Month: January 2010

By Jonathan Liss

The Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Sunday rejected a bill proposed by MK Ahmed Tibi (Ra’am-Ta’al) proposing that the state enforce equal allocation of land to Jews and Arabs.

“Yet again, the Israeli government has proven that it is avoiding the principle of civil equality,” Tibi said in response to the ruling. “The same government which approved the selection bill of [Jewish] MKs David Rotem and Israel Hasson, ignores Arabs’ rights, and hasn’t approved the building of a new Arab village since 1948. The government failed at the challenge I placed before it, and that saddens me.”

The bill’s authors stressed the importance of it in an explanation to the committee.

“Since the foundation of the state, the Israel Lands Administration is solely used as Jewish land administration. The director of the Israel Lands Administration has used all the tactics, with the help of the Jewish Agency, to allocate state land only to Jews. Despite the bitter attempt over the decades, not even one Arab town has been established since the state’s foundation. Therefore a bill must be passed which stipulates that the Israel Lands Administration will serve all the state’s citizens without discrimination on religion or nationality, and will promise an equal allocation of land to better the Arab population of Israel.”

Haaretz for more

Laal presents “Meray Dil, Meray Musafir” dedicated to the Birth Centenary of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The music video is a new interpretation of Faiz’s iconic poem “Dil e Man, Musafir e Man”. While Faiz wrote this poem about exile, this video explores Marx’s concept of alienation within the context of modern industrial capitalism.

None of the individuals within the video are actors. Comrade Irfan plays his and his family’s shared experiences. In fact, every single role has been played by individuals who actually live these lives. The video was shot in the industrial areas of Lahore (Greentown, Multan Road, Defence Road, Ilaqa Nawab Sahib). Laal’s music is about real people and real struggles.

Inqalab Zindabad! (Long Live Revolution)

Laal: Meray Dil Meray Musafir
Poet: Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Composition / Arrangment: Taimur Rahman
Mixing / Mastering: Jamal Rahman
Direction: Taimur Rahman and Mahvash Waqar
Acting: Comrade Irfan, Raheela, Natasha, Tehseen, Touseef.

You Tube

Thanks to Asad Zaidi; his message: Happy New Year from Los Angeles Faiz Centennial Infinitive -2011

Dear Friends we are planning a Faiz Celebration in the Year 2011..please keep in touch! soon you will have program info!

By B. R. Gowani

Nature was unaware of 2009
And is oblivious 2010’s neigh

It knows not New Year’s Day
New Year’s Eve: No way

If it chose to observe
It wouldn’t have enough nerve

To choose Mercury’s 88-day year
Or Neptune’s 165-year year to cheer

Many unknown planets let’s not forget
In other galaxies not discovered yet

But for millions on this earth
New Year Eve’s ritual-mirth

That has its roots in the west
But now others also plan with zest

Those without means have no time
Others with time just mime

B. R. Gowani can be reached @brgowani@hotmail.com

Environmentalist Sunita Narain on US Climate Policy

As heads of state begin to arrive to the COP15 summit here in Copenhagen, the rift between rich and poor countries continues to widen. With less than three days to go, there is no final agreement or breakthrough on the future of the Kyoto Protocol, which industrialized nations, led by the United States, are seeking to dismantle. We speak with leading environmentalist and political activist from India, Sunita Narain. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Sunita Narain, leading Indian environmentalist and political activist. She is the director of the New Delhi, India-based Center for Science and Environment and editor of the magazine Down to Earth.

AMY GOODMAN: As heads of state begin to arrive at the COP15 summit here in Copenhagen, the rift between rich and poor countries continues to widen. On Tuesday, officials from China, India, Brazil and South Africa spoke out angrily after being pressured to sign a deal dictated by rich countries. With less than three days to go, there is no final agreement or breakthrough on the future of the Protocol—the Kyoto Protocol, which industrialized nations, led by the United States, are seeking to dismantle.

I’m joined now by a leading environmentalist and political activist from India. She’s the director of the New Delhi, India-based Center for Science and Environment and the editor of the magazine Down to Earth. In 1991, she co-authored the publication “Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism.” In a recent article, she writes, quote, “The inconvenient truth is not that climate change is real, but that confronting climate change is about sharing that growth between nations and people. The rich must reduce so that the poor can grow.” Sunita Narain, that’s her words.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!

SUNITA NARAIN: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: You have said this is the worst conference, is that right? The worst COP, conference of parties?

SUNITA NARAIN: Yeah. I don’t know, Amy. It could be that I’m getting old and that I just see this differently, but I was at Rio, I was at—in Berlin when the Berlin—

AMY GOODMAN: Rio was 1992.

SUNITA NARAIN: Ninety-two. I was in Berlin when the Berlin Mandate was set. That was ’95 when the Berlin Mandate was decided upon. I was in Kyoto when we talked about the Kyoto Protocol in end of 1997. And every conference had definitely difficulties. Definitely we’ve had difficulties between the North and the South. But I think the kind of distrust that you have at this meeting, the kind of bad organization that you have, the lack of process, the lack of transparency, the enormous effort there seems to be to somehow fix the deal—and that’s completely unacceptable. And I think, you know, if it’s the Danish government or if it’s the US government working with the Danish government, I think the only lesson to them is that they really cannot do this and get away.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is being lost right now? Explain, as hundred—more than a hundred heads of state come to Copenhagen.

SUNITA NARAIN: Time. I think what is really being lost today is time. We know that climate change is urgent. We need to do something about it. We need to reduce the emissions that we have. And this conference was to come after two years of negotiations.

Democracy Now for more

When the going gets tough, the losers panic. And the desperation grows.

Well, this is the story of the duo — Dr Ron Herring (from Cornell) and Dr Shantu Shantaram — doing the rounds across the country on behalf of the GM industry. After the New Delhi panel discussion organised by the Institute of Economic Growth on Dec 3, the duo went to Ahmedabad and from there to Thiruvanthapuram in Kerala.

You have probably read about the New Delhi meet, and the FAQs that come up again and again, on this blog earlier. Just in case you missed it, here is the link: http://devinder-sharma.blogspot.com/2009/12/gm-denial-industry-cornell-university.html

My colleague Sreedevi Lakshmi Kutty was in Thiruvanthapuram early this week and did manage to attend for sometime the two-day conference where both Ron Herring and Shantu Shantaram were present. She sends me this report.

I was in Kerala on a vacation last week and during that time came across this workshop on “Modern biotechnology in Indian Agriculture” (on Dec 13-14). This was organised under the banner of AICBA Delhi and FBAE Bangalore. This was a pro-GM industry conference, where Monsanto also made a presentation.

Interestingly, when the GM industry organises a conference, no one (and that includes the scientists and the media) ever question the need for the other perspective to be heard so that a balanced view can be evolved. But when the civil society holds a conference on the relevance of GM foods/crops, the first question asked is that why is the industry not represented. Double standards, isn’t it?

Anyway, much of what transpired at the conference was pro-GM propaganda. Such was the extent of the bias that any difficult question from the audience invited the wrath of the speakers whose effort was to silence the questioner in a quelling and patronizing manner. Still I sat through the proceeding, and interestingly was a witness to the presentation by Dr Shantaram, who was full of vitriol and venom, and this happens only when you lack substance.

Dr Shantaram’s presentation was on “The desperate saga of anti-GM activism in India”. By the end of his talk, Dr Shantaram’s desperation was at its peak. Speaking before an audience which was predominantly comprising bio-tech students from various colleges in Kerala and college teachers from various science/biotech and related departments, he had no reasons to feel so panicky.

He began his tirade listing the various segments of society who are against GM crops (NGOs, INGOs, environmentalists, particularly urban environmentalists whom he called the “environmental taliban”, farmer groups, leftists, socialists, disgruntled scientists, journalists, mediocre science professors, literauteurs, film stars, religious heads and so on – he had a very sarcastic expression on his face when he listed these groups). It was quite amusing to know from Dr Shantaram that almost the entire society was opposed to GM technology.

He talked about “organikers — agriculture fundamentalists” with a lot of scorn, and said that throughout the world they were creating a lot of problems for the introduction of GM crops. In the US, because of the “organikers,” the government had stopped allowing GM content in labeled organic foods.

Dev Sharma Blogspot for more

By A. C. Grayling

The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
By Iain McGilchrist (Yale University Press 597pp £25)

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the human brain’s asymmetrical halves. Thus baldly described, the endeavour doubtless seems implausible at least.

Before jumping to that conclusion, though, you should know that this is a beautifully written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous book. It embraces a prodigious range of enquiry, from neurology to psychology, from philosophy to primatology, from myth to history to literature. It goes from the microstructure of the brain to great epochs of Western civilisation, confidently and readably. One turns its five hundred pages – a further hundred are dense with notes and references in tiny print – as if it were an adventure story. And in one good sense it is. All the way through there is a single recurrent theme like a drumbeat, a theme McGilchrist thinks we urgently need to understand and do something about. It is that once we understand the structure and function of the brain, we see that the wrong half of it is in charge of our civilisation.

Now to return to that matter of jumping to the conclusion that what McGilchrist’s book seeks to do is, at very least, implausible. Alas, it is. The chief reason is that far too much is made to turn on the suppositious and slender state of knowledge in brain science. Although a great deal of intensely interesting work has been done and is being done in that field (McGilchrist tells us about the rapidly evolving technologies and experimental work in fascinating and lucid detail), nevertheless it simply does not permit such claims as that ‘the right hemisphere underpins our sense of justice’, ‘only the right hemisphere understands metaphor’, ‘the left hemisphere closes most routes to reality’, and the overarching claim for which McGilchrist argues, namely that the narrow, fragmenting, thing-based, mechanical, overly self-confident, black-and-white, unempathetic, even zombie-like left hemisphere is dominating our civilisation to its cost.

As this characterisation of the left hemisphere implies, the right hemisphere is McGilchrist’s favourite. Chapter after chapter is devoted to explaining and exploring the contrast between the two hemispheres, chiefly to the right hemisphere’s credit. It is more in touch with reality and life; it is global and integrating in its activity, creating a holistic view of the world; it recognises individuals, and is the seat of most forms of attention; it is the home of emotion and therefore of empathy and its offspring morality. To it belong music, art, religion and social connectedness. It is or should be the master hemisphere, but its quondam servant, the left hemisphere, whose job should be the instrumental and subordinate one of focusing on details and applying rational calculation when needed, has usurped it – principally because the left hemisphere’s chief interest, says McGilchrist, is power: it wants to divide and rule, and by underpinning the emergence of the analytic philosophy, science and bureaucratic organisation of the Western world in the last half dozen centuries, has succeeded in doing so.

Literary Review for more

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey

Known as the “nine-day queen”, Lady Jane Grey has become an iconic Tudor victim: virginal, sweet and beheaded at 16, largely because of the machinations of her evil mother. But is any of this true? Leanda de Lisle discovers otherwise …

Lady Jane Grey is mythologised, even festishised, as an innocent girl sacrificed on the altar of her mother’s ambition. But behind the popular biographies of the Tudor Queen lies a different story of misogyny and masochism. It seems the much-maligned mother is in fact the victim.

When I began researching for “The Sisters Who Would be Queen”, my triple biography of Lady Jane and her sisters, Katherine and Mary Grey, I hoped the well-known life of the iconic teenage Queen, would lend some insight to the younger sisters, the forgotten heirs to Elizabeth Tudor. I assumed there would be little new to day about Jane herself. But as I began my research it became clear that nothing written about Jane could be trusted. The first woman to wield the power of a Tudor monarch had been reduced, over time, to an eroticised image of female helplessness. Meanwhile, her conventional mother became the embodiment of the belief that powerful women are monstrous and mannish.

The traditional story runs like this: Lady Jane Grey was born in 1537, the daughter of Henry VIII’s royal niece, Frances, and her husband, Harry Grey, Marques of Dorset. The stout, bejewelled woman in a double portrait by Hans Eworth is still used to illustrate Frances’s nature. “Physically she bore a marked resemblance to Henry VIII,” notes Alison Weir, a best-selling historian, in her book “The Children of Henry VIII“. Here was a woman, “determined to have her own way, and greedy for power and riches,” who “ruled her husband and daughters tyrannically and, in the case of the latter, often cruelly.”

So Jane grew up an abused child, beaten regularly by her unloving mother. In 1553 the 15-year-old Jane was forced (beaten again) to marry the 18-year-old Guildford Dudley, son of the principle figure in the King’s Privy Council, John Dudley. Frances believed the marriage would promote Jane as heir to the dying Protestant King Edward VI. Weeks later Edward did indeed bequeath Jane his throne, in place of his Catholic sister Mary Tudor. Jane was obliged to accept, though she protested through tears that Mary was the rightful claimant.

moreintelligentlife for more

About The Cost of War:

To date, $915.1 billion dollars have been allocated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national, state, and local numbers we provide are based on the total approved amounts through the end of Fiscal Year 2009.

In addition to this approved amount, the FY2010 budget shows a $130 billion request for more war spending. This would bring total war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan to more than $1 trillion. When all FY2010 war-related amounts are approved, we will adjust the counter so that it reaches the new total at the end of FY2010.

If you should compare the amount displayed on the numbers in our information sheets with the Cost of War counter, please note that the information sheets include all war spending approved to date, the same number that the counter will reach at the end of the 2009 fiscal year.

nationalpriorities for more

The useless, destructive talks at Copenhagen show that the treaty-making system has scarcely changed in 130 years.

By George Monbiot

First they put the planet in square brackets, now they have deleted it from the text. This is no longer about saving the biosphere: now it’s just a matter of saving face. As the talks melt down, everything that might have made a new treaty worthwhile is being scratched out. Any deal will do, as long as the negotiators can pretend they have achieved something. A clearer and less destructive treaty than the texts currently being discussed would be a sheaf of blank paper, which every negotiating party solemnly sits down to sign(1).

This is the chaotic, disastrous denouement of a chaotic and disastrous summit. The event has been attended by historic levels of incompetence. Delegates arriving from the tropics spent ten hours queuing in sub-zero temperatures without shelter, food or drink, let alone any explanation or announcement, before being turned away. Some people fainted from exposure; it’s surprising that no one died. The process of negotiation is just as obtuse: there’s no evidence here of the innovative methods of dispute resolution developed recently by mediators and coaches, just the same old pig-headed wrestling.

Watching this stupid summit via webcam (I wasn’t allowed in either), it strikes me that the treaty-making system has scarcely changed in 130 years. There’s a wider range of faces, fewer handlebar moustaches, frock coats or pickelhaubes, but otherwise, as the world’s governments try to decide how to carve up the atmosphere, they might have been attending the Conference of Berlin. It’s as if democratisation and the flowering of civil society, advocacy and self-determination had never happened. Governments, whether elected or not, without reference to their own citizens let alone those of other nations, assert their right to draw lines across the global commons and decide who gets what. This is a scramble for the atmosphere comparable in style and intent to the scramble for Africa.

At no point has the injustice at the heart of multilateralism been addressed or even acknowledged: the interests of states and the interests of the world’s people are not the same. Often they are diametrically opposed. In this case, most rich and rapidly developing states have sought through these talks to seize as great a chunk of the atmosphere for themselves as they can – to grab bigger rights to pollute than their competitors. The process couldn’t have been better designed to produce the wrong results.

I have spent most of my time at the Klimaforum: the alternative conference set up by just four paid staff, which 50,000 people attended without a hitch. (I know which team I would put in charge of saving the planet.) There the barrister Polly Higgins laid out a different approach. Her declaration of planetary rights invests ecosystems with similar legal safeguards to those won by humans after the second world war(2). It changes the legal relationship between humans, the atmosphere and the biosphere from ownership to stewardship. It creates a global framework for negotiation which gives nation states less discretion to dispose of ecosystems and the people who depend on them.

Even before this new farce began it was starting to look as if it might be too late to prevent two or more degrees of global warming. The nation states, pursuing their own interests, have each been passing the parcel of responsibility since they decided to take action in 1992.

We have now lost 17 precious years; possibly the only years in which climate breakdown could have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the result of a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, which has been driven and promoted by the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted by the nations characterised, until now, as the good guys: those which have made firm commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false accounting and outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has trumped the long-term welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and political expediency have proved to be more urgent concerns than either the natural world or human civilisation. Our political systems are incapable of discharging the main function of government: to protect us from each other.

Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest; it was nice knowing you, not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.
www.monbiot.com

References:
1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-climate-change-summit-liveblog
2. http://www.treeshaverightstoo.com/

Monbiot for more