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Showing posts from November, 2004

Somebody Blew Up America

By Amiri Baraka They say its some terrorist, some barbaric A Rab, in Afghanistan It wasn't our American terrorists It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads Or the them that blows up nigger Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row It wasn't Trent Lott Or David Duke or Giuliani Or Schundler, Helms retiring It wasn't The gonorrhea in costume The white sheet diseases That have murdered black people Terrorized reason and sanity Most of humanity, as they pleases They say (who say?) Who do the saying Who is them paying Who tell the lies Who in disguise Who had the slaves Who got the bux out the Bucks Who got fat from plantations Who genocided Indians Tried to waste the Black nation Who live on Wall Street The first plantation Who cut your nuts off Who rape your ma Who lynched your pa Who got the tar, who got the feathers Who had the match, who set the fires Who killed and hired Who say they God & still be the Devil

911 Poem - Ani DiFranco

Y es, us people are just poems we're 90% metaphor with a leanness of meaning approaching hyper-distillation and once upon a time we were moonshine rushing down the throat of a giraffe yes, rushing down the long hallway despite what the p.a. announcement says yes, rushing down the long stairs with the whiskey of eternity fermented and distilled to eighteen minutes burning down our throats down the hall down the stairs in a building so tall that it will always be there yes, it's part of a pair there on the bow of noah's ark the most prestigious couple just kickin back parked against a perfectly blue sky on a morning beatific in its indian summer breeze on the day that america fell to its knees after strutting around for a century without saying thank you or please and the shock was subsonic and the smoke was deafening between the setup and the punch line cuz we were all on time for work that day we al

Pesticides with fizz. Enjoy, drop dead

By TJS George So the truth is out. All those who have been attacking colas as bad must admit that they were wrong. It has now been conclusively proved that colas are most useful as pesticides. The proof comes, not from interested lobbies, but from consumers. Farmers of Guntur district in Andhra Pradesh were the first to report their findings. Since then farmers from Maharashtra, Chhatisgarh and northern Karnataka have also been heard from. They all say unanimously that Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola and Thums Up are extremely effective in killing the pests that afflict their cotton and chilli crops. pesticides A tell-tale quote from a Guntur farmer is worth re-quoting. "We found the three colas had uniform effect on the pests. The pests became numb after tasting the concotion and fell to the ground." The discovery thrilled the farmers because now they could make one acre of crop pest-free at a cost of Rs. 270. Branded pesticides would cost four times as much The boon is by no means co

The Bush dynasty and the Cuban criminals

The brother of President George Bush, the Florida governor, Jeb Bush, has been instrumental in securing the release from prison of militant Cuban exiles convicted of terrorist offences, according to a new book. The Bush family has also accommodated the demands of Cuban exile hardliners in exchange for electoral and financial support, the book suggests. Last year, after September 11, while the justice department announced a sweep of terrorist suspects, Cubans convicted of terrorist offences were being released from US jails with the consent of the Bush administration, according to the book, Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana, by Ann Louise Bardach , the award-winning investigative journalist who has covered Cuban and Miami politics for the New York Times and Vanity Fair. The Bush family connections go back to 1984 when Jeb Bush began a close association with Camilo Padreda, a former intelligence officer with the Batista dictatorship overthrown by Fidel

Where the People Voted Against Fear

by Eduardo Galeano; Inter Press Service; November 18, 2004 A few days before the election of the President of the planet in North America, in South America elections and a plebiscite were held in a little-known, almost secret country called Uruguay. In these elections, for the first time in the country's history, the left won. And in the plebiscite, for the first time in world history, the privatization of water was rejected by popular vote, asserting that water is the right of all people. * * * The movement headed by President-elect Tabare Vazquez ended the monopoly of the two traditional parties--the Blanco and the Colorado parties--which governed Uruguay since the creation of the universe. And after each election you would hear this exclamation: 'I thought that we Blancos won but it turns out we Colorados did"--or the other way around. Out of opportunism, yes, but also because after so many years of ruling together, the two parties had fused into

NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE

NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE Fawlty Towers, Torquay, Devon, England To the citizens of the United States of America In the light of your failure to elect a competent President of the United States and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories except Utah, which she does not fancy. Your new prime minister (The Right Honourable Tony Blair, MP for the 97.85% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside your borders) will appoint a Minister for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire will be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed. To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

Church air is 'threat to health'

BBC reports that church air is a "threat to health" I have always believed the smoke and fumes - would never invoke any divine interventions... If candle smoke can cause cancer - what about this man in a church?? Is he really praying? I doubt it. Anyway, read on. A ir inside churches may be a bigger health risk than that beside major roads, research suggests. Church air was found to be considerably higher in carcinogenic polycyclic hydrocarbons than air beside roads travelled by 45,000 vehicles daily. It also had levels of tiny solid pollutants (PM10s) up to 20 times the European limits. The study, by Holland's Maastricht University, is published in the European Respiratory Journal. The researchers say that December, with churches lighting up candles for Christmas, could be an especially dangerous month for the lungs. It is now believed that respiratory health is increasingly at risk from so-called "indoor pollution" in t

Tolerating a No Fault Government

If Only Voters Were as Diligent as Sports Fans By RALPH NADER W henever I hear sports fans on talk radio or personally chat with people about sports both Spectator and participatory games the depth and breadth of the conversations are not surprising. As a teenager fan, I knew the batting averages of half the players in the American League. It is the American way. This mental diligence does not carry over, by and large, into their role as voters. Compare the differences. 1. Sports fans do their homework. They know the statistics of the players and teams are deeply involved in analyzing strategies and tactics on the playing filed. To them the game is a study not a hunch or knee jerk reaction. The looks, smiles, big salaries and rhetoric of the players mean nothing unless they are based on performance. Fans also look forward, thinking about foreseeing and forestalling their opposing team's adjustments and responses.

Microsoft Warns Asian Governments of Linux Suits

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp warned Asian governments on Thursday they could face patent lawsuits for using the Linux operating system instead of its Windows software. The growing popularity of Linux -- an open-code software that is freely available on the Internet and easily modified by users -- is a threat to the global dominance of Microsoft's Windows. Linux violates more than 228 patents, according to a recent report from a research group, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said at the company's Asian Government Leaders Forum in Singapore. "Someday, for all countries that are entering the WTO (World Trade Organization), somebody will come and look for money owing to the rights for that intellectual property," he added. The Open Source Risk Management Group said earlier this year that potential intellectual property claims against Linux could expose users to unexpected claims that might result in lawsuits. Software developer SCO Group In

Register Your Complaint with FCC - now!

An Official Presidential Smooch! [White House Approved!] File your complaint with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for profanity!! or Bookmark this link: http://www.fcc.gov/parents/content.html Is Bush a racist? Spellings got a smooch; Ms Rice must have been devastated with this peck on the cheek!

DARFUR: The new killing fields

Panorama: The new killing fields BBC One, Sunday, 14 November 2004 at 22:15 GMT Panorama asks whether the first genocide of the 21st century is occurring in Darfur. Travelling behind the rebel lines to areas where no television team has previously reached, the programme uncovers evidence of systematic killings on a horrifying scale. Hilary Andersson - who for much of this year has been reporting from Darfur - goes on the trail of the killers to find out who the Janjaweed are. She also investigates where their orders are coming from and confronts the tribal head who is number on the US State Department's list of suspected Janjaweed leaders. Production team: Reporter: Hilary Andersson Producer: Darren Kemp Editor: Mike Robinson Deputy Editors: Andrew Bell, Frank Simmonds 'They raped me, one after the other' Panorama travelled across the Darfur region and heard stories of atrocities being committed by Arab militia soldiers against black

Saving First Amendment as well as 'Ryan'

HOW did a patriotic movie about young men giving their lives for their country turn into such a hot-button issue? On Veteran's Day, ABC decided to continue its tradition of showing the unedited version of Steven Spielberg's passionate plaudit, "Saving Private Ryan." While ABC-owned stations, including KGO-Channel 7 in San Francisco, aired the World War II movie, 66 ABC affiliate stations owned by a variety of companies, including Cox Television (which also owns KTVU-Channel 2, the Bay Area's Fox affiliate station), did not -- out of fear. Stations located in Atlanta, Dallas, Honolulu, New Orleans, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Orlando, Fla., Charlotte, N.C., and Portland, Maine, decided not to air the movie because they might get fined for the movie's profanity. "Ryan" tells the story of a group of Army soldiers on a mission to find and bring home a soldier whose three brothers are killed in action. It was inspired by the real story of the five

Global Eye: Game Boy

By Chris Floyd Published: November 12, 2004 We said it here over and over, going back to 2003: If the U.S. presidential election was close enough to be gamed, it damn sure would be gamed. And the chunks of evidence now rolling in -- like so many cracked shells of fact in a high tide of pompous drivel -- increasingly indicate that millions of votes were indeed monkeyed with on the way to amassing George W. Bush's teeny-tiny one percent majority last week. It seems we were all a bit too quick to concede the reality of Li'l Pretzel's "mandate." For example, in county after county, state after state, unprecedented discrepancies between the exit polls and the final result turned up -- in areas that used electronic voting, that is, usually without a recountable paper trail. In almost every such case, exit poll leads for John Kerry -- sometimes very substantial leads, beyond the realm of statistical error -- were converted in the end to narrow victories for Bush.