…”When do you wreck it as a system?” Lovejoy wonders. “It’s like going up to the edge of a cliff, not really knowing where it is. Common sense says you shouldn’t discover where the edge is by passing over it, but that’s what we’re doing with deforestation and climate change.”
commondreams.org

Men get greater satisfaction than women from seeing someone they dislike suffer pain shows a study of how people react when witnessing revenge. Scientists found highly significant differences between the genders in how male and the female brains respond.

Men and women feel empathy with people they know experiencing pain but in men the empathy turns to pleasure when the victim is someone they dislike.
independent.co.uk

Latin America’s estimated 60,000,000 indigenous peoples are on the move from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego, but in dramatically distinct directions.

While Mexico’s profoundly Mayan Zapatista Army of National Liberation launches a vehement anti-electoral campaign, dissing the political class, eschewing power, and seeking to build autonomous alliances down below, Evo Morales, a 46 year-old acculturated Quechua Indian farm leader, will take power from the top when he is sworn in as the first Indian president of majority-Indian Bolivia.

Evo, recently snapped wearing his ratty old alpaca sweater during an audience with the King of Spain to the enormous disdain of fashion-conscious diplomats everywhere, has also been photographed whispering in Fidel Castro’s ear, leading a “pollera”-wearing (Indian skirt) entourage of women leaders of his “cocalero” (coca-growers) federation through the streets of old Havana, and nuzzling Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez before a portrait of Simon Bolivar in Caracas–Chavez, Morales, and Castro have announced the formation of an anti-imperialist alliance that has Washington plotting counter-insurgency strategies.

Having won a smashing (52%) victory in December elections, Evo and his MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) Party prepare to take power in a country that has suffered nearly 200 coup d’etats in its 175-year history.

Although the affable, boyish Morales whose thick black locks appear permanently adorned with confetti these days, has seemingly risen to superstar echelons overnight, it is taken Evo a good decade of hard organizing to reach these lofty heights. In the spring of 2004, this reporter got a week-long look at Bolivia’s unlikely new president in interviews with Evo himself; his vice-president, the former Tupac Katari guerrillero Alvarro Garcia; MAS deputies; and leaders of the six coca-growing federations in the Amazon basin region of Chapare, south of Cochabamba where Morales has built a rock-solid base. The thumbnail portrait that emerged was one of a pragmatic and even opportunist politico with a wandering eye and a quick tongue. He energetically bashed the gringos to a gringo reporter, charging the U.S. with “poisoning” Bolivia with transgenic crops and vowing to shut down Washington’s embassy for meddling in Bolivian affairs, when he came to power.

Evo Morales is being touted as Latin America’s first Indian president since Mexico’s Benito Juarez in the mid-1800s but hyperbole seems to be far ahead of the facts here. In fact, Alejandro Toledo in next-door Peru is an acculturated Quechua (“cholo”) from Andean Ankash who was captured by the Peace Crops and brainwashed by the World Bank before being repatriated to serve their interests six years ago. Toledo will probably be succeeded by another Indian Ollanta Humala, a nationalist who is close to Chavez and Morales.

In a majority Indian country like Bolivia (between 60 and 85% depending on whose parameters you swallow) being an Indian is no big thing. Bolivians are more apt to identify themselves by their class or occupation–farmer, miner– than as Aymara, Quechua, or Amazonas.

Evo Morales concedes his own ties to “Indian-ness” are tenuous âo” when I was in Cochabamba, he was relearning Quechua in preparation for the presidential run. The lingua franca of the cocalero movement is Spanish.

A bright kid from the dirt-poor altiplano where the tin mines had all tapped out, Morales moved with his family down to the tropical Chapare in the mid-1970s. Growing coca leaf was the preferred mode of eking out a living for the new arrivals or “colonos.” By the early ’90s, Evo had risen from sports director of the cocalero federations to a tough energetic leader not afraid to defy the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s militarized coca eradication programs to uproot the sacred Inca plant. The federation’s chief weapon was multiple road blockades paralyzing transit on Bolivia’s key east-west highway that often brought them into conflict with the DEA-subsidized Bolivian military.

But the cocaleros’ epic struggle has less to do with the Incas than with defending the colonos’ hard-won land. Evo Morales’s interests have always been more agricultural than cultural. He is an Indian leader of a mestizo-ized campesino movement, the mirror-opposite of the Zapatistas’ Subcomandante Marcos, a mestizo mouthpiece for a profoundly Indian army. Despite their differences, Morales recently invited Marcos to his January 22nd inauguration.

“Evo is not an Indian–he’s a socialist,” observes Aymara peasant leader Felipe Quispe, “El Mallku” (The Condor.) Quispe who has tussled with Morales for years, dreams of restoring Inca glories by building a Tahuantinsuyo, a four nation (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Paraguay) majority-Indian population Andean federation.
counterpunch.org

Subcomandante Marcos is much more than a ‘mestizo mouthpiece’ for the Zapatistas. He is a savvy intellectual, and comes from among the privileged classes, and thus a troubling leader for an indigenous movement. Other privileged admirers who idealize the Zapatistas either minimize or ignore this. Just a thought to add to the mix…

A curious religious debate is raging in Egypt. The question is: should you keep your clothes on when having sex?
It began when Dr Rashad Khalil, an expert on Islamic law from al-Azhar university in Cairo warned that being completely naked during intercourse invalidates a marriage. His ruling was promptly dismissed by other scholars, including one who argued that “anything that can bring spouses closer to each other” should be permitted.

Another religious scholar suggested it was OK for married couples to see each other naked as long as they don’t look at the genitals. To avoid problems in that area, he recommended having sex under a blanket.
guardian.co.uk

“Vernon Bellecourt made the phone call. Clyde took the call and issued the order for her murder.”
— Russell Means

“I personally will be overjoyed when the Canadian courts rule to return John Graham back to the US to answer for this brutal murder.”
— Robert Robideau

On February 24, 1976, the frozen body of American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Anna Mae Pictou Aquash was found wrapped in a blanket in a ravine on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Aquash was with the militants who occupied the town of Wounded Knee, SD for 71 days in 1973, the culmination of a reservation Reign of Terror that saw over sixty “traditional” Indians murdered. Anna Mae, the highest ranking woman in the male-dominated AIM, had disappeared from Denver in December 1975.

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) pathologist, Dr. W. O. Brown certified that she had “died from exposure.” In a very unusual move, her hands were severed and sent to the FBI for fingerprinting and, even more unusual, she was quickly buried in a pauper’s grave March 3rd, before any identification was made or any burial permit issued.

That same day, the FBI announced that the body was that of Aquash, a 30-year-old Mi’kmaq from Nova Scotia. Her Canadian family was informed by the FBI that she had “died from natural causes.”

At her family’s request, an exhumation order and a new autopsy was gained. On March 11, a second autopsy revealed the true cause of death, an execution shot to the back of the head and the .32 caliber bullet was recovered

Of course, this led to charges of an FBI cover-up. To this day, many believe that the FBI had her killed. And, there is, of course, ample reason to believe this: Agent David Price, a maverick cowboy even within that lawless agency, had arrested Aquash June 25, 1975 and pressured her to cooperate with the authorities on a series of incidents; most specifically the famous shootout that left two agents and one Native dead and for which AIM leader Leonard Peltier is now serving time after being the sole person convicted. Price famously told Aquash that she’d “be dead within a year” should she not cooperate.
counterpunch.org

While the celebrations on the eve of 2006 were going on all over the world and the people with means were bursting crackers, drinking champagne and dancing enthusiastically, one person was desperately reminding them of widespread incidence of poverty all around. Almost all television channels except TV5, a French language Canadian channel, ignored him and his message. Perhaps they did not think it pleasant to remind the revellers that there were hundreds of millions of people all over the world going without food and at least 100,000 people were dying every day of hunger and malnutrition-related diseases. This person was no other than redoubtable Jean Ziegler, a professor of economics at University of Geneva and Sorbonne, Paris.
zmag.org

Racial science has discovered the art, and the power, of flattery. Last year, three scholars published a paper, Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, in which they argued that Ashkenazi Jews were considerably more intelligent than other Europeans, because their history of moneylending and other financial occupations favoured genes associated with cleverness.
The principle at stake was essentially the same as the one underlying The Bell Curve, a provocative tome in which Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein suggested that black people might be innately less intelligent than white people, that race is biologically real and that some races are intellectually superior to others. But the public reaction was strikingly different. There was none of the outrage that followed The Bell Curve’s appearance in 1994. Instead there were thoughtful commentaries on the paper’s arguments, and an undertone of complacency.

At a meeting in New York at which the psychologist Steven Pinker spoke about the Ashkenazi paper, though, one writer was troubled. Maggie Wittlin, reporting for Seed magazine, said: “People will hear what they want to hear. And many in attendance were there to hear that Jews are naturally smarter than everyone else.” Seduction is more powerful than provocation – and more insidious.

And it is not directed at one ethnic group. As Pinker has noted, race has raised its head in public several times in the past year, and the reaction – or lack of it – has been notable. Murray restated his case, more magisterially than ever, in the magazine Commentary. The British biologist Armand Marie Leroi argued in the New York Times that race was a scientifically meaningful and medically valuable concept. His case has the implicit support of the US Food and Drug Administration, which has approved a heart drug, BiDil, that is intended specifically for black people. Discredited by association with the Third Reich, and discarded by mainstream science thereafter, racial science is pushing for rehabilitation on a range of fronts.

Last month, Pinker told the Edge website that “the dangerous idea of the next decade” will be the notion that “groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments”. It is all the more dangerous for being bound up with ideas about how populations vary in their susceptibility to disease. The implication is that we must take these ideas as a package. Health must come first, of course – and the dangerous elements must follow in its wake. We are ill-prepared to respond to the complex challenges posed by racial arguments bobbing in the unstoppable tide of genetic research.

In the past it was easy: an ominous reference to the Nazis and a snippet of scientific reassurance – such as the observation that there is more variation within so-called races than between them – would do the trick. But the hardcore advocates of race science have spent years working out answers to the standard rebuttals. And you cannot refute a scientific claim by referring to its historical baggage.

Over the years, the denial of race became almost absolute. Differences were only skin-deep, it was said – despite the common knowledge that certain groups had higher incidences of genetically influenced diseases. It became a taboo, and as the taboo starts to appear outdated or untenable, the danger is that unreflective denial will be replaced by equally uncritical acceptance.

We don’t need to take it as a package, though. In particular, we should not be misled into thinking that sexes and races are the same kind of thing. Evolutionary theory affirms that in general, male and female behaviour will differ. On race, however, it has little or nothing to say. Whereas there is a fundamental asymmetry between the genetic interests of men and women, because women are obliged to invest more resources in their offspring than men are, different peoples are much the same. Although hardcore race theorists talk about the bracing effects of cold open spaces upon East Asian mental abilities (which they consider to be greater than those of any other group), they are pushed to explain why such environments should promote intelligence any more than, say, the Australian outback. If life in groups of clever primates was the main driving force behind human intelligence, as many scientists nowadays consider, it’s harder still to see why intelligence should vary with the landscape.

For most people these are unfamiliar and perhaps uncomfortable arguments. Critical and frank discussion from publicly engaged scientists on current racial issues would be welcome. But perhaps the most constructive thing to do is to reflect on our own attitudes. Our ideas about race are a mishmash of received opinions, partly remembered facts and subjective impressions. They probably include more old-fashioned racial notions than we would like to think, but clever approaches such as the Ashkenazi paper may lure them to the surface. We have gone beyond the stage where the question of racial science could be seen as a straightforward contest between decent values and sinister pseudoscience. It’s no longer black and white.
guardian.co.uk

…It is also interesting to see how Gordimer saw herelf as a privileged white person involved in the struggle against apartheid. “When white detractors accuse Gordimer of ‘hardness’ in her portrayal of whites,” writes Roberts, “she retorts: ‘If I am pointing fingers at whites, am I not a white myself? Isn’t it always mea culpa? If I’m dissecting whites, am I not dissecting myself. …I’m right in the middle of it.” This is a far cry from today’s white activists in South Africa who constantly tell poor black people that racism is no more, class is the real issue. Whites’ arrogance of instructing millions of poor blacks who are subjected to racism daily in South Africa about their reality is
simply astounding, to say the very least. According to Roberts, Toni Morrison once said of Gordimer: “Gordimer managed to ‘validate’ race while also interrogating and moving beyond it: neither wishing race away…nor remaining mired in racialism.” One finds that one cannot honestly say the same about most white activists in South Africa today, especially on the issue of Zimbabwe.
zmag.org

More than 20 years ago, Mohammed Amin set up his camera in the dustbowls of Korem in northern Ethiopia and filmed people starving to death. His footage, accompanied by a report from the BBC’s Michael Buerk, left an indelible impression of Africa on the minds of British television viewers.

Now his son Salim wants to give African journalists a bigger voice in how the continent is presented to the world by setting up the Africa’s first news channel.

“We want to show the success stories as well as the failures, and show there is more to us than famines and wars,” he said. “We need to remind ourselves, as well as others, that there are people here who are contented with their lives.

“My father always talked about how important it was for Africans to receive news from other Africans.”

Mohammed Amin was killed in 1996 after a plane he was travelling on was hijacked and crashed into the sea. His son is now determined take up the task of covering African news from the inside. Already the chief executive of Camerapix, a production company based in Nairobi, he believes his true mission is to set up an African version of the Arabic TV news channel al-Jazeera, broadcasting in English and French to African and international audiences. Mr Amin said: “The idea is to get Africans talking to each other instead of getting their information on what is happening in each other’s countries from outsiders.”
independent.co.uk

William Gladstone, the on-again, off-again British prime minister for most of the second half of the 19th century, famously liked to walk the streets at night, counseling prostitutes to a more wholesome life. He did so when he was young. He did so when he was old, and through his four terms as prime minister from 1868 through 1894. Those were the years when Britain thought itself Queen Victoria’s and God’s gift to the world (in that order), when imperialism found cover behind the infomercial known as the white man’s burden.

The link between Gladstone’s streetwalking and Britain’s globe-trotting is one of those striking historic parallels between a man’s ideals personifying a civilization’s presumptions. The link isn’t just symbolic. It betrays the rot at the heart of Western assumptions about right and wrong, about who, your majesty, the savages are. For Gladstone wasn’t a compulsive streetwalker for virtue all those years: He was, in fact, an assiduous whoremonger. He makes you think of that old hair club commercial — “I’m not just the president, I’m a customer.” And Britain wasn’t bringing civilization to the world so much as decimating and retarding it where it didn’t fit with Albion’s tastes.

Britain has long been replaced by the United States as the world’s civilizing Santa. But aside from the Big Stick years of Presidents McKinley and the first Roosevelt, who left no natives unturned in the Philippines and South of the Border, it should be said that American imperialism had a decidedly Wilsonian bend for most of the 20th century. It was too busy saving the world rather than conquering it (except, again, South of the Border). When the Soviet Union fell, it looked as if America’s job as world’s sheriff was done. Finally, the West’s trillions could be invested in something more constructive than missiles and fearmongers’ dividends. Sure enough, Pentagon budgets quit sprawling under Bill Clinton.

Conservatives panicked. For lack of war’s distortions on national purpose — the phonier the war, the greater the distortions — peace tends to rouse social consciences, and with them police truncheons (on labor in the 1920s, blacks in the ’50s, students and women in the ’60s, anti-globalists in the ’90s). Peace isn’t good for certain trades, imperial power and aimless leadership among them. For all his personal foibles, Gladstone was a great leader and reformer, and a critic of Britain’s colonial brutality under Benjamin Disraeli. Our street-walker for democracy has none of Gladstone’s qualities and all of Disraeli’s defects. Until the latter days of 2001, President Bush’s skeletal talents for peacetime democracy were creaking out of the closet and down the ravine of opinion polls. He was a Hoover in the making (the president or the vacuum, your pick). Osama bin Laden to the rescue. His one-hit wonder on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did wonders for a presidency looking for salvation. And the most imperial presidency in the nation’s history was off on its wolves’ hunt, with democracy for a battle flag.
commondreams.org

Well, in addition to the crimes in the Caribbean and Latin America, there was also Iran in 1953 and Congo in 1960…