business as usual

Today the United Nations adopted a landmark decision outlining the rights of the worlds estimated 370 million indigenous people and outlawing crimes against them.....
however there was 4 votes against the declaration those votes coming from Canada, US, New Zealand, and Australia.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0709/S00333.htm


those complete bastards. each 1 of these 4 countries have huge aboriginal populations in their "borders" who are fighting for their survival. an easy easy step in helping stop the destruction of these cultures, traditions and the people and also a step that would help us get our own cultures, tradition and lives back on more of a smoother track would have been to vote YES.

not surprising for countries who are currently on the other side of the planet completely outright destroying more cultures, traditions and peoples with very brutal means. then these countries (and their media who are the real culprits) find certain stories in which they can "sensationalize" to try to make us all feel good about ourselves even though we have completely completely destroyed another country.


link and story taken from the boys to the north in PROPAGANDHI
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/09/12/youssif.arrives/index.html

Naomi Klein and Montreal

so i just came back from seeing naomi klein speak here at concordia university in montreal.

the talk was on her new book entitled "the shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism"

heres a little re-cap:

in the early 90s you had new market capitalism, in the late 90s we had the dot com markets/capitalism, and in now days we have a new form of capitalism which is rightfully named disaster capitalism. capitalism which feeds and gets its life off of disasters. hurricanes, tsunami's, floods, wars and in the same family terror attacks.

it was pointed out as well that the dot com'ers of the 90s at the time were there to give us our freedom, help give us more access to things and expand our technological world. now in the current climate these tech industries have switched gears and instead of giving us things as such have now turned into a sort of security apparatus, surveillance system.

another thing ms klein pointed out and which i found very interesting was that in the early 50s there were experiments conducted right here in montreal at mcgill university in which "scientists"/"psychologists" tried to erase peoples minds through electro shock treatment, drugs and many other forms of mind bending techniques. all these experiments and their outcomes would actually be all layed out in CIA manuals on torture and eventually used in the past/present/and future. these torture techniques all started here in montreal.

it was a really good talk and it was amazing to be in a huge room which was sold out with like minded individuals.

montreal is seriously an amazing amazing city. the culture here and the people are beyond. the moment i drove up my street to my new house i could tell this was going to be an exciting chapter in my life. i could tell that evening from the energy on the streets and the energy in the air that this would be a fun fun ride.

ive only been here for a little over a week but i can see so many different things that i you wouldnt see at all south of the border or things that just happen differently.
so many examples. yes i am new so im sure living here for a couple years these things wont stick out as much but at the moment they do.
there are a couple free vegan lunches/ dinners that happen daily here in the city. free!! of course they do ask for a donation.
every sunday there is a HUGE (i mean HUGE) gathering at the mont royal park where people gather to spend the day in the sun, dance, play music, drum circles, smoke some refer, drink some beers and just relax. i went this past sunday and there were probably around 5000 people.

Media Consolidation

For your information.
Rupert Murdoch-media mogul- (Fox News, Myspace and many many others) has just recently taken over the Wall Street Journal, and the Dow Jones.

Greenpeace Q&A on Alberta Tar Sands

Questions and answers about the Alberta Tar Sands
27 July 2007
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Greenpeace has started a campaign to oppose the unsustainable development of the Alberta Tar Sands. We are keeping the larger details of the campaign under wraps for now, but Geeta Sehgal, one of our new campaigners, answered a few of our questions about what's going on in the Alberta Tar Sands.

1) What are tar sands?

2) Where are they in Canada? Around the world?

3) Why are tar sands worse than conventional oil extraction?

4) How much do the tar sands contribute to Canada's greenhouse gas emissions?

5) What stage of development are the tar sands at now?

6) What do the tar sands mean for Canada's commitment to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change?

7) Why is Canada exploiting the tar sands now? Do we need the energy?

1) What are tar sands?

Tar sands are a mixture of sand, clay, and a very heavy crude oil called bitumen, which is tar-like and does not flow on its own. To get the oil out of the ground, trees are cut down, the surface layer is strip-mined, and the underlying mixture is heated with steam in order to make it flow. Because the bitumen is very low quality, it is then processed and refined to turn it into synthetic crude oil which can be used as fuel.

2) Where are they in Canada? Around the world?

The largest reserves of accessible tar sands are located in Northern Alberta, Canada, amidst pristine, untouched wilderness and under millions of hectares of boreal forest. The closest town is Fort McMurray, and there are a number of small communities located downstream from tar sands projects, where residents are suffering from the effects of pollution caused by the tar sands. Large tar sands deposits are also located in the Orinoco oil belt in Venezuela, as well as smaller deposits in the Middle East and the United States.

3) Why are tar sands worse than conventional oil extraction?

It takes immense quantities of water, and huge amounts of dirty energy to create the steam needed to get oil out of tar sands, and processing the bitumen requires the use of even more dirty energy. But exploiting the tar sands goes farther than simply using up water, electricity, coal and natural gas. The air is polluted with nitrogen oxides and sulphur dioxide, water is contaminated with toxic chemicals, and millions of hectares of wilderness are being destroyed.

4) How much do the tar sands contribute to Canada's greenhouse gas emissions?

Oil from the tar sands produces five times as many greenhouse gas emissions as conventional oil. Annual greenhouse gas emissions from tar sands plants in 2007 are expected to be 39.3-41.4 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, and it is estimated that by 2011, annual greenhouse gas emissions from the tar sands plants alone will be over 80 million tones of CO2 equivalent - a greater quantity of emissions than that produced by all of Canada's passenger cars today.

5) What stage of development are the tar sands at now?

There are over 3200 tar sands lease agreements in place right now, covering an area larger than Vancouver Island, and governments and the oil industry are constantly working to increase this number. Licenses are in place to divert 349 million m3 of water per year out of the Athabasca River. The area that can potentially be leased includes almost 150,000 km2 of boreal forest - an area larger than the state of Florida, and double the size of New Brunswick. Existing tar sands operations produce just over one million barrels per day. and these are causing plenty of damage. Up to five barrels of water are needed to extract each barrel of bitumen, and 500 - 1000 cubic feet of natural gas to produce a barrel of crude oil. The amount of water in the Athabasca River has been noticeably depleted, fish in Lake Athabasca are reported to have strange tumours and mutations, and people living in downstream communities are suffering from higher rates of cancer and diseases like multiple sclerosis. Massive amounts of nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, volatile organic compounds and particulate matter are also being released into the air by the processing of the tar sands; these substances are known to cause respiratory problems and cancers.

6) What do the tar sands mean for Canada's commitment to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change?

Canada will be unable to meet its Kyoto commitments if the tar sands continue to operate. We need to reduce our emissions by about 280 million tonnes per year in order to meet Kyoto requirements. The tar sands are emitting around 40 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year at present, and will probably double to about 80 million tonnes per year by 2011. This will make it impossible to live up to our Kyoto commitments.

7) Why is Canada exploiting the tar sands now? Do we need the energy?

Most of the oil produced by the tar sands goes to the United States. Americans appreciate having a "secure" source of energy on the North American continent so that they can attempt to reduce their dependence on oil from the Middle East. We don't really need the energy, but because of our inefficient transportation systems we sure use up a lot of it! Canada could have exploited the tar sands a long time ago, but chose not to because oil prices were low and production prices were high, meaning that oil companies couldn't make very big profits. Over the past few years, oil prices have gone up and technology has changed to allow companies to get the oil out more cheaply. The Alberta government also gives oil companies a huge incentive to exploit the tar sands: low royalty rates that mean the corporations get to keep most of the profits, even though they're destroying land that belongs to Albertans.

so i just saw this ad "pop up" on my little internerd browser.
the ad was for a band named STRATA.
never hear of them in my life. and never will. i could already tell by the style of the ad that i would truly loose my mind if i listened to such a band.
this is the ad
"watch the new strata video "cocaine" and win a free i-phone"

hopefully there is a life ending device in this phone for the winners(or losers. depends on how you look at it)

The Churchill Firing

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/07/30/witherspoon


The Churchill Firing — II
By Gary Witherspoon
Many conservatives believe the firing of University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill will now reduce liberal politics in academia. Many liberals believe that his firing will uphold high standards of academic scholarship. Both are wrong — because the firing of Churchill reveals a very pernicious kind of exclusionary dogmatism in scholarly research and writing and media reporting. The firing of Professor Churchill for alleged research misconduct ignored evidence to the contrary provided by professors who know his work best, ignored evidence from a committee of scholars who found the investigating committee itself guilty of research misconduct, and ignored all Indigenous evidence and perspectives that are critical of Eurocentric versions of the history of the European invasion of the Americas.

Research misconduct is in the eye of the beholder. Euroamerican teachers and scholars have taught and written for several centuries that Columbus discovered America. That is a more profound and easily provable case of research misconduct than anything of which Churchill has been accused. The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been here at least 13,000 years and more likely, according to recent DNA research, 50,000 years. This Columbus lie, which is at the foundation of Eurocentric American history, dehumanizes all those who are now called American Indians by discrediting any of their accomplishments as not being human accomplishments. Everyone who has perpetuated this myth over the years should be found guilty of deceit, research misconduct and racism, according to the standards of the investigating committee.

The 1987 edition of the standard American history textbook, American History: A Survey begins by saying, “For thousands of centuries — centuries in which human races were evolving, forming communities and building the beginnings of national civilizations in Africa, Asia and Europe — the continents we know as the Americas stood empty of mankind and its works” The book informed its readers that American history “is the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed.” Now that is a very egregious form of “research misconduct.” That statement bears no resemblance to the truth and serves only to continue to misinform and to indoctrinate students in Eurocentric lies.

The committee should have read the 2005 national best selling book 1491, by Charles Mann, for a thorough critique of the statements quoted in American History, and for extensive support for Churchill’s arguments about the history of the Americas. Summarizing research and writing over the last 30-40 years, Mann shows that in 1491 the population of the Americas surpassed that of Europe, that American cities such as Tenochtitlan were larger than any found in Europe at the same time and, unlike European cities, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens and clean streets. I would add that nowhere in Indigenous America in the areas of my research (North and Central America) have any jails been found, so far as I have been able to determine. The earliest American cities were thriving before the Egyptians built their pyramids, and the feats of Indigenous American agriculture were unparalleled anywhere else. The journal Science recently pronounced the development of corn from its ancient noble grass ancestors as probably the greatest botanical achievement of genetic engineering in human history.

The European invasion of the Americas reduced an Indigenous population estimated by many scholars at nearly 100 million or more by 90-95 percent. Shelburne Cook and Woodrow Borah of the University of California at Berkeley spent decades reconstructing the aboriginal population of central Mexico where they determined the population to have been 25.2 million before Cortez’s invasion. Just 100 years later in 1623 only 700,000 had survived the Spanish conquest which destroyed not only millions of people but amazing architecture, art, culture and science, burning nearly all the books in their extensive libraries. The highly regarded historian Richard White has described the results of the invasion of Indigenous America as “the greatest human catastrophe in the history of the planet.”

Most people think the Churchill problem began with his planned speech in 2005 at Hamilton College — after it was shown that he had written that some of the victims of 9/11 were not entirely innocent (CIA agents housed in the building and some technocrats of Western militarism and financial imperialism according to Churchill’s clarification of what he meant in a later press release) and were instead akin to “little Eichmanns.” My essay is not intended to discuss the appropriateness or validity of his statement or its clarification, but to discuss the attack on Churchill from the perspectives, perceptions and practices of research misconduct as they apply to American history and American Indians. The truth about the beginning of the Churchill controversy is that it began with the right wing attack on Churchill after Churchill and others protested a Columbus Day parade in Denver in October 2004.

The Historical Context

It should be pointed out here that in 1861 Cheyenne leader Black Kettle had been invited to Fort Lyon to negotiate a peace with the the United States. He did so, ceding much of Cheyenne territory to the U.S. and agreeing to live south of Sand Creek. The Cheyenne were given a U.S. flag that they were told they should raise whenever threatened and no one would attack them. In 1864, the Reverend Colonel Chivington led 800 troops of Colorado territorial militia in an unprovoked attack on a sleeping village of mostly women and children at Sand Creek (the younger men were out hunting). The villagers raised the U.S. flag as a sign of peace, but Chivington wanted genocide, massacring the village of 53 older men and 110 women and children, mutilating the bodies of the Cheyenne villagers. They took the Cheyenne scalps and genitalia back to Denver, marching down the streets with Indian genitalia held up on sticks, celebrating their genocidal trophies and their evidence that Indians would never again be able to reproduce.

In 1864 The Rocky Mountain News, one of the Denver papers that convicted Churchill in the press and called for his termination, described the massacre of 110 women and children and 53 older men by 800 Colorado volunteers this way: “Among the brilliant feats of arms in Indian warfare, the recent campaign of our Colorado volunteers will stand in history with few rivals, and none to exceed it in final results.... Among the killed were all the Cheyenne chiefs, Black Kettle, White Antelope, Little Robe, Left Hand, Knock Knee, One Eye, and another, name unknown. Not a single prominent man of the tribe remains, and the tribe itself is almost annihilated.... All acquitted themselves well, and Colorado soldiers have again covered themselves with glory.” History has shown the account of this massacre to be a gross case of research and journalistic misconduct.

One historian called Sand Creek the American My Lai. Former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell called Sand Creek “one of the most disgraceful moments of American history.”

One of the participants in this massacre was David Nichols who was honored by the University of Colorado by having a dormitory on campus named after him. In the 1980s my daughter and other First Nations students at UC protested this name, and the name was eventually changed in 1989 to Cheyenne Arapaho Hall. This local history is not irrelevant to understanding how Colorado to understanding the protests of the Columbus Day parades in Denver, and how Colorado has dealt with Churchill his termination or extermination.

Angry over the acquittal of Churchill and the other protesters of the Columbus Day parade, the right wing searched Churchill’s writing for something with which they could destroy him. That is when they found and publicized his comment, written in 2001, about some victims of 9/11 not being totally innocent. Later they discovered that it would be difficult to fire him on the grounds of his unpopular essay, so they went after his scholarship, looking for something they could call “research misconduct.” Forty-four pages in the “official investigation” (or shall we call it an inquisition) are devoted to trying to disprove Churchill’s contention that U.S. agents deliberately gave Indians small pox invested blankets in 1837-1840, while this represents only three paragraphs in any of Churchill’s 12 books and represents less than a thousandth of one percent of the genocide inflicted on Indigenous peoples. This attack on his position is all done from Eurocentric perspectives, biases and paradigms, totally discounting Indigenous perspectives and oral traditions. Yet universities like Colorado hypocritically claim to support and cherish diversity and dissent while denying validity to non-Euroamerican perspectives and traditions.

University officials said their deliberations did not consider Churchill’s essay about the causes of the 9/11 attack in which a short phrase found in one sentence has been used to indict and convict Churchill in the press. That position is, to say the least, not credible, and is being put forth simply to position the university in the upcoming court battle. Churchill’s attorney, David Lane, says that in order to show that Churchill’s First Amendment rights were violated all he has to do is show that Churchill’s unpopular phrase in that essay was a factor in his dismissal, not the whole cause. Everyone knows that without the publicity surrounding that phrase promoted by the right wing, there would never have been any investigation of his scholarship, which in the previous 30 years the university had found exemplary and worthy of promotion and reward.

Those who deny or ignore the American Holocaust are not being investigated. The scholars and journalists who perpetuate the Eurocentric biases disguised as American history are not being investigated for research misconduct, and are not being fired from their teaching or their positions in the media. The protestations of the university about preserving academic and research integrity ring hollow. The firing of Churchill is itself a form of research misconduct and represents a clear attempt by the right wing to silence Indigenous perspectives and to deny the American Holocaust.

Gary Witherspoon is a professor of anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Washington.

Ward Churchill Interview

a good interview with Ward Churchill from the msnbc website


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20001571/site/newsweek/page/0/