:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 9.23.2009 ::

:: Barack Obama puts Bush era behind him in UN general assembly speech
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Guardian.co.uk

Barack Obama put the Bush era decisively behind him today in a speech to the United Nations in which he rejected unilateralism in favour of countries working together to problems ranging from the Middle East to Iran and North Korea.

Obama, in his first address to the UN general assembly, pleaded he would need the support of other countries in tackling what described as the world's most intractable problems.

"Make no mistake: this cannot solely be America's endeavour. Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world can not now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone," said.

In contrast with Bush's speeches at the UN that were usually heard in sullen silence, Obama was greeted with two minutes of applause at the end of his 41-minute speech, as well as bursts of appreciation throughout.

But, in contrast with Obama's soaring rhetoric, the UN continues to be bedevilled by divisions and walk outs.

Among the 100-plus world leaders attending were the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, attending for the first time, and the Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chávez. European leaders included Gordon Brown, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the Italian president Silvio Berlusconi.

Highlighting the problems of Obama's call for unity, Ahmadinejad is threatened with a walk out when he delivers his speech because of his reiteration on Friday that there was no Holocaust. The Canadian prime minister, Stephen Carter, was among leaders who said his country would leave its seat empty.

Ahmadinejad, sitting in the fifth row, was among the few leaders not to applaud Obama. Gaddafi, also faced a walk out when he took to the podium immediately after Obama, mainly because of US anger over the release of the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

White House aides made sure that Obama and Gaddafi did not meet and all the members of the US delegation, other than a notetaker and an African specialist, left the chamber when the Libyan leader began a speech that lasted one hour and 40 minutes.

Obama, in the most sweeping foreign policy speech he has delivered since becoming president in January, set out four priorities are: nuclear non-proliferation, Middle East peace, climate change and addressing poverty among developing nations.

There were bursts of applause when he mentioned all these, and when he promised to close the Guantánamo detention centre and push to end the conflict in Sudan.

At the heart of his speech, he promised to work with the UN in a way that Bush had not: "The choice is ours. We can be remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of the 20th century into the 21st.... Or, we can be a generation that chooses to see the shoreline beyond the rough waters ahead; that comes together to serve the common interests of human beings, and finally gives meaning to the promise embedded in the name given to this institution: the United Nations."

Read more here.

Video of the speech.

posted by me

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:: FCC chief proposes new Net neutrality rules ::

by Marguerite Reardon
CNET News.com

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski on Monday outlined a plan to keep the Internet open.

In a speech given at the Brookings Institute, Genachowski proposed that the FCC turn its four principles of network openness official into regulation. And he suggested that the FCC add two more "principles" as part of these new rules.

The existing principles can be summarized this way: Network operators cannot prevent users from accessing lawful Internet content, applications, and services of their choice, nor can they prohibit users from attaching non-harmful devices to the network.

Now Genachowski is proposing two new principles. The first would prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management. The second principle would ensure that Internet access providers are transparent about the network management practices they implement.

Genachowski tried to alleviate fears that the FCC will overstep its bounds and create rules that hamper innovation.

"I am convinced that there are few goals more essential in the communications landscape than preserving and maintaining an open and robust Internet," he said. "I also know that achieving this goal will take an approach that is smart about technology, smart about markets, smart about law and policy, and smart about the lessons of history."

The debate over so-called Net neutrality began heating up about three years ago, when congressional leaders first held hearings on potential laws to ensure that Internet service providers couldn't monkey with traffic. There is no clear definition of the term "Net neutrality," but in general it refers to the concept that Internet users should have unfettered access to content and services. In other words, service providers should not be allowed to either impede or favor access to particular sites or applications.

The discovery that the nation's largest cable operator, Comcast, had slowed down certain kinds of peer-to-peer traffic on its network fanned the flames and sparked public outrage over such practices.

Read more here.

A L S O

Republicans to Push Against Net Neutrality
Washington Post

posted by me

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:: The Holy Grail of the Unconscious ::

By SARA CORBETT
NYT

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.

So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.

Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Bahnhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.

Read more about the publication of Jung's "Red Book" here.

A L S O

Carl Jung’s Red Book
PsychCentral

In his late 30s, Jung started writing a book called The Red Book. The Red Book is part journal, part mythological novel that takes the reader through Jung’s fantasies — hallucinations he self-induced to try and get to the core of his unconscious. And as a theorist, he wanted to document his 16-year journey, so he wrote down everything he experience, saw and felt.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

For decades, The Red Book has been wrapped in mystery, because it has never been published. It was thought that only one copy of the book existed — locked in a Swiss safe deposit box by the heirs to C.G. Jung’s estate.

As it turns out, however, copies of the book have been around if one searched hard enough to find them. A historian by the name of Sonu Shamdasani found said copies and after three years of discussions with the descendants of Jung, convinced the family to allow him access to the original to translate and finally publish it. The book will finally be published next month.

Read more here.

posted by me

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:: The Father Of the Green Revolution ::

By Joe Holley and J.Y. Smith
Washington Post

Norman E. Borlaug 1914-2009

Norman E. Borlaug, 95, an American plant pathologist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for starting the "Green Revolution" that dramatically increased food production in developing nations and saved countless people from starvation, died Saturday at his home in Dallas.

"More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world," the Nobel committee said in honoring him. "Dr. Borlaug has introduced a dynamic factor into our assessment of the future and its potential."

Edwin Price, director of the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture at Texas A&M University, said his mentor died of cancer. Since 1984, Dr. Borlaug had been a distinguished professor of international agriculture there.

Dr. Borlaug was barely known in the country of his birth. But in India, Mexico and other nations susceptible to hunger and famine, he was known as one of the great Americans of modern times. Price accompanied Dr. Borlaug to Russia, where he visited a wheat research institute south of Moscow. "When Norm came in," Price said, "the scientists at the institute all cried."

From the 1970s until his death, he increasingly took the politically incorrect view that environmentalists were hampering world food production by indiscriminately attacking the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

"They claim that the consumer is being poisoned out of existence by the current high-yielding systems of agricultural production and recommend we revert back to lower-yielding, so-called sustainable technologies," he said in a speech in New Orleans in 1993.

Unfortunately, he said, it is not possible to turn the clock back to the 1930s, when the population of the world was 2.2 billion. It was estimated at 5.6 billion in 1995 and was projected to rise to 8.3 billion by 2025.

Dr. Borlaug's career was defined on the one hand by the ability of science to increase food production at an exponential rate and on the other by the Malthusian nightmare of an exploding population outstripping its ability to feed itself. His work took him from the Iowa farm where he grew up to the primitively cultivated wheat fields of Mexico in the 1940s, the rice paddies of Asia in the 1960s and 1970s and to the savannas of Africa in the 1980s.
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In his lecture accepting the Nobel Prize, he said an adequate supply of food is "the first component of social justice. . . . Otherwise there will be no peace."

He warned that the world could wind up with too many mouths to feed, and he offered only guarded hope that "since man is potentially a rational being . . . he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers along the road of irresponsible population growth and will adjust the growth rate to levels which will permit a decent standard of living for all mankind."

posted by me

:: 3:04:00 PM [+] ::
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:: How 9/11 Should Be Remembered: The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People ::

By Rebecca Solnit
Tomdispatch.com
via Alternet

After 9/11, saw amazing acts of courage by ordinary people, including assembled flotilla of boats evacuated 300,000 to 500,000 people from lower Manhattan.

Eight years ago, 2,600 people lost their lives in Manhattan, and then several million people lost their story. The al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers did not defeat New Yorkers. It destroyed the buildings, contaminated the region, killed thousands, and disrupted the global economy, but it most assuredly did not conquer the citizenry. They were only defeated when their resilience was stolen from them by clichés, by the invisibility of what they accomplished that extraordinary morning, and by the very word "terrorism," which suggests that they, or we, were all terrified. The distortion, even obliteration, of what actually happened was a necessary precursor to launching the obscene response that culminated in a war on Iraq, a war we lost (even if some of us don't know that yet), and the loss of civil liberties and democratic principles that went with it.

Only We Can Terrorize Ourselves

For this eighth anniversary of that terrible day, the first post-Bush-era anniversary, let's remember what actually happened ...

Read more here.

A L S O

Obama marks 9/11 with memorial, call to service
AP

WASHINGTON — On his first 9/11 anniversary as president, Barack Obama urged Americans to come together in service just as they united after the terrorist attacks eight years ago.

"We can summon once more that ordinary goodness of America, to serve our communities, to strengthen our country and to better our world," Obama said at a memorial at the Pentagon.

Obama on Thursday declared the anniversary of the attacks a national day of remembrance and service. And he and first lady Michelle Obama led the way Friday, visiting a Habitat for Humanity construction site in Washington, where they pitched in by painting a living room wall.

Earlier, the Obamas participated in the anniversary rituals that have become familiar in the eight years since the attacks on New York and Washington. They began the day by observing a moment of silence on the South Lawn of the White House at precisely 8:46 a.m., the moment the first jetliner struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Nearly 200 White House staffers — from chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to kitchen workers — gathered under a heavy downpour. Moments before the president and first lady stepped outside, the rain subsided and it held off as they placed their hands over their hearts and bowed their heads.

After the Obamas walked back into the White House, the rain resumed.

As a presidential candidate, Obama marked last year's anniversary in New York at the site of the World Trade Center. This year, the commander in chief spoke at a Pentagon memorial service, and laid a wreath in honor of the 184 people who died there.

Read more here.

9/11 Remembered: Photos From The Day
Huffington Post

posted by me

:: 4:01:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Death in Texas, what a concept ::

Man convicted of murder, executed over arson that wasn't, scientist says

Faulty investigation of fire that killed 3 kids led to conviction, state-funded report concludes.
By Chuck Lindell
Austin American-Statesman

The fatal house fire that led Texas to execute Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004 was erroneously ruled to be arson by fire investigators who relied on bad science, unproven theories and personal bias, a state-funded analysis concludes.

The analysis, prepared by nationally known fire scientist Craig Beyler, raises the possibility that Willingham did not commit the crime for which he was executed, a 1991 fire that killed his three young children in the Corsicana house they shared.

Only Willingham escaped the burning house, and he insisted on his innocence until the moment of his death.

"I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do," he said while strapped to the execution-chamber gurney.

Beyler's report, requested by the Texas Forensic Science Commission, listed more than a dozen instances of improper analysis and mistaken conclusions provided by two fire officials during Willingham's capital murder trial.

Read more here.

A L S O

Did Texas execute an innocent man?
The New Yorker

posted by me

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:: Marred Afghan Vote Leaves US in a Delicate Spot ::

By MARK LANDLER and HELENE COOPER
NYT

WASHINGTON — On Monday, as the vote-counting in Afghanistan was nearing an end, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was briefed by the American ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry. The same day, the ambassador delivered a blunt message to the front-runner, President Hamid Karzai: “Don’t declare victory.”

The slim majority tentatively awarded Mr. Karzai in Afghanistan’s fraud-scarred election has put the Obama administration in an awkward spot: trying to balance its professed determination to investigate mounting allegations of corruption and vote-rigging while not utterly alienating the man who seems likely to remain the country’s leader for another five years.

Mrs. Clinton and Ambassador Eikenberry, senior administration officials said, wanted to prevent Mr. Karzai or his backers from pre-empting an outside investigation of allegations of irregularities in the Aug. 20 vote.

“We realize that the allegations have reached such a level that we need to be very careful to allow the process to breathe,” said an administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “The message was, Let’s make sure that the electoral bodies do their work, and do it rigorously.”

On Tuesday, the United Nations-backed commission that is the ultimate arbiter of the vote said it found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” at several polling stations and ordered a partial recount.

Read more here.

ALSO

A primer on Afghanistan's political situation, and the US role
LA Times

"As charges of election fraud surround Afghanistan's recent presidential vote, Obama is considering his next steps in that country. Here's some background, and what Obama faces."

ELSEWHERE

US warns Iran is nearing nuclear capabilities
AP

Mexican Jetliner Hijacked, Passengers Freed
Wall Street Journal

posted by me

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:: Trustafarian meets a 1960s band so obscure that their music is not even available on iTunes ::

Chuck Klosterman Repeats The Beatles
A.V. Club

Like most people, I was initially confused by EMI’s decision to release remastered versions of all 13 albums by the Liverpool pop group Beatles, a 1960s band so obscure that their music is not even available on iTunes. The entire proposition seems like a boondoggle. I mean, who is interested in old music? And who would want to listen to anything so inconveniently delivered on massive four-inch metal discs with sharp, dangerous edges? The answer: no one. When the box arrived in the mail, I briefly considered smashing the entire unopened collection with a ball-peen hammer and throwing it into the mouth of a lion. But then, against my better judgment, I arbitrarily decided to give this hippie shit an informal listen. And I gotta admit—I’m impressed. This band was mad prolific.

It is not easy to categorize the Beatles’ music; more than any other group, their sound can be described as “Beatlesque.” It’s akin to a combination of Badfinger, Oasis, Corner Shop, and everyother rock band that’s ever existed. The clandestine power derived from the autonomy of the group’s composition—each Beatle has his own distinct persona, even though their given names are almost impossible to remember. There was John Lennon (the mean one), Paul Stereo versionMcCartney (the hummus eater), George Harrison (the best dancer), and drummer Ringo Starr (The Cat). Even the most casual consumers will be overwhelmed by the level of invention and the degree of change displayed over their scant eight-year recording career, a span complicated by McCartney’s tragic 1966 death and the 1968 addition of Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono, a woman so beloved by the band that they requested her physical presence in the studio during the making of Let It Be.

There are 217 songs on this anthology, many of which seem like snippets of conversation between teenagers who spend an inordinate amount of time at the post office. The Beatles’ “long play” debut, Please Please Me, came in 1963, opening with a few rudimentary remarks from Mr. McCartney: “Well, she was just 17 / If you know what I mean.” If this is supposed to indicate that the female in question was born in 1946, then yes, we know exactly what you mean, Paul. If it means something else, I remain in the dark. These young, sensitive, genteel-yet-stalkerish Beatles sure did spend a lot of time thinking about girls. Virtually every song they wrote during this period focuses on the establishment and recognition of consensual romance, often through paper and quill (“P.S. I Love You”), sometimes by means of monosyllabic nonsense (“Love Me Do”), and occasionally through oral sex (“Please Please Me”). The intensely private Mr. Harrison asks a few coquettish questions two-thirds of the way through the opus (“Do You Want To Know A Secret”) before Mr. Lennon obliterates the back door with the greatest rock voice of all time, accidentally inventing Matthew Broderick’s career. There are a few bricks hither and yon (thanks for wasting 123 seconds of my precious life, Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow) but on balance, I have to give Please Please Me an A, despite the fact that it doesn’t really have a proper single.

Things get more interesting on With The Beatles, particularly for audiences who feel the hi-hat should be the dominant musical instrument on all musical recordings.

Read more here.

a l s o . . .

Come Together: Everybody Reviews the Beatles
NYT

Newly Discovered Recordings Reveal Beatles Actually Terrible Group
The Onion

Quote for the day:

"Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust."
~The Clash, London Calling

posted by me

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:: One giant slip in Bangladesh news ::

BBC

Two Bangladeshi newspapers have apologised after publishing an article taken from a satirical US website which claimed the Moon landings were faked.

The Daily Manab Zamin said US astronaut Neil Armstrong had shocked a news conference by saying he now knew it had been an "elaborate hoax".

Neither they nor the New Nation, which later picked up the story, realised the Onion was not a genuine news site.

Both have now apologised to their readers for not checking the story.

"We thought it was true so we printed it without checking," associate editor Hasanuzzuman Khan told the AFP news agency.

"We didn't know the Onion was not a real news site."

The article said Mr Armstrong had told a news conference he had been "forced to reconsider every single detail of the monumental journey after watching a few persuasive YouTube videos and reading several blog posts" by a conspiracy theorist.

"It took only a few hastily written paragraphs published by this passionate denier of mankind's so-called 'greatest technological achievement' for me to realise I had been living a lie," the fake article "quoted" Mr Armstrong as saying.

"The truth is that Neil Armstrong never gave such an interview. It was made up." ~Daily Manab Zamin

Read more here.

A L S O

Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked

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