faculty at one of America’s most conservative universities is protesting the invitation of Dick Cheney to speak at commencement. Issues of character were cited as the reason. Appearing first in the article was Cheney’s use of profanity on the Senate floor. And the issues of lying about the connection between Sadam and Al-Qaeda as well as outing CIA agent Valerie Wilson were also mentioned.

According to World Net Daily, even as [or because of] Ahmadinejad announcing atomic ‘good news’ today, the Russians are insistent on U.S. Iran attack¹. The “nibble” I mentioned previously is the U.S. support for Pakistani militants operating in Iran. [Sorry ] Scott Ritter claimed more than two years ago that U.S. U2’s were overflying Iranian air space. This is technically an act of war. A friend argued that it is an act of war so frequently used by the U.S. that it doesn’t count. That kind of thinking is part of the problem.

¹That our armed forces will, not that they should :).

Two friends of Dee in Salt Lake City. Photo: Dee

It is 1:08 P.M. in Tehran [UTC +3:30]¹. According to a report from Russian intelligence sevice, the U.S. war with Iran was scheduled to go hot at 4:00 AM today, known to some as Good Friday. Nothing on Yahoo news. Nothing on English Al-Jazeera.² The blogosphere only this. And more recently this from Dee’s Dotes.

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I kinda learned that in grade school, but it remained a blur.

It was a dazzlingly brilliant day, so much that it almost hurt. And there she was. Her traditional robe gently unfurling in the breeze. She had to be African. Not African-American*, African-African*. I was right. She is Ashanti. She looked lost. It took almost two years for Harvard and Cambridge to help her find her way, but they did. I don’t know how she is doing now.

I don’t know the full history of the Hutu’s and the Tutsi’s, but I do wonder where the machetes came from. Would things have been different if we African-European-Americans* had The Prime Directive or better if we had never gone back at all?
I know a man from Tanzania and young man from Eritrea. They have pretty good ideas where they are going. If you work at Harvard long enough the whole world drops in. Slowly the fog is lifting.

This is Africa Week at Harvard. Tonight a Film: The Invisible Children; The lives of children soldiers in Uganda. Tonight Thurs. April 5, 2007 @ 7:00 PM Emerson 305.

Last night, Professor Jacob Olupona from [among many places] Harvard Divinity School
addressed the question, “Is Jesus a White Man’s God?” I speak not even one African language. Fortunately he spoke English. Unfortunately, I still had a hard time**. Hopefully the text will be posted to the net. But I heard what I most needed to. “It is often assumed that Christianity in Africa is nothing more than a tool of colonial oppression. This racist assumption is false.” After duly noting the disclosure implicit in his job title, I still feel compelled to take this seriously. It is the assumption I held. It is tenaciously held by some on the ideological left, who seem to believe that denouncing others magically makes them free of racsim. I almost wish it were that simple. For me, unlearning the racism of youth*** has been and may well be a lifelong task. I am a work in progress.
Full schedule of events in the Science Center
*According to the Human Genome Project, we are all African-somethings.

** In graduate school I learned that multilingual people are also better at understanding non-native English speakers than I am. My Greek colleague could understand by Chinese colleague’s English and ‘translate’.

***My mother’s commentary on “Gone with the Wind” and a fortiori “Amos ‘n Andy” was tragedy and farce.