Dear Kitty. Some blog

From Socialist Unity blog in Britain:

this picture shows the brother of some of those injured by a Hamas rocket, calling for an end to the Israeli military action. Second from the left in the picture is Ihab Orabi, a construction worker from Kufr Manda, who works with his brothers on a building site in the Israeli town of Ashkelon. Two of his brothers were injured on December 29th when a Hamas missile hit the construction site they were all working in. The slogan Ihab holds says: “workers pay the price of war”.

From Solidarity Magazine in Britain:

WAC-Maan: stop Israel’s war on Gaza

Arab Construction worker killed and 9 wounded as missile hits the Israeli city of Ashkelon on Monday

WAC-MAAN calls upon trade unions and the international labor movement to pressure their governments to stop Israel ’s war on Gaza

On Monday morning, Dec. 29, a Grad missile launched in Gaza hit a construction site in the Israeli city of Ashkelon . It killed Hani al Mahdi, 27 years old, from the Arab town of Aarara in the Negev . It also injured nine workers from the Arab village of Kufr Manda in Galilee.

These men, who were working to gain a decent life for their families, fell victim to Israel ’s war on Gaza, which started Saturday and has so far killed 300 in Gaza , as well as injuring 1000. Among the killed and wounded are many civilians.

Israel claims that it is defending its citizens in the South. But these people are working-class, and the government has shown by its policies that the lives and security of workers mean nothing to it: its priorities are with the rich.

WAC-MAAN, an independent trade-union association, has been active for many years in Kufr Manda. Many construction workers, including those who were injured on Monday, are members and supporters of WAC, which acts day and night to defend the rights of workers in Israel , especially Arabs.

We know from our members that they have to travel 200 kilometers each day, like the nine who were injured in Ashkelon, just to find a place that is willing to hire them. Their tenuous job situation has caused them, in recent years, to work without social benefits at sites that threaten their safety and health. The government encourages the formation of a “precarious work force” in order to help employers and investors.

The same government that started the present war has sent tens of thousands into unemployment, while destroying the social security net in accordance with its neoliberal agenda.

WAC-MAAN opposes the war on Gaza and calls for an immediate cease fire. After the war ends, we know, hundreds of thousands on both sides of the border will remain poor and unemployed. Palestinian workers are shut jobless behind the separation wall, while their families languish in poverty and hunger. Israeli workers, for their part, are starting to feel the pinch of the global financial crisis, with higher levels of unemployment and further attacks on earlier social gains.

The killing of Hani al Mahdi on Monday brings to mind the situation of 1.2 million Arab citizens of Israel , whom the establishment routinely brands as disloyal. In reality, half the Arab families here live below the poverty line, although the national average is 20%. They live in towns without infrastructure or job opportunities, a result of discriminatory policies implemented since Israel was established 60 years ago.

WAC-MAAN calls upon trade unions around the world to pressure their governments for action that will force Israel to end its brutal attack on the Palestinians in Gaza, stop its occupation of Palestinian lands and accept the right of the Palestinians to self determination and peace.

This video from the USA is called Must See Hilarious George Bush Bloopers.

By Michael Tomasky in British daily The Guardian:

Welcome to America’s hall of shame

From Sarah Palin to AIG’s pamper-hungry sales reps, the following characters have made us less than proud

Wednesday 31 December 2008

In at least one obvious way, 2008 was a pretty good year in my country. We made history in electing an African-American president. I and 67 million of my fellow citizens brought the era of conservative dominance to a thundering close. For those of us who’ve been told for eight years that we weren’t real Americans - liberals, urbanites, non-believers, cabernet-sippers, same-sex lovers, anti-war-mongerers, Volvo drivers - well, the tables have turned. We’re the real Americans now.

But ill winds still blew, and blow, across the republic. It being the duty of journalism to take the measure of these winds, I hereby dedicate my year-end column to ranking some of the worst Americans of the year. It started as a bottom 10 list, but consultations with various associates persuaded me that 10 was not enough, and further research suggested that a non-round and totally capricious number better suited the exercise. Herewith, the Tomasky List of the 19 Worst Americans of 2008.

19 E.D. Hill. Ms Hill is the Fox News anchor who referred to Barack and Michelle Obama’s on-stage fist bump in early June as a “terrorist fist jab“. I guess she’s well familiar with the various and sundry ways in which couples express intimacy - she’s been married three times herself. Fox announced in November that it wasn’t renewing her contract.

18 Don Blankenship. Who? He’s the head of a huge coal-mining company that is an industry leader, if one must put it that way, in so-called mountain-top removal mining. It’s a hideous practice that destroys mountains and communities, and Blankenship is its poster child. Our supreme court has agreed to hear a case in which Blankenship financed the election of a state judge who, in a $50m lawsuit, ruled for Blankenship’s company. Google Caperton v Massey, read more about Massey, and tell me if this fellow shouldn’t perhaps be even higher. …

10 The boys from AIG. Less than a week after the insurance giant received an $85bn federal bail-out, some AIG execs and sales reps spent $440,000 on a retreat at an exclusive resort, including $23,000 in spa charges. Well, they were under tremendous stress, you know. …

8 Dick Cheney. Just because. If he lives to be 99 - and he’s not as old as he looks: can you believe, for instance, that he’s younger than Ringo? - and I’m still doing this column, something tells me he’ll always find his way on the list. It’ll take that long to undo the damage he’s done to flag and country.

7 Steve Schmidt. John McCain didn’t make the list, but his chief campaign strategist has earned an indisputable spot. He displayed a rare combination of incompetence, tone-deafness and cynicism. He’s only as low as number eight because it didn’t work.

6 Joe Lieberman. It’s not that the Connecticut senator backed McCain. It’s the way he did it, the way he does everything - the self-regard, the pride, the arrogation to himself of some kind of moral authority that he in fact does not have any more (even if he once did, itself a debatable proposition). Don’t take it from me. Take it from his constituents, who ignored him to the tune of supporting Obama by a 22-point margin.

5 Michele Bachmann. Of the many memorable moments the campaign produced, I will never forget watching this Minnesota congresswoman say on national TV in October that Obama “may have anti-American views” and endorse the idea of a media investigation of all members of Congress to determine whether their views were sufficiently pro-American. The single most appalling political statement of the year. …

3 George Bush. There were years when he would have been higher - 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. I’ll give him a slight pass for 2001, what with the attacks and all that. In those previous years, he stole an election, started an unnecessary war, lied about it, approved torture, let a great US city drown and so on. This year he merely presided over the bankruptcy of the global economy. Twenty days and counting.

2 Sarah Palin. Does she really deserve to be this high? Never in my adult lifetime has one politician so perfectly embodied everything that is malign about my country: the proto-fascist nativism, the know-nothingism, the utterly cavalier lack of knowledge about the actual principles on which the country was founded. So, heck, you betcha she does! [See also here]

1 Bernard Madoff. It’s pronounced “made-off”. Could Dickens have named him better? Bilking people and institutions out of $50bn is a pretty surefire way to make yourself No 1 with a bullet on anyone’s year-end bad guys’ list.

Well, here’s to a better 2009, for America, the world, and you and yours. And keep yer nose clean.

• Michael Tomasky is editor of Guardian America.

By Dan Solin in the USA:

The Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme is generally regarded as the biggest financial scam of all time. I don’t agree.

Hedge funds, and particularly “fund of funds,” make Bernie’s despicable conduct look like small potatoes.

Lies on the Iraq war: here.

Worst coal ash spill in US history ruins huge area in Tennessee: here. And here.

From The Raw Story in the USA:

RNC mulls accusing Bush of ’socialism’

Nick Juliano

Published: Tuesday December 30, 2008

The divisions taking hold among Republicans are becoming more severe as the party prepares to accuse its outgoing president of embracing “socialism.”

The slur that conservatives were so fond of lobbing at Barack Obama during the presidential campaign is now being directed toward President Bush and GOP lawmakers who supported federal bailouts of the banking and auto industries. ..

Republican leaders in both the House and Senate supported the Wall Street bailout, and GOP presidential candidate John McCain infamously “suspended” his campaign to return to Washington and whip up support for the bill.

The socialism of the bailout of the big capitalist crooks in the USA is an extremely particular “socialism” between snigger quotes. It is socialism for the rich. For the financial base of the US Republican party.

Like the Iraq war and Bush’s other wars are also a form of “socialism for the rich”; as Big Oil, Big Weaponry, etc. profit from them and Joe Taxpayer pays for them. Well, these Republican cowards slavishly supported Bush and his wars for eight years. And now that Bush is almost out of the White House, they get “courageous” calling Bush the biggest insult in their vocabulary. Still not daring to mention those wars.

This is a hawfinch video from Italy.

Today, again to the cemetery.

Quite some siskins. A great tit.

Three hawfinches in the top of a tree. Until jackdaws came; then they flew away.

A male chaffinch. The sound of a nuthatch.

The temperature is below zero. In the old harbour there is much more ice than yesterday. An icicle just outside the window.

This Associated Press video says about itself:

Experts in China’s Liaoning province discovered a new species of dinosaur. They and their colleagues at Brazil’s National Museum in Rio De Janeiro believe the pterodactyl or flying reptile is one of the smallest ever found.

Pterosaurs are not really `dinosaurs`.

From British daily The Guardian

Dinosaur bones find is world’s biggest, says China

7,600 fossils about 100m years old discovered in Zhucheng

* David Stanway in Beijing
* Tuesday 30 December 2008

China claims to have found the world’s biggest deposit of dinosaur bones in the old city of Zhucheng in Shandong province on the country’s eastern coast.

Workers digging along a 300 metre slope on the outskirts of the city unearthed a densely packed layer of fossils that could be more than 100m years old. The state news agency Xinhua said that 7,600 samples had now been discovered, mostly dating from the late Cretaceous period, the era when dinosaurs are believed to have become extinct.

Zhucheng has become an important site for China’s dinosaur hunters, with the world’s largest remnant of the duck-billed hadrosaur discovered near the city more than 20 years ago. The city’s unique importance to the world of palaeontology emerged in 1964, when oil prospectors working for the state geological bureau stumbled on a collection of dinosaur fossils during a routine dig.

Xinhua said the new findings included the skull of a large ceratopsian, a beaked flying dinosaur, along with bones thought to belong to the club-tailed ankylosaurus.

A number of important fossil discoveries have been made in China from a wide range of geological ages, with the remains of oviraptors, sauropods, plateosaurs, stegasaurs [sic; stegosaurs] and hadrosaurs found in Mesozoic deposits stretching from Shandong in the east to Xinjiang in the remote west. The caudipterix, elaborately plumaged and believed to be the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds, is also one of the country’s most important discoveries.

Pterosaurs are not really `flying dinosaurs`.

Long-Necked Dinos Hung Their Heads: here. And here. And here.

The ankylosaur Edmontonia: here.

Estimating Impact Forces of Tail Club Strikes by Ankylosaurid Dinosaurs: here.

This music video says about itself:

The Sex Pistols studio video of Anarchy in the UK.

From British daily The Guardian:

Revealed: how the Sex Pistols shook Ireland

* Henry McDonald, Ireland correspondent
* Wednesday 31 December 2008

They raged against the Queen and the “fascist regime”, and noisily agitated for anarchy in the UK. But in the late 1970s the Sex Pistols were considered just as much of a threat to Ireland and its traditional Catholic moral values, it emerged yesterday, as state papers revealed the extent of official concern about the prime instigators of the punk revolution.

This video from Scotland says about itself:

A RED, RED ROSE by Robert Burns, sung by Andy M. Stewart

It’s one of the Bard of Scotland’s great poems, sung by Andy M. Stewart with Gerry Butler as Rabbie Burns. 18th and 19th century Scottish paintings and etchings were adapted as the background, and a number of actresses portray Burns’ wife and many loves. One can only hope that the movie about the life of Robert Burns will one day be made. If anyone can do it, Gerry Butler is the man.

From British daily The Guardian:

Burns was a republican fan of French revolution, says expert

Scottish literature professor claims that revered poet engaged in dangerous talk

* Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent
*Wednesday 31 December 2008

In the late 18th century, it was a dangerous idea, a political view that could entail deportation to the penal colonies. But the revered Scots poet Robert Burns was openly discussing republican sentiments in the last months of his life, risking punitive action for challenging the authority of the king, an expert in Scottish literature has found.

In a biography to mark the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth, Prof Robert Crawford of St Andrews University has unearthed new evidence which he believes is conclusive proof that Burns was a democrat who sympathised with the French revolution.

A private journal written by a contemporary of Burns records meeting the poet and a friend in Dumfries, two months before he died there in July 1796, aged 37. The diary by James Macdonald recalled: “They were both staunch republicans.” Crawford said this claim could have had explosive consequences for Burns: “It was dangerous to be called that then.”

At the time, the British aristocracy was extremely fearful about the risks of radical, democratic ideas spreading in Britain following the French revolution and of threats to George III’s life. Men such as Thomas Muir, the Scots political reformer, were being deported to the Botany Bay penal colony for sedition.

“Particularly towards the end of his life in the 1790s, democracy was a dirty word. It was a word associated with terrorism, a word which has just come into the English language; it’s associated with the terreur in France,” he said.

Crawford’s biography of Burns, The Bard, is published by Cape in the UK and Princeton in the US next month to coincide with more than 300 cultural and arts events being held across Scotland next year to mark the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth in Alloway, Ayrshire, on 25 January 1759.

See also here.

Scotland’s national poet Burns to be commemorated on stamp set: here.

This video from Ireland says about itself:

Footage of the 29 October 2008 demonstration at the Dail against the education cuts with a voice over of an anarchist leaflet distributed to the teachers, pupils and others at the demonstration in Dublin.

The economic crisis continues.

Year-end data shows deeper slump in US: here.

Irish banks bailed out as economy unravels: here.

This video is called TateShots: Cildo Meireles.

From British daily The Morning Star:

The art of experience

(Tuesday 30 December 2008)

EXHIBITION: Cildo Meireles
Tate Modern, London SE1

CHRISTINE LINDEY finds out how thought-provoking artist Cildo Meireles mixes fun, fear and meaning.

As crowds mass into Tate Modern’s Rothko exhibition, a smattering of people are being delighted by Cildo Meireles’s work across the hall.

He is less well known in part because he is Brazilian. Aware of US cultural hegemony, he points out that his political and ethical outlooks were formed outside the “cultures of plenty.”

Meireles was one of the pioneers of conceptual art in the late 1960s. Realising that the mass media so saturated our senses that we were learning to shut out rather seek out descriptive images, the artists challenged the limitations of art’s traditional paint and clay.

Inspired by the Dadaists, Surrealists and the loner Marcel Duchamp, conceptual artists claimed the freedom to use any material, object or process as a means of conveying meaning.

Their works would appeal to the mind as much as to the senses. Rather than depicting their experience, they would provide us with experiences. For some like Meireles, environments, multiples and actions were also a means of defying the capitalist art market.

Meireles was 16 years old when the military dictatorship seized power. “Political and social events steamrolled us,” he says.

In a country where people disappeared and feared to openly express dissent, he acted as a guerilla artist. Covertly opposing the regime, he made his Insertions Into Ideological Circuits 1970-1976, which defied censorship yet managed to reach a wide, undifferentiated public.

On bank notes, he printed messages such as “who killed Herzog?” - a journalist who had been tortured to death by the regime - and reinserted them into public circulation. To destroy them would be to destroy their monetary value.

Similarly, he printed political messages onto Coca-Cola bottles which were sold on a deposit system so that these too were subversively returned to circulation.

In Zero Cent (1978-84), a coin mimics a US dollar, but its numerical value is reduced to zero, while a Coca-Cola bottle replaces the image of Abraham Lincoln beneath the slogan “Liberty.” Tiny poetic objects that sum up the links between political and economic power. …

Conceptual art has been given a bad name by dry overintellectualising or by the derivative inanities of much Brit Art of the 1990s. If it intrigues but baffles you, Meireles may well dispel your reservations. He offers a rare blend of acute political engagement, aesthetic pleasure, imagination and wit. His poetic mind games allude to multilayered meanings without being unfathomable. Curated with intelligence and empathy, this comprehensive exhibition provokes thought while providing fun and joy.

Exhibition runs until January 11 and costs £7.80/£6.90 senior citizens/£5.90 concessions.

This video from the USA is called Domestic Military Policing - Incremental Step Towards “In Your Face Martial Law!”

From The Raw Story in the USA:

Report: Military may have to quell domestic violence from economic collapse

Deepening economic strife in the US could lead to civil unrest and violence that would require military intervention, warns a new report from the US Army War College.

“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” writes Nathan Freier, a 20-year Army veteran and visiting professor at the college.

A copy of the 44-page report, “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development,” can be downloaded here. Freier notes that his report expresses only his own views and does not represent US policy, but it’s certain that his recommendations have come before at least some Defense Department officials. …

Freier’s report has merited some concern as it comes alongside revelations that the Defense Department has assigned a full-time Army unit to be on-call for domestic deployment.