OVERDOSE. The Next Financial Crisis.

Having trouble understanding the financial crisis? Then this documentary is for you. The crisis explained in layman's terms, it makes the whole thing very simple, and understandable.

And when you've seen it, if you're angry, then you've understood.

The transformation of Latin America is a global advance

Finally a decent article on Latin Ameria in the Guardian, albeit in the CiF section - opinion. However, there is so much more truth written in this one article than in Rory Carroll's entire output.

"The transformation of Latin America is a global advance"

"Nearly two centuries after it won nominal independence and Washington declared it a backyard, Latin America is standing up. The tide of progressive change that has swept the continent for the past decade has brought to power a string of social democratic and radical socialist governments that have attacked social and racial privilege, rejected neo-liberal orthodoxy and challenged imperial domination of the region.
Its significance is often underestimated or trivialised in Europe and North America. But along with the rise of China, the economic crash of 2008 and the demonstration of the limits of US power in the "war on terror", the emergence of an independent Latin America is one of a handful of developments reshaping the global order. From Ecuador to Brazil, Bolivia to Argentina, elected leaders have turned away from the IMF, taken back resources from corporate control, boosted regional integration and carved out independent alliances across the world."

"For all his popularity at home, Chávez has been the target for a campaign of vilification and ridicule throughout the US, European and elite-controlled Latin American media – which has little to do with his high-octane rhetoric and much more with his effectiveness in using Venezuela's oil wealth to challenge US and corporate power across the region.
Forget his success in slashing the Venezuelan poverty rate in half, tripling social spending, rapidly expanding healthcare and education, and fostering grassroots democracy and worker participation. Since the beginning of the year Venezuela's enemies have smelled blood as his government faltered in the face of drought-triggered power cuts, a failure to ride out recession with a stimulus package – as Morales's Bolivia did – and growing discontent over high levels of violent crime.
So expect a flurry of new claims that Chávez is a dictator who has stifled media freedom and persecuted bankers and businessmen, and whose incompetent regime is running into the sand. In reality the Venezuelan president has won more free elections than any other world leader, the country's media are dominated by the US-funded opposition, and his government's problems with service delivery stem more from institutional weakness than authoritarianism."

"If both Brazilian and Venezuelan elections are won by the left, the US and its friends may be tempted to look for other ways to divert Latin America from the path of self-determination and social justice it took while George Bush was busy fighting his enemies in the Muslim world. For all Barack Obama's promise to "seek a new chapter of engagement" and warning that a "terrible precedent" would be set if last year's bloody coup against the reforming Honduran president Manuel Zelaya were allowed to stand, there has been little change in US policy towards the region. The Honduran coup was indeed allowed to stand – or, as Hillary Clinton put it, the "crisis" was "managed to a successful conclusion".
The clear message was that the radical tide can be turned and the fear is now that another of the more vulnerable governments, such as Paraguay's or Guatemala's, could also be "managed to a conclusion" in one form or another. Meanwhile the US is attempting to shore up its military presence on the continent, using the pretext of "counter-insurgency" to station US forces in seven bases in Colombia.
But direct military intervention looks implausible for the foreseeable future. If the political and social movements that have driven the continent's transformation can maintain their momentum and support, they won't only be laying the foundation of an independent Latin America, but new forms of socialist politics declared an impossibility in the modern era. Two decades after we were told there was no alternative, another world is being created."

Harvard University fund sells all Israel holdings

Although,the subtitle says "No reason for the sale was mentioned in the report to the SEC", there is no doubt that the campaign to boycott the criminal regime in Israel is gaining ground...

Update 17 Aug
:----------------

...in spite of their denial that: "The university has not divested from Israel."  According to the Guardian "Harvard spokesman, John Longbrake, said today...the change had taken place because Israel had been part of its emerging markets portfolio but the country's status had been upgraded to developed market.
Longbrake added that the university retained shares in Israel: "We have holdings in developed markets, including Israel, through outside managers in commingled accounts and indexes, which are not reported in the filing in question."

The Guardian then quotes plagiarist and supporter of Israel's genocidal campaign against the Palestinians, Alan Dershowitz:

"There will be some irresponsible anti-Israel extremists who will try to portray this economic decision as an attack against Israel," Dershowitz said. "Shame on them. They will continue to lose their credibility among all reasonable and objective people if they try to take political advantage of this purely technical decision.He added: "The end result may well be that Harvard will have greater rather than lesser holdings of Israeli stocks. No one should misinterpret this purely economic decision as support for any form of divestment against Israel. Indeed, Harvard has publicly committed itself not to divest from Israel and not to participate in any campaign of boycotting the Jewish nation.""

Fuck you Dershowitz, you can try to spin it as much as you can, but the fact is that Harvard has "sold all its holdings in Israeli companies", for whatever reasons they care to state. If I was Harvard, I would also deny the divestment campaign had anything to do with the decision. It would keep nutters like Dershowitz off my back.

'In the hole!'

There I was, idling away an hour or so on the sofa watching the opening day of the USPGA championship, whose coverage was focusing at the time on Tiger Woods' first round, when I noticed that the spectators weren't shouting "In the hole!" at Tiger's 'birdie' opportunities as usual. I  admit it, the thought did make me chuckle...

Introducing a new blog: \kʌnts\

I would like to introduce a new blog which I have started, called \kʌnts\, dedicated to outing all those \kʌnts\  out there, who through their actions are a negative influence on the world - some may indeed say that's what this blog is...

First on the list Wan Ker-moon sorry, Ban Ki-moon. Any suggestions, just send them in with reasons.

How facts backfire - The Boston Globe

For all those desperate that their efforts at trying to inform the misinformed are not having any effect, a real kick in the balls:

How facts backfire - The Boston Globe


Update 07 August 2010:

These are some comments sent to me by Manuel Garcia, Jr., former physicist at Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laborator:

"Why we suffer, politically: How facts backfire - The Boston Globe

>From earlier MG writing:

"The social programming language of capitalist authoritarianism seeks to activate personal greed, intellectual insecurity and visceral racism as motivators of guided popular political reaction. The Pavlovian logic to this scheme of social manipulation is that all human beings are possessive, gullible and fearful." (from:'Decoding the Language of Social Control, Democracy is Communism and Must be Destroyed ...', 12 March 2010)

"The brain is a food-seeking antenna at the service of the stomach, the controlling organ of the body. To understand this is to be free of the delusion that we humans are rational beings who observe to gather data for analysis, analyze to formulate plans and arrive at decisions, and then employ our physical selves and our exosomatic mechanisms to enact these plans and decisions. Instead, we decide emotionally and largely unconsciously, generally on the basis of fear and prejudice, and we use our brains to fabricate post-facto rationalizations for our biases and predetermined actions. Some may feel this characterization of human motivation is unjustly insulting to human dignity, and severely dismissive of human intellect. I concede that it will not be universally applicable, but I think it sufficiently representative to help explain many social trends and popular attitudes." (from: 'On Voting, A Ritual of Justifying Biases',, 8 August 2008)

"Minds that remain largely unused because of ignorance, which is the child of laziness, will be found by mass media ("propaganda," in the old days), filled with easily swallowed psychic worms that are coated with syrupy sweet sex, glistening cherry-red violence, desire-fulfillment fantasy, voyeurism, and lowest-common-denominator semi-pornographic mass culture. Once embedded, the underlying psychic messages re-program the thought patterns of the consuming individual for ease of remote control by the social programming elite. If you don't think, someone will do it for you, but not for your benefit." (from 'The Imprisoned American Mind', 2 August 2004)

The psychological hurdle blocking human progress (the next challenge to human evolution?, the determining test of human survival?):
"Better that the world should end than my ideas should change."


All three articles are well worth the read...
Thanks Manuel!