Peace Out NYC

"New York has a couple of characteristics that are undeniable and one of those is that it’s a magnet for assholes who couldn’t get any attention at home and decided that the problem wasn’t that they weren’t interesting but that there were all these squares around them in Dubuque or whatever and they need to go to some big cosmopolitan city like New York where people will appreciate them."

-Steve Albini

NIRVANA MONDAY RETURNS

"What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. No-one embodied (and struggled with) this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, that even realizing it is a cliché. The impasse that paralyzed Cobain is precisely the one that Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in 'a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices and styles in the imaginary museum'. Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that youw ere the new meat on which the system could feed. But the high existential angst of Nirvana and Cobain belongs to an older moment; what succeeded them was a pastiche-rock which reproduced the forms of the past without anxiety." - Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

Julian Assange: Statement on the Unauthorised, Secret Publishing of the Julian Assange “autobiography” by Canongate

statement:

http://www.wikileaks.org/Julian-Assange-Statement-on-the.html

product description:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Julian-Assange-Unauthorised-Autobiography/dp/0857863843/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316954000&sr=8-1

Troy Davis

Troy Davis is a man whom any reasonable system of justice would have declared innocent twenty years ago. Instead, he's been on death row since his August 1991 conviction for the murder of Georgia police officer Mark MacPhail, a conviction which rested solely on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses, seven of whom have since recanted. One of the two witnesses who has not recanted is himself considered a suspect in the murder (and was instrumental in Troy's arrest). Troy was twenty years old when he was arrested. Here's a picture of him (not in prison):

I said his conviction "rested solely" on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses. In other words, there was (and still is) no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime. His execution has been stayed three times since his conviction, and in 2007 the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles vowed not to allow Troy to be executed "unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt" as to his guilt, a vow which has now been broken with the board's decision this morning to deny his petition for clemency. Davis is now scheduled to be executed tomorrow at 7 p.m. Amnesty International is petitioning Savannah, Georgia District Attorney Larry Chisolm to seek a withdrawal of the death warrant against Troy. This is a campaign which is supported by everyone from Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson to the pope and former Republican member of congress Bob Barr. So overcome your squeamishness about feeling like a liberal and sign the petition. And keep Robespierre's sage words in your mind as you do:

"Listen to the voice of justice and reason. It cries out to you that human judgements are never certain enough to justify a society of men subject to error dealing death to another man. Even if you could imagine the most perfect judicial order, even if you had found the most upright and enlightened judges, there would still remain some room for error or caution. Why forbid yourselves the means of repairing them? Why condemn yourselves to the inability to lend a helping hand to oppressed innocence? What do sterile regrets, illusory reparations matter to a vain shadow, to insensible ash? They are the sad testimony of the barbaric temerity of your penal laws. Take from a man the possibility to expiate his crime by repentance or acts of virtue; pitilessly close off to him any return to virtue, self-esteem, rush his descent, so to speak, into the tomb still covered by the recent stain of his crime is, in my eyes, the most horrible refinement in cruelty.

"The first obligation of a legislator is to form and preserve public morals, the source of all freedom, source of all social happiness. When in running to a particular goal he turns away from this general and essential goal he commits the most vulgar and dire of errors.... If in place of this powerful, calm and moderate severity that should characterize it they place anger and vengeance; if they spill human blood that they could spare and that they have no right to spread; if they spread out before the people cruel scenes and cadavers wounded by torture, it then alters in the hearts of citizens the ideas of the just and the unjust; they plant the seed in the midst of society of ferocious prejudices that will produce others in their turn. Man is no longer for man so sacred an object: we have a less grand idea of his dignity when public authority puts his life at risk. The idea of murder inspires less fear when the law itself gives the example and the spectacle. The horror of crime is diminished when it is punished by another crime. Do not confuse the effectiveness of a penalty with the excess of severity: the one is absolutely opposed to the other. Everything seconds moderate laws; everything conspires against cruel laws."

still cool

Smoke Up, Then Move To Cuba

From Popular Science:

"From the island nation known for the quality of its cigars comes some pretty big news today:Xinhua reports that Cuban medical authorities have released the first therapeutic vaccine for lung cancer. CimaVax-EGF is the result of a 25-year research project at Havana’s Center for Molecular Immunology, and it could make a life or death difference for those facing late-stage lung cancers, researchers there say.

"CimaVax-EGF isn’t a vaccine in the preventative sense--that is, it doesn’t prevent lung cancer from taking hold in new patients. It’s based on a protein related to uncontrolled cell proliferation--that is, it doesn’t prevent cancer from existing in the first place but attacks the mechanism by which it does harm.

"As such it can turn aggressive later-stage lung cancer into a manageable chronic disease by creating antibodies that do battle with the proteins that cause uncontrolled cell proliferation, researchers say."

Egypt Update: Yikes Town

"Since it took over patrolling the streets from the police on January 28, 2011, Egypt’s military has arrested almost 12,000 civilians and brought them before military tribunals, Human Rights Watch said today. This is more than the total number of civilians who faced military trials during the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak and undermines Egypt’s move from dictatorship to democratic rule, Human Rights Watch said."

"In a September 5 news conference Gen. Adel Morsy of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) said that between January 28 and August 29, military tribunals tried 11,879 civilians. The tribunals convicted 8,071, including 1,836 suspended sentences; a further 1,225 convictions are awaiting ratification by the military."

"Defendants in Egyptian military courts usually do not have access to counsel of their own choosing and judges do not respect the rights of defense. Judges in the military justice system are military officers subject to a chain of command and therefore do not enjoy the independence to ignore instructions by superiors."

"Military courts have acquitted only 795 of the nearly 12,000 cases they have tried, a conviction rate of 93 percent, Human Rights Watch said.

"In July, the SCAF issued statement number 64 in which it announced that it was limiting the use of military tribunals to three categories of crimes: “thuggery,” rape, and assault against police officers, a limitation of little practical relevance since these categories cover the vast majority of cases before tribunals over the past months. The vast majority of those sentenced by military tribunals are not political cases but involve individuals arrested in connection with alleged regular criminal activities. Those sentenced included a 16-year-old child, Islam Harby Raga, currently in Tora prison serving a seven-year sentence after a military trial in February in which he was convicted on charges of assaulting a public official."

Blogger Maikel Nabil, currently on hunger strike, is serving a three-year prison sentence for “insulting the military establishment” and “spreading false information” – in fact, for peaceful expression of his views on his blog and on Facebook. Nabil’s lawyers have appealed his sentence and another military court will hear his appeal on November 1. On September 5, Morsy insisted that there were no cases regarding freedom of expression before the military courts, saying that Nabil was a case of “insulting the armed forces.”

Full article

Maybe the worst thing I've ever seen in a major newspaper

This column. Make sure to read the last paragraph especially.

Why Are We In Haiti?

An article on the Guardian's website asks this question after a video came to light that showed UN "peacekeeping forces" raping an 18 year old boy in Port Salut. The video is in the article, but I won't post it here. The soldiers are laughing throughout.

"The incident is likely to pour more gasoline on the fire of resentment that Haitians have for the UN troops who have occupied their country for more than seven years. There has been a dire pattern of abuses: in December 2007, more than 100 UN soldiers from Sri Lanka were deported under charges of sexual abuse of under-age girls. In 2005, UN troops went on the rampage in Cité Soleil, one of the poorest areas in Port-au-Prince, killing as many as 23 people, including children, according to witnesses. After the raid, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders reported: "On that day, we treated 27 people for gunshot wounds. Of them, around 20 were women under the age of 18."

"WikiLeaks cables released in the last week reveal that the Timothy Carney, representing the United States government as the top-ranking diplomat in Haiti in 2006, warned that such raids would "inevitably cause unintended civilian casualties given the crowded conditions and flimsy construction of tightly packed housing in Cité Soleil". But Washington – showing its lack of respect for human life in Haiti – offered no objections to further raids, which continued into 2006.

"And make no mistake about it: the UN occupation of Haiti is really a US occupation – it is no more a multilateral force than George W Bush's "coalition of the willing" that invaded Iraq. And it is hardly more legitimate, either: it was sent there in 2004 after a US-led effort toppled Haiti's democratically elected government. Far from providing security for Haitians in the aftermath of the coup, Minustah stood by while thousands of Haitians who had supported the elected government were killed, and officials of the constitutional government jailed. Recent WikiLeaks cables also confirm that the US government sees Minustah as an instrument of its policy there.

"This latest incident could shed some light on the nature of its mission, just as the photos from Abu Ghraib made plain for most of the world the brutality of the US occupation of Iraq. Images cannot be so easily dismissed or buried as words. And the images from this video are symbolic of what the "international community" has been doing to Haiti since the country won its independence from France in the world's first successful slave-led revolution.

"There is no legitimate reason for a military mission of the United Nations in Haiti. The country has no civil war, and is not the subject of a peace-keeping or post-conflict agreement. And the fact that UN troops are immune from prosecution or legal action in Haiti encourages abuses. The occupying troops don't speak the language either, which severely limits their capacity for any positive security role; can you imagine how effective a police force in Washington, DC would be if it spoke only Japanese?

"To make things even worse, it is now virtually certain that Minustah brought the cholera bacteria to Haiti that has killed more than 6,000 Haitians and infected more than 400,000 in the last 10 months. This was an act of gross negligence: there should have been supervision to make sure that fecal waste from UN troops was not dumped into the water supply, given the risks of such a deadly contamination and the known incapacity of Haiti's water, sanitation and public health system."