MELLOW MARIJUANA

If you're grasping at stems, trying to drum up any "evil" in this popularly smoked flower, you might point to the corporatists' argument: the demon weed drains your ambition. No bad thing, you might say. Who wants to end up as a 'suit'?

For quite a lot of people [the fortunate ones?], in my experience, this appears true-ish. For many more people, this is demonstrably false.

But I'm indulging the paranoiacs, so let's say it's true universally. Does it affect a body's get-up-and-go more than video games, satellite teevee, or cheap bacon quintuple-cheeseburgers? Not in the least.

If you're predisposed to be lazy or to go all-out and embrace self-destruction, you don't need marijuana to help.

In fact, it probably sucks for the consciously lazy, because it sparks all kinds of creativity and neural growth in the brain which you'd have to smother with something genuinely harmful like alcohol.   more »

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans - members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen - rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq.

A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell’s presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk.

In it, Powell confidently rattled off his “evidence”: satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare.

The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled “Irrefutable” and declared that after Powell’s talk “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”   more »

The 1968 crowd had dreams - we are dealing with reality

The protests in France this month have led to riots in the streets and students occupying campuses for the first time since the late 60s. But what do they want? And what sets them apart from their hippy forebears? We talk to the leaders of the new French revolution.

Back in November, when the forests of tower blocks in the Paris suburbs were lit by rioters torching cars, Floréal Mangin woke each morning to count the blackened metal wrecks outside her bedroom window.

She watched the gangs of boys in tracksuits and hoods who were setting light to all they could find. They had grown up with her and some were in her class at school. "They were on self-destruct," she says.

"They were destroying their own neighbourhood, smashing their families' cars, but they had no other way of telling the world they existed."

Now Mangin, a slight 17-year-old in a sweatshirt with a cartoon on the front, is one of the organisers of a new youth rebellion in the suburbs beyond the moat of Paris's ring-road, where its poor and immigrant populations have been traditionally confined. And this time, they will not be ignored.   more »

There is no immigration crisis -- other than the one created by a small but vocal stripe of opportunist politicians, media demagogues and freelance xenophobes.

So it has always been throughout the history of this country when anti-immigrant hysteria periodically reigns during low ebbs in our national sense of security and vision.

The script is as old as the Mayflower: A false alarm is sounded that the values, wages and safety of the current roster of credentialed Americans are jeopardized by the "flood" or "tidal wave" or "river" sneaking across our porous borders.

Be they Irish, Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Mexican or even the freed slaves seeking to earn an honest living in Northern cities after the Civil War.

Any and all manner of societal problems are to be laid on these scapegoats, and the same simplistic solution offered: Find and deport them, and don't let any more in.   more »

WHY ISRAELI & SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID ARE SO SIMILAR

1]- Israel: The Apartheid Wall (which the government labels a "Security Wall") forces communities apart and unlawfully grabs land.

South Africa: Segregated Bantustans, officially (but falsely) called "Independent Homelands," forced millions of African blacks to be herded into artificial landlocked reserves.

2]- Israel: Jewish residents in West Jerusalem who need government services face a relatively short wait in air-conditioned comfort. In East Jerusalem, Palestinians begin queuing in the middle of the night, or pay someone else to do so, for a remote chance of being served.

Once the sun comes up, they wait for hours outside in the heat before an iron-grilled gate for what should be routine requests, such as; identity documents, birth registrations, death certificates, etc. They often go home empty-handed.

South Africa: In Johannesburg, whites, blacks and mixed-race "coloreds" were directed to separate entrances of government offices, such as the Home Affairs Ministry, and given service -- or not -- entirely according to their skin color.   more »

If you start looking at them as humans, then how are you gonna kill them?

They are a publicity nightmare for the US military: an ever-growing number of veterans of the Iraq conflict who are campaigning against the war. To mark the third anniversary of the invasion this month, a group of them marched on Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.

At a press conference in a cavernous Alabama warehouse, banners and posters are rolled out: "Abandon Iraq, not the Gulf coast!" A tall, white soldier steps forward in desert fatigues.

"I was in Iraq when Katrina happened and I watched US citizens being washed ashore in New Orleans," he says. "War is oppression: we could be setting up hospitals right here. America is war-addicted. America is neglecting its poor."

A black reporter from a Fox TV news affiliate, visibly stunned, whispers: "Wow! That guy's pretty opinionated."

Clearly such talk, even three years after the Iraq invasion, is still rare. This, after all, is the Deep South and this soldier less than a year ago was proudly serving his nation in Iraq.   more »

Blair’s good guy outer façade is so perfected that people around the world are genuinely bemused as to why he slavishly supports the Bush administration’s misadventures.

During my travels when people realise I’m British and the conversation turns to politics, I’m often asked why Blair chose that route.

A few years ago, my answer would have been on the lines of Blair having being dragged behind Washington kicking and screaming on the strength of the strong and historic trans-Atlantic relationship. I was wrong.

The fact is Blair is a cross between a neo-conservative and a member of the religious right in Labour’s clothing even at a time when many of the staunchest neo-conservatives and their supporters are undergoing a dramatic change of heart themselves.

Even Francis Fukuyama, a former neocon, sometimes credited for writing an essay that sent Bush to war, is saying mea culpa to any journalist who will listen.

Blair, however, is as passionate about the cause as ever. So, what exactly is the cause? The answer lies within Blair’s recent speech.

Unless we articulate a common global policy based on common values, we risk chaos threatening our stability, economic and political, though letting extremism, conflict or injustice go unchecked," he says. What he means, of course is that the world must adopt Western values or be damned.   more »

The overwhelming preoccupation of the Bush administration (and Blair for that matter) with Iraq, the Middle East and Islam, speaks of a failure to understand the deeper forces that are reshaping the world and an overriding obsession with realising and exploiting the US's temporary status as the sole global superpower.

Such a myopic view can only hasten the decline of the US as a global power, a process that has already started.

The Bush administration stands guilty of an extraordinary act of imperial overreach which has left the US more internationally isolated than ever before, seriously stretched financially, and guilty of neglect in east Asia and elsewhere.

Iraq was supposed to signal the US's new global might: in fact, it may well prove to be a harbinger of its decline. And that decline could be far more precipitous than anyone has previously reckoned.

Once the bubble of US power has been pricked, in a global context already tilting in other directions, it could deflate rather more quickly than has been imagined. Hyde's warnings should be taken seriously.   more »

29 MARCH

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