Remembering Winter Soldiers

March 13-16, 2008:

US Vets, Active-Duty Soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan Testify About the Horrors of War

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans gathered in Maryland to testify at Winter Soldier, an eyewitness indictment of atrocities committed by US troops during the ongoing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, the event was modeled after the historic 1971 Winter Soldier hearings held during the Vietnam War.

Although Winter Soldier was held just outside the nation’s capital, it was almost entirely ignored by the American corporate media. A search on the Lexis database found that no major television network or cable news network even mentioned Winter Soldier over the weekend, neither did the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times or most other major newspapers in the country. The editors of the Washington Post chose to cover Winter Soldier but placed the article in the local section.

Democracy Now!‘s coverage of Winter Soldier includes a live broadcast from the proceedings, as well as extensive excerpts of soldiers’ testimony: Here

Jon Michael Turner is a former Marine who fought with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines. This video testimony aired Monday March 17, 2008 on Democracy Now:

More Information About WINTER SOLDIER: Here

Toxic Alberta: Oilsands Most Destructive Project on Earth

Canada’s Tar Sands: "The Most Destructive Project on Earth"





Source: TarSandsNews

Tar Sands' Toxic Leakage: Tar Sands operations in Alberta leak more than 4 billion litres of contaminated tailings water every year. New Tar Sands projects could expand the leakage to more than 25 billion litres within a decade. Those are the key findings from Environmental Defence’s latest Tar Sands report: 11 Million Litres a Day: The Tar Sands’ Leaking Legacy.

Tailings ponds are known to contain dozens of toxic contaminants like heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and naphthenic acids. Naphthenic acids in particular break down very slowly and therefore pose a long-term threat to the groundwater of the region.

Surplus

Here is a trailer for an independent video called Surplus, by people i do not know. Random, no doubt, to some but interesting enough to watch.



More: Here

Cultures at the Edge of the World

In this TED Talk anthropologist Wade Davis suggests that vanishing cultures are a loss of variety of possible ways of being, thinking and orienting ourselves to the planet and each other. He calls the overall cultural, imaginal and linguistic actualities of our species the 'ethnosphere', and makes a passionate and informative plea for an increased sensitivity to the loss of cultural and linguistic diversity.

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DeLanda and the Geology of Morals

The Geology of Morals: A Neo-Materialist Interpretation

by Manuel DeLanda

The distinction between institutions which emerge from centralized and decentralized decision-making by its human components has come to occupy center-stage in several different contemporary philosophies. Economist and Artificial Intelligence guru Herbert Simon, for example, views bureaucracies and markets as the human institutions which best embody these two conceptions of control.

Hierarchical institutions are the easiest ones to analyze, since much of what happens within a bureaucracy in planned by someone of higher rank, and the hierarchy as a whole has goals and behaves in ways that are more or less consistent with those goals. Markets, on the other hand, are tricky. Indeed, the term "market" needs to be used with care because it has been greatly abused over the last century by theorists on the left and the right. As Simon remarks, the term does not refer to the world of corporations, whether monopolies or oligopolies, since in these commercial institutions decision-making is highly centralized, and prices are set by command.

I would indeed limit the sense of the term even more to refer exclusively to those weakly gatherings of people at a predefined place in town, and not to a dispersed set of consumers catered by a system of middleman (as when one speaks of the "market" for personal computers). The reason is that, as historian Fernand Braudel has made it clear, it is only in markets in the first sense that we have any idea of what the dynamics of price formation are. In other words, it is only in peasant and small town markets that decentralized decision-making leads to prices setting themselves up in a way that we can understand. In any other type of market economists simply assume that supply and demand connect to each other in a functional way, but they do not give us any specific dynamics through which this connection is effected.

Moreover, unlike the idealized version of markets guided by an "invisible hand" to achieve an optimal allocation of resources, real markets are not in any sense optimal. Indeed, like most decentralized, self-organized structures, they are only viable, and since they are not hierarchical they have no goals, and grow and develop mostly by drift.

Read More: Here

David Harvey on Reading Marx's 'Das Kapital'

Below is David Harvey's introduction to his open lecture series on Karl Marx and Marx's seminal book Das Kapital - Volume 1:

Corporate Ethics and Criminal Crackdown in the Amazon

From WorldChanging Team:

Crackdown against 'environmental criminals' follows Greenpeace report

Slaughtering the Amazon from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

Some of the world's top footwear brands, including Clarks, Adidas, Nike and Timberland, have demanded an immediate moratorium on destruction of the Amazon rainforest from their leather suppliers in Brazil.

The move is the first major development since the Guardian revealed a three-year undercover investigation by Greenpeace in June. The investigation said leading Brazilian suppliers of leather and beef for products sold in Britain had obtained cattle from farms involved in illegal deforestation.

Nanotechnology and Water-purification

Engineer Michael Pritchard did something about it -- inventing the portable Lifesaver filter, which can make the most revolting water drinkable in seconds. With cutting-edge nanotech, Michael Pritchard's Lifesaver water-purification bottle could revolutionize water-delivery systems in disaster-stricken areas around the globe. Full bio and more links

Below is his amazing demo from TEDGlobal 2009:

Ward Churchill: Indigenous Rights and Resistance

The following is part 1 of a lecture by Ward Churchill on indegenous rights and the politics and history of Native America resistance.



Ward Churchill (b.1947) is an American writer and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1990 to 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States. His work features controversial and provocative claims, written in a direct – often confrontational – style.

In January 2005, Churchill's work attracted publicity, with the widespread circulation of a 2001 essay, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. In the essay, he claimed that the September 11, 2001 attacks were provoked by U.S. policy, and referred to the "technocratic corps" working in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns".

In March 2005 the University of Colorado began investigating allegations that Churchill had engaged in research misconduct; it reported in June 2006 that he had done so. Churchill was fired on July 24, 2007, leading to a claim from some scholars that he was fired over the ideas he expressed. Churchill filed a lawsuit against the University of Colorado for unlawful termination of employment.

In April 2009 a Denver jury found that Churchill was wrongly fired, awarding him $1 in damages, but this verdict was vacated by a District Court judge in July 2009.

Slavoj Žižek on Revolutionary Discourse

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek answering the question, "What does it mean to be a revolutionary today?", at the Marxism 2009 conference, London, July 2009.

MORE: On Violence and Ideology / Reading Lacan through Zizek