Artist spotlight: 'She creates'

Mumbai: The world will watch as She Creates ...

In the spirit of Gandhi Jayanti, please join us for the first screening of the 5 films made by 25 girls from Dharavi slums to private schools who came together to make a difference through films. What started as an experiment, resulted in heartfelt short films on girl child issues.

On 2nd October MAM Movies invite you all to witness their little dreams taking shape in the big screen.

The girls attended workshops in film making, so that they could create these stories. Some are about themselves, some are about their family, their neighbours, their nightmares, and their dreams to rise above these...

 

"Transplant tourism" and offshore organ transplants

Organ transplants move offshore as patients pursue "transplant tourism"

Wednesday, September 19, 2007 by: David Gutierrez

 

(NewsTarget) The United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO) has expressed concern over a dramatic rise in the incidence of "transplant tourism," in which wealthier medical patients -- usually from First World countries -- travel to poor countries for transplants from people who have been persuaded to trade their organs for money.

According to Luc Noel of the WHO's health technology and pharmaceuticals unit, the prevalence of transplant tourism has increased over the past 10 years to the point where it accounted for five to 10 percent of worldwide kidney transplants in 2005.

Poor people in countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and the Philippines are commonly convinced by organ brokers to sell their body parts.

"There are villages that are in the poorer parts of Pakistan where as many as 40 to 50 percent of the population of the village we know only has one kidney," said Farhat Moazam of the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation in Karachi, Pakistan. While organ donors may be promised as much is 150,000 rupees ($2,500), she said, the amount they see may be drastically lower once brokers' fees and medical costs are deducted.

In addition, many such donors do not receive the needed follow-up care after their major surgery, which often leads to serious health complications.

According to Jeremy Chapman, a doctor at Westmead Hospital in Sydney, Australia, advances in surgical techniques have led to an explosion in the demand for organ transplants. This, in turn, has led to a shortage of organs, most of which are donated by people only after their deaths. If a living relative is not available to donate the needed organ, many people are now turning to other countries to find what they want.

"The wealthy, in search of their own survival, will sometimes seek organs from the poor," Chapman said, summing up the troubling dynamic.

In response to this trend, the WHO has recommended stricter international rules on organ donation and transplantation.

 

 

Open Letters to George W. Bush

Letters to the president from his ardent admirer Belacqua Jones

 

Dear George,

 

Two words explain why victory is ours in Iraq: pathological rationalism. This dynamic allows us to pursue a linear course of action driven by a series of if/then constructions that move us forward regardless of the consequences of these actions. Translation: staying the course no matter how deep the shit is.

 

Take Iraq. The logic of it all sings. Controlling oil in the Middle East is a matter of national security. We lost a client state when the Iranian revolution swept the shah out of office. So when the Neocons came to power, it seemed only logical to replace Iran with Iraq, especially since between the first gulf war and our draconian sanctions, the regime was too weak to stand. A cakewalk, as one sage put it.

 

And, what the hell, while we were at it, why not democratize and secularize the whole region, another cakewalk for the world’s sole surviving superpower.

 

It is a basic precept of pathological rationalism that once an action is initiated, it continues even if all the premises upon which the action was based turn out to be wrong. And when it came to Iraq, they were about as dead wrong as you could get. 

 

But, that doesn’t matter. It is far better to bleed slowly to death than to lose face by admitting a mistake. 

 

Besides, as a western democracy we are entitled to take whatever we want because the purity of our motives are always above reproach regardless of our actions. Columbus established this precedence when he Christianized the natives by enslaving them. 

 

It’s only right. We are rational; they are irrational. We practice the serene violence of the civilized; they practice the savage violence of the barbarian. We practice policy while they practice passion.

 

Policy is the sand we spread to absorb and conceal the pools of blood we leave in our wake. Madness poured into the mold of policy is no longer madness. As policy, madness becomes clarity of vision as seen through the opaque lens of ideology.

 

The reason you have christened this The Long War is because we will plod on and on until we have shed so much blood that we finally see a return on our success, no matter how small or insignificant that success is. 

 

To the pathologically rational mind, whatever is posited is. A policy promulgated defines reality and in doing so transcends the grim, unpredictable concreteness of fire, earth, water and air as it orbits in the ethereal realm of fantasy where all is well that ends well.

 

Your admirer,

Belacqua Jones

 

[ Link ]

Floating Utopias

"...A parable from seasteading’s past goes some way in explaining. In 1971, millionaire property developer Michael Oliver attempted to establish the Republic of Minerva on a small South Pacific sand atoll. It was soon off-handedly annexed by Tonga, and, in a traumatic actualized metaphor, allowed to dissolve back into the sea. To defeat the predatory outreach of nations and tides, it is clearly not enough to be offshore: True freedom floats..."

 

[ full article ]

A recent article on mind control as hypnotism

"...Hypnotism is where one person wilfully imposes part of his consciousness directly into the brain of his subject in order to disconnect conscious awareness from the body. It is a psychic attack. Entry is usually through the eyes but can also be pushed down the ear canals into the centre of the brain displacing the aetheric spark in the pituitary/pineal.

Even if the subject is willing to be put to sleep for some perceived gain such as the desire to stop smoking, on a spiritual level the disruption of the connection between the soul and body is a violation of spiritual principle.

Self hypnosis is where the hypnotist and the subject are the same person and that person wilfully disconnects from source. This opens the physical mind and body to astral psychic parasitic entities and whatever other influences are prevailing at the time.

All drugs that disconnect the body from the soul and chemically induce the same state as hypnosis violate the spiritual connection. Many of these drugs are called hypnotics.

Electro-magnetic frequencies that alter or block wakefulness or induce "suggestibility" are violating the sanctity of self guided thought. These frequencies are most often associated with television and cell-phones. It has long been recognized that television lulls people into a semi-comatose state within minutes.

Implants such as RFID tags and nanotechnology work at frequencies that block the lifestream flowing from the spiritual source. Weakening the body and clouding the mind these silicon motes induce a stupor and the body becomes a bio-machine. This too is a hypnotic state.

The use of hypnotism to cause people to become trance channellers promotes the idea that answers come from outside self or disconnected from the divine source. All too often the channelled entity is an astral parasite as the channeller is drained of energy.

Edgar Cayce shortened his life by channelling. That is one of his predictions that did come true.

Connecting to source energizes the mind, body and spirit .

The promotion of trance channelling is part of the age old agenda of debilitating humanity. It pushes the belief that all answers are gained through disconnecting one's own conscious awareness. Mediumship is the message of breaking the life-line to the higher self.

The solution to the problem of the widespread use of hypnosis is to reconnect to source. Many are achieving higher energy levels through prayer. Many are finding answers in nature walks. Many are finding source through grounding the consciousness during meditation. Many have found source and are infused with energy..."

 

[ full article ]

El Boom: class curriculum in 'the magical, marvelous real'

Abracadabra.

This word of medieval magic is traced to a mythical Persian sun god, summoned to the magician's aid. But also, in numerology its letters add to 365, so that it encompasses the entire year, and the powers of the 365 attendant spirits of the Lord. It is not a corruption of the Cabalistic Hebrew habraha dabar, bless the object.

***

This course will, essentially, attempt an understanding of the literature termed "magical realism," or lo real maravilloso, translated literally from the Spanish as "the marvelous real."

Further, the course will be a half-reading, half-writing , half-discussion class. Since this is a course for writers, examination will consist of testing both the literature and ourselves by responding with creative and interesting writing. We will do this to better understand and show how the literature provokes. We will not set out to imitate the literature, but to widen the road--to find something in this literature of and for ourselves, and to move in that direction.

I will ask as prerequisites a substantial literature background and, at very least, two creative writing courses, including an advanced creative writing class--fiction, poetry, or drama.

Each member of the class will be responsible for the reading list, one book not on the list, and the extra book's author--or a topic related to that book.  I'll ask that you prepare a short report on both the extra book and its author for the class. I will provide a separate list of these books from which to choose.  All readings will be in English, though some of you may choose to explore the original languages. The course will cover some North American and Eastern European works, but Latin/South American writers will constitute the majority. We will also look to some early influences on this literature, particularly Surrealism and Dada.

In a word, this will be a class in "el boom." (This is not to be confused with John Lee Hooker, who just recently passed away, and his fine song "Boom Boom," memorable in its own right for its uncompromising lyric: "Boom boom boom boom, boom boom boom boom....")  This is the recent Literature of, and a Welcome to, the New World.

Try this as a starting point: Monday, Sunday, Saturday, Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday.

You know the words, and you know the pattern. But listening to these words backward: If that shakes us up, if that surprises us, imagine what else might be possible--all in the middle of what is absolutely familiar.

If we assign only names and not numbers to the days of the week, if we do not get older, or younger, but simply see Monday again, we have some new sense of time--still ordered, but moveable in more than one direction. Looked at this way, in this particular order above, what is routine or mundane starts to look odd, almost misspelled, and not so easy to say. Time is for those who have watches, and look there. Or Time is for those who notice things, and look there.  Time as quantity or quality--this is a new way to think about time.  It's things like this that we'll be discussing.

So begins the adventure of the New, made of what is Old. Magic, maybe, out of the regular. The magical, the marvelous, real. Or, the more or less real: approximate reality, heavy on the leeway. Reality driving down the leeway freeway. It is all in where we look, and even more so in the value we assign to that glance.

Don't worry, or think that you are lost. It's too late. In these worlds, you are never lost, because to be lost you need to know where you have been, which may not be where you thought. You will not--cannot--get lost; you will, simply, always be somewhere. Perhaps this requires a new kind of patience; but, its reward, too, is a new kind of seeing. This is the equation of writers. This is the best poem, the best part of the story, the strongest moment in a play: being somewhere.

Our job, out of all of this, will be simple. Our plan will be to find movement in standing still. This will be a wonderful class.

 

[ Link ]

Operation AJAX, and the Begining of the National Security State

The CIA in Iran from Policy to Coup

 

"... Operation AJAX, represents more than a single foreign policy decision, but rather a paradigm shift away from democracy, congressional oversight, and transparency of government, toward secret policy and covert actions carried out by the executive branch and the national security apparatus.
The plot to overthrow the Mossedegh government in Iran originated within the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and in the fall of 1952, SIS meet with CIA’s Near East and Africa Division (NEA) representatives in Washington. Iran was not on the agenda, but after British intelligence brought up the possibility of a “joint political action to remove Prime Minister Mossedegh,” the NEA committed to studying the proposals

 

[ ... ]

Another good example of the limited knowledge about Operation AJAX within the U.S. government is a State Department memo entitled “Proposed Course of Action with Respects to Iran” detail diplomatic strategies to end the oil crisis in Iran. The memo that is dated August 10th 1953, was issued just 9 days before Mossedegh was overthrown, and indicates that many within the State Department were in the dark on what was going on in Iran.
Operation AJAX, though a CIA operation, had Ambassador Loy Henderson, and General H. Norman Schwartzkopf, playing critical roles.

The U.S. embassy in Tehran was utilized for a number of purposes as AJAX unfolded. The current Iranian administration has published a total of 77 volumes of “Documents from the Den of Spies” since the student take over the U.S. Embassy in 1979, offered up a huge cache of classified documents showing clandestine operations were centered in and around the Embassy.
Schwartzkopf was brought in to pressure the Shah, with whom he had an excellent relationship during WWII, into signing the firmans, royal decrees, one to dismiss Mossedegh and one to appoint Gen. Zahedi (Roosevelt 147-149). The military played other supporting roles from transportation of agents, to making clandestine approaches to number of ‘operational assets.’
The CIA’s own history of the affair mentions that the possibility that ‘blowback’ is likely to result from the overthrow of Mossedegh. The rise of the Shah and his brutal regime, secured by SAVAK, the secret police, which was created and supported by Israel and CIA (Roosevelt 9), surely contributed to the social tension that exploded in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. In the long run the CIA’s first overthrow was a mistake, but Operation AJAX became in many ways the blueprint for future covert operation carried out by the Agency in the Cold War and beyond. After Roosevelt debriefed the British government, including Winston, an SIS aid approached Roosevelt with a folder covered in ribbons and sealing wax, and told Roosevelt “that [the folder] represented approval of a project on which they had previously been turned down by the Foreign Office and that this reversal of the Foreign Office was due to the success in Iran

[ ... ]

Dr Donald Wilber, the author of the Clandestine Service History: Overthrow of Premier Mossedegh of Iran, and a key planner and strategist of Operation AJAX, as quoted by the New York Times, had this to say about Operation AJAX and its effect on subsequent CIA covert operations: “If this history had been read by the planners of the Bay of Pigs, there would have been no such operation,” and “in hindsight, one might wonder why no one from the Cuban desk ever…read the history ..."

 

[ full article ]

 

"There are no experts"

"... Perhaps the best oracles we can consult are systems analysts like Erwin Laszlo. Laszlo studies chaos theory and believes global civilization is a few years away from what he calls “the chaos point.” According to Laszlo, we are at a “crucial decision-window” of instability. “When we reach the point of chaos,” Laszlo tells us, “the stable ‘point’ and ‘periodic’ attractors of our systems will be joined by ‘chaotic’ or ‘strange’ attractors.” These “strange attractors” will propel us, like booster rockets, to evolutionary development or entropic debauch. In other words, we should prepare ourselves for the unknown and inexplicable.

[ ... ]

 

In Third World countries, currency crises — often brought about by predatory speculation — frequently lead to frozen bank accounts and long breadlines, followed by a change of currency that creates immense profit for the banks and the government. Of course, many believe that such a thing could never happen here. Recently, there have been rumors of a plan to form an American version of the European Federation, uniting Mexico, the U.S. and Canada under a new currency, the “Amero,” and a new constitution, devised by the bankers. ..."

 

Daniel Pinchbeck: 'The Almighty Amero'