[FACT comments: Consider for a moment the number of death sentences for cannabis and the aggregate years in gaol for cannabis prisoners in every country. It’s time to stop this madness and legalise cannabis!]
5 Things the Corporate Media Don’t Want You to Know About Cannabis
AlterNet: September 23, 2009.
Recent scientific reports suggest that pot doesn’t destroy your brain, that it doesn’t cause lung damage like tobacco — but you won’t hear it in the corporate media.
Writing in the journal Science nearly four decades ago, New York State University sociologist Erich Goode documented the media’s complicity in maintaining cannabis prohibition.
He observed: “[T]ests and experiments purporting to demonstrate the ravages of marijuana consumption receive enormous attention from the media, and their findings become accepted as fact by the public. But when careful refutations of such research are published, or when later findings contradict the original pathological findings, they tend to be ignored or dismissed.”
A glimpse of today’s mainstream media landscape indicates that little has changed — with news outlets continuing to, at best, underreport the publication of scientific studies that undermine the federal government’s longstanding pot propaganda and, at worst, ignore them all together.
Here are five recent stories the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know about pot:
1. Marijuana Use Is Not Associated With a Rise in Incidences of Schizophrenia
Over the past few years, the worldwide media, as well as federal officials in the United Kingdom, Canada and the U.S. have earnestly promoted the notion that smoking pot induces mental illness.
Perhaps most notably, in 2007 the MSM reported that cannabis “could boost the risk of developing a psychotic illness later in life by about 40 percent” — a talking point that was also actively promoted by U.S. anti-drug officials.
So, is there any truth to the claim that pot smoking is sparking a dramatic rise in mental illness? Not at all, according to the findings of a study published in July in the journal Schizophrenia Research.
Investigators at the Keele University Medical School in Britain compared trends in marijuana use and incidences of schizophrenia in the United Kingdom from 1996 to 2005. Researchers reported that the “incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia and psychoses were either stable or declining” during this period, even the use of cannabis among the general population was rising.
“[T]he expected rise in diagnoses of schizophrenia and psychoses did not occur over a 10-year period,” the authors concluded. “This study does not therefore support the specific causal link between cannabis use and incidence of psychotic disorders. … This concurs with other reports indicating that increases in population cannabis use have not been followed by increases in psychotic incidence.”
As of this writing, a handful of news wire reports in Australia, Canada, and the U.K. have reported on the Keele University study. Notably, no American media outlets covered the story.
2. Marijuana Smoke Doesn’t Damage the Lungs Like Tobacco
Everyone knows that smoking pot is as damaging, if not more damaging, to the lungs than puffing cigarettes, right?
Wrong, according to a team of New Zealand investigators writing in the European Respiratory Journal in August.
Researchers at the University of Otago in New Zealand compared the effects of cannabis and tobacco smoke on lung function in over 1,000 adults.
They reported: “Cumulative cannabis use was associated with higher forced vital capacity [the volume of air that can forcibly be blown out after full inspiration], total lung capacity, functional residual capacity [the volume of air present in the lungs at the end of passive expiration] and residual volume.
“Cannabis was also associated with higher airways resistance but not with forced expiratory volume in one second [the maximum volume of air that can be forcibly blown out in the first second during the FVC test], forced expiratory ratio, or transfer factor. These findings were similar amongst those who did not smoke tobacco. … By contrast, tobacco use was associated with lower forced expiratory volume in one second, lower forced expiratory ratio, lower transfer factor and higher static lung volumes, but not with airways resistance.”
They concluded, “Cannabis appears to have different effects on lung function to those of tobacco.”
Predictably, the scientists’ “inconvenient truth” was not reported in a single media outlet.
3. Cannabis Use Potentially Protects, Rather Than Harms, the Brain
Does smoking pot kill brain cells? Drinking alcohol most certainly does, and many opponents of marijuana-law reform claim that marijuana’s adverse effects on the brain are even worse. Are they correct?
Not according to recent findings published this summer in the journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology.
Investigators at the University of California at San Diego examined white matter integrity in adolescents with histories of binge drinking and marijuana use. They reported that binge drinkers (defined as boys who consumed five or more drinks in one sitting, or girls who consumed four or more drinks at one time) showed signs of white matter damage in eight regions of the brain.
By contrast, the binge drinkers who also used marijuana experienced less damage in 7 out of the 8 brain regions.
“Binge drinkers who also use marijuana did not show as consistent a divergence from non-users as did the binge drink-only group,” authors concluded. “[It is] possible that marijuana may have some neuroprotective properties in mitigating alcohol-related oxidative stress or excitotoxic cell death.”
To date, only a handful of U.S. media outlets — almost exclusively college newspapers — have reported the story.
4. Marijuana Is a Terminus, Not a ‘Gateway,’ to Hard Drug Use
Alarmist claims that experimenting with cannabis will inevitably lead to the use of other illicit drugs persist in the media despite statistical data indicating that the overwhelming majority of those who try pot never go on to use cocaine or heroin.
Moreover, recent research is emerging that indicates that pot may also suppress one’s desire to use so-called hard drugs.
In June, Paris researchers writing in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology concluded that the administration of oral THC in animals suppressed sensitivity to opiate dependence.
Also this summer, investigators at the New York State Psychiatric Institute reported in the American Journal on Addictions that drug-treatment subjects who use cannabis intermittently were more likely to adhere to treatment for opioid dependence.
Although a press release for the former study appeared on the Web site physorg.com on July 7, neither study ever gained any traction in the mainstream media.
5. Government’s Anti-Pot Ads Encourage, Rather Than Discourage, Marijuana Use
Sure, many of us already knew that the federal government’s $2 billion ad campaign targeting pot was failing to dissuade viewers from toking up, but who knew it was this bad?
According to a new study posted online in the journal Health Communication, survey data published by investigators at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania found that many of the government’s public-service announcements actually encouraged pot use.
Researchers assessed the attitudes of over 600 adolescents, age 12 to 18, after viewing 60 government-funded anti-marijuana television spots.
Specifically, researchers evaluated whether the presence of marijuana-related imagery in the ads (e.g., the handling of marijuana cigarettes or the depiction of marijuana-smoking behavior) were more likely or less likely to discourage viewers’ use of cannabis.
Messages that depict teens associating with cannabis are “significantly less effective than others,” the researchers found.
“This negative impact of marijuana scenes is not reversed in the presence of strong anti-marijuana arguments in the ads and is mainly present for the group of adolescents who are often targets of such anti-marijuana ads (i.e., high-risk adolescents),” the authors determined. “For this segment of adolescents, including marijuana scenes in anti-marijuana (public-service announcements) may not be a good strategy.”
Needless to say, no outlets in the mainstream media — many of which donated air time to several of the beleaguered ads in question — have yet to report on the story.
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Keeping Google out of libraries |
Bill Thompson
BBC News: September 2, 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8233324.stm
Google is in the middle of a massive project to scan and digitise every book it can get its hands on, whether old or new, and if it gets its way then the US courts will soon endorse an agreement between the search engine giant and the US book industry that will allow it to do this without fear of prosecution for copyright infringement.
Authors and publishers will get some money in return, and we will all benefit from the improved access to digitised books that Google will provide.
The deal sounds like a good one, but not everyone is happy with it. The Department of Justice in the US has begun an investigation to see if it is anti-competitive, and last month a number of library associations got together with Amazon, Yahoo! and Microsoft to form the Open Book Alliance http://www.openbookalliance.org/ which argues that it should not go forward.
The details of the settlement are complex, and it is almost impossible to be sure what would emerge from it because many of the provisions involve setting up things like a Book Rights Registry, and we don’t yet know what they will look like.
World’s librarian
But whatever the detail there remains a fundamental problem. It is not that the settlement will give Google indemnity from prosecution should it be found to have scanned books that are in copyright without the copyright owner’s permission, nor even that it gives Google freedom to exploit scanned content commercially.
It is, rather, that the settlement gives only Google these privileges, and places one company in a prime position to become the world’s de facto librarian instead of encouraging open access, open standards and a plurality of services and service providers.
Neither Google nor any other company should be entrusted with that responsibility, and nothing in the detail of the agreement or the funds that will be made available to authors as a consequence can change this.
If Google is given a monopoly, either explicitly in the settlement or implicitly because any other scanning project would be forced to negotiate its own multi-million dollar agreement, then the deal must be rejected.
The proposed settlement came about after Google began a project to scan and index millions of books, including many that are still in copyright.
It was sued by groups representing authors and publishers who felt that scanning books, even if the text was only used to create a searchable index which then pointed readers to the relevant text, was an unlicensed use and therefore illegal.
The book trade was also worried that Google might scan the books under the pretext of creating an index and then start offering them online or even selling them, even though it was always absolutely clear that such behaviour would be a breach of copyright.
Instead of fighting the case through the US courts and winning a great victory for those of us who believe that three hundred year-old notions of copyright should not be used arbitrarily to limit new ways of making use of creative works, Google announced in October 2008 that it had reached a settlement with the US Authors’ Guild and the Association of American Publishers that would allow it to continue scanning with permission.
At the moment the settlement hangs in the balance, waiting for what is quaintly termed a ‘fairness hearing’ in US District Court on October 7.
At this hearing of the questions raised since the settlement was announced will be debated, including the question of how the relatively small Authors Guild came to speak for all published writers in the US, living and dead, in negotiating with Google.
One of the arguments being made in favour of Google, most clearly by US industry analyst Jeffrey Lindsay, is that Google deserves to benefit from having taken the risk of digitising books when the project’s legal status was uncertain and that Google, unlike Microsoft and Yahoo!, has invested millions of dollars in the project and is committed to pushing forward.
Microsoft did indeed abandon its own book scanning project, Live
Search Books, in 2008, largely on cost grounds but also because the legal uncertainties clearly exposed the company to potential liability in what was never a core area of its activity.
Tribal lands
But Lindsay’s view seems hard to accept. Pretending that the world’s libraries are some unexplored continent to be opened up and claimed by the adventurers from Mountain View may appeal to the frontier mentality of US commentators, but it is not a metaphor likely to have much appeal elsewhere.
For one thing the bookshelves of the worlds are already inhabited, just like the territory of the United States, and those of us who remember the fate of the Native Americans may not be happy to see Google build its railroad tracks over our tribal lands.
Even without the dodgy analogy, the project of digitising the information held in the world’s printed books is too important to be dealt with purely as a commercial venture between rights holders and a potential supplier of services.
We are at an inflection point in world history, and the transition we are making from analogue to digital is happening so quickly and offers so many delights that there is a temptation to let the past moulder in archive boxes and concentrate solely on the new and digital.
For those who take that view then letting Google pay to digitise books is an uncontroversial decision, one that can deliver more digital stuff to search through without apparently costing anything.
George Santayana wrote ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’, but it may also be true that those who do not care to digitise their own past will end up paying a high price to regain what they give up so thoughtlessly.
If we let Google have its settlement we will all be the poorer. Not for a while, perhaps, but one day we will need more from this new library of Alexandria than Google is willing to offer, and find that the price it demands is more than we can pay.
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
Legal advocates push for Google Books privacy
CNet News: July 23, 2009
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10294519-93.html
Google should promise to protect the privacy of consumers with its Book Search service, the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Samuelson Law Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley Law said in a letter to the search giant on Thursday.
“Under its current design, Google Book Search keeps track of what books readers search for and browse, what books they read, and even what they ‘write’ down in the margins,” the groups wrote in a letter (PDF) to Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.
“Given the long and troubling history of government and third-party efforts to compel libraries and booksellers to turn over records about readers, it is essential that Google Books incorporate strong privacy protections in both the architecture and policies of Google Book Search,” the letter said.
“Without these, Google Books could become a one-stop shop for government and civil-litigant fishing expeditions into the private lives of Americans.”
In 2006, the U.S. Attorney demanded that Amazon turn over book purchase records of 24,000 customers, the groups said in an e-mail statement.
Specifically, the groups are calling for Google to promise to respond only to properly issued warrants from law enforcement and court orders and notify readers if information about them has been requested; allow readers to search and browse anonymously; give readers control over their purchases and data and prevent others from viewing their activities; allow readers to give books to others without tracking; tell readers what information is being collected and maintained and why data has been disclosed if it has.
Google also should keep search log information for no longer than 30 days and agree not to share reader activity with third parties or link data collected about use of Book Search to any other Google services without user consent, the groups said.
A Google Books representative said it’s premature for Google to say what its privacy policy will be, but that Google will continue to discuss the issues with advocates.
“We have a strong privacy policy in place now for Google Books and for all Google products. But our settlement agreement hasn’t yet been approved by the court, and the services authorized by the agreement haven’t been built or even designed yet,” Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Books, wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
“That means it’s very difficult (if not impossible) to draft a detailed privacy policy,” he wrote. “While we know that our eventual product will build in privacy protections–like always giving users clear information about privacy, and choices about what if any data they share when they use our services–we don’t yet know exactly how this all will work. We do know that whatever we ultimately build will protect readers’ privacy rights, upholding the standards set long ago by booksellers and by the libraries whose collections are being opened to the public through this settlement.”
Google has negotiated deals with publishers for current works and is also digitizing public-domain works. For out-of-print books still protected by copyright, the company reached a $125 million proposed settlement with U.S. publishers and authors that awaits court approval.
Critics complain that the deal, which is scheduled to be implemented in October, would effectively give Google a monopoly over books that are in copyright but out of print. Google argues that the agreement will make millions of books hidden on library shelves more accessible and give publishers and authors a new opportunity to profit from them.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice said it was launching a formal investigation into the proposed settlement. And European Union regulators are also taking a close look.
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor.
Econundrum: Kindles vs. Books
Mother Jones: September 21, 2009
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/09/econundrum-kindles-vs-books
Q: Should I ditch my books for an e-reader?
A: My friends rave about their Amazon Kindles, but as a bookstore junkie, I’m wary. I’m pretty sure old-fashioned books are aesthetically superior—they look, feel, and smell a whole lot better than an LCD screen. But last year, the book and newspaper publishing industries used 125 million trees, creating as much carbon 7.3 million cars did in the same amount of time.
A recent report from the environmental consulting firm Cleantech Group found that the Kindle’s lifecycle impact is much less: In its first year, it offsets the emissions created by its manufacture, and over its lifecycle, its carbon savings even out to about 370 pounds of CO2, or the equivalent of about 22.5 books per year. So what’s a book aesthete to do?
One (admittedly retro) option: a library card. Let’s imagine you buy 20 books a year. According to Cleantech Group, that’s about 331 pounds of carbon. Now say you’re willing to buy only five books a year—new releases that you just can’t wait for—and get the other 15 from the library. The San Francisco library bought 78,445 books in 2008. Let’s assume each of the library’s 2,265,209 visitors borrowed two books. Of course, they’re not all borrowing newly purchased books. But if all those patrons are shouldering the carbon burden of the new books, that evens out to about 0.3 pounds of CO2 per patron. You’ve reduced your reading emissions to 42 pounds of CO2, nearly an eighth of what they would be if you bought all your books new.
Another way to think about it: The carbon impact of reading—either on paper or via e-reader—is dwarfed by that of TV: A typical 34-37-inch LCD-display television creates about 474 pounds of carbon a year—significantly more than the 370 pounds of carbon emitted in a year of reading a Kindle or books—and that’s not even counting the carbon created by your TV’s manufacture.
The bottom line: Borrow more books than you buy—but whether or not you decide to join the Kindle-wielding masses, reading is always better for the planet than turning on the boob tube.
Puerto Rico: Debate on Censorship
Global Voices: September 21, 2009
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/09/21/puerto-rico-debate-on-censorship/
The Department of Education of the government of Puerto Rico recently eliminated five books from the eleventh grade curriculum of the public school system: Antología personal, by José Luis González; El entierro de Cortijo, by Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá; Mejor te lo cuento: antología personal, by Juan Antonio Ramos; Reunión de espejos, an anthology of essays edited by José Luis Vega (all Puerto Rican authors); and Aura, by Carlos Fuentes from Mexico. The public agency justified its action by saying that the books “contain unacceptable language and vocabulary, which is extremely coarse and vulgar.”
The governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Fortuño, supported the decision: “I think I have been very clear, and that all of the mothers and fathers out there understand perfectly that the books that an 18-year-old can read should not be read by a 12-year-old.” Numerous writers and artists in Puerto Rico publicly voiced their concerns and described the government’s action as censorship. The Federation of Teachers also condemned the decision and stated that it “reflects ignorance about the social reality that our students live in, and a backward-looking vision of modern literature as part of the academic curriculum.” After such public pressure, the Department of Education said they had only permanently eliminated one book, but were still evaluating the rest.
The Association of Journalists of Puerto Rico joined writers, professors and artists in an act of protest in front of the Department of Education in Hato Rey, where they read fragments of the books that were removed. Footage of a demonstration against the elimination of books in public school system was posted at YouTube.
Bloggers have also been commenting intensely.The writer Mayra Santos Febres says in Lugarmanigua [ES]:
Temo a la censura. Sobretodo le temo cuando se utiliza “la formación integral de nuestros niños y jóvenes” como excusa para privarlos del contacto con experiencias y sobretodo con libros que los ayuden a desarrollar herramientas para pensar. La reflexión tiene que hacerse en un contexto amplio, sin verjas ni “no pases”. Es imposible pensar: es decir, “sopesar ideas”, cuando estas ideas diferentes, divergentes son sacadas de en medio desde un principio. Cierto es que la educación debe tener en consideración la capacidad de jóvenes y niños para asimilar y digerir información. No vas a servirle churrasco a un bebé de cuatro meses que no tiene dientes. Pero los muchachos de undécimo grado que configuran el estudiantado de Escuelas Públicas de nuestro país, a su edad, ya tienen dientes. Tienen dientes, uñas y garras. Algunos ya tienen bebés de cuatro meses. Ya pueden comer churrasco.
I fear censorship, even more when the “integral formation of our children and youth” is used as an excuse to deprive them of contact and experience, and of books that might help them develop analytical tools. Reflection must be done in a broad context, without iron gates and “do not enter’s”. Its impossible to think, that is, to consider ideas, when different ideas are eliminated from the beginning. It is true that education must take into account the capacity of the young and the children to absorb and digest information. You are not going to give grilled meat to a four month-old baby who has no teeth. But at the age of the kids who are in the eleventh grade in the public schools of our country, they already have teeth. They have teeth, nails, and claws. Some of them even have four-month-old babies. They can eat grilled meat.
The legal scholar recently turned blogger Dora Nevares-Muñiz analyzed the controversy from a legal standpoint:
La censura de textos literarios de parte del Departamento de Educación es inconstitucional y viola derechos de los estudiantes… La censura, aparte de coartar el libre flujo de las ideas y la libertad de expresión atesorada en nuestra Constitución, constituye un acto de violencia de parte del Ejecutivo hacia unos estudiantes que tienen el derecho a recibir una educación que propenda al pleno desarrollo de su personalidad y al reconocimiento de los derechos y libertades fundamentales. El acto de censurar es de por sí un atentado a la libertad de pensamiento y expresión, típico de sociedades intolerantes y totalitarias…La censura no debe tener espacio en el sistema educativo. Una de las metas del sistema escolar debe ser que el estudiante internalice actitudes de tolerancia y respeto ante la diversidad y las personas que tienen ideas discrepantes. Este es uno de los primeros pasos para prevenir la violencia. Los libros censurados se leían en grado undécimo. Se trata de obras reconocidas en Puerto Rico y en el extranjero por su calidad literaria. Un estudiante de Escuela Superior debe tener desarrolladas las destrezas de pensamiento crítico y análisis lógico necesarias para analizar esos libros.
The Department of Education’s censorship of literary texts is unconstitutional and it infringes the rights of the students… Censorship not only restricts the free flow of ideas and the freedom of speech enshrined in our Constitution, but it also constitutes an act of violence perpetrated by the Executive branch against students who have the right to receive a complete education that leads them to the full development of their personalities and the recognition of their fundamental freedoms and rights. The act of censoring is an attempt against freedom of thought and expression, commonly seen in intolerant and totalitarian regimes.
Censorship should have no place in the education system. One of the objectives of the school system should be that students internalize tolerance and respect towards diversity and people who have different opinions. This is one of the first steps in order to prevent violence. The censored books used to be read in eleventh grade. They are well known books in Puerto Rico and other countries due to their literary quality. A high school student should have the necessary critical analytic and logical reasoning skills to be able to analyze these books.
In his blog Lecturas urbanas [ES], Javier Valentín Feliciano remembered his experience in the public school system in Puerto Rico:
Cuando cursé mis doce años de estudios en la escuela pública nunca conocí a ninguna de estas autoras puertorriqueñas, tampoco conocí a escritores hispanoamericanos que estaban en todo su auge como Gabriel García Márquez, el propio Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Luisa Valenzuela, la lista es inmensa. Tuve que esperar muchísimos años para poderme reconocer como hispanoamericano con estos autores. En la escuela pública no los leí, nunca los asignaron. Quién sabe y nunca los hubiera descubierto.
I never read any of these Puerto Rican authors during my 12 years in the public school system. I never read Hispanic-American writers who were at their peak, such as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes [one of the censored authors], Mario Vargas Llosa, Luis Valenzuela; the list is immense. I had to wait many years to be able to recognize myself as Hispanic-American with these authors. I never read them in school; they were never assigned. Who knows if I would have never discovered them.
*Bloggers posts were translated by the author.
French rapper censored-BBC
27-09-09
French rapper in censorship row
David Chazan
BBC News: July 29, 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8171389.stm
A 27-year-old rapper from Normandy, nicknamed by some the “French Eminem”, is at the centre of a political storm over censorship in France.
Orelsan has seen 10 of his concerts cancelled recently after the former Socialist presidential candidate, Segolene Royal, and other politicians complained that his lyrics encouraged violence against women.
Ms Royal even threatened to withdraw the public subsidy from one prestigious festival, Les Francofolies in La Rochelle, in her capacity as head of Poitou-Charentes regional council.
The organisers dropped Orelsan, whose real name is Aurelien Cotentin, from the bill shortly afterwards, complaining that Ms Royal had “positioned herself as a master-blackmailer”.
The move led the governing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) of President Nicolas Sarkozy to accuse Ms Royal of attacking freedom of expression, and of “intolerable” interference.
‘Fiction’
Ms Royal and other critics were particularly outraged over a song by the 27-year-old called Sale Pute, roughly translated as “Dirty Bitch”, which is about a man who wants to break the bones of his unfaithful girlfriend.
Orelsan says he no longer performs Sale Pute in public
“I hate you, I want you to die a slow death. I want you to become pregnant and lose the baby,” he chants in one verse. “You are just a pig who should go straight to the slaughter house.”
But Orelsan says the song, which he no longer performs in public, was never meant to be taken seriously.
“This song tells the story of a man who sees his girlfriend cheating, comes back home, drinks and writes her an e-mail in which he insults her,” he says.
“But it’s a fiction. It’s nothing real. I didn’t write it about my ex-girlfriend or anything so you can’t really take the song personally. I play a role in it, that’s all.”
“It’s like a book or a film about a murderer or a criminal,” he adds.
Historical parallel
Orelsan’s new album, Perdu d’Avance, has been removed from public libraries in Paris because of concern over what feminist and women’s groups say are his sexist, homophobic and violent lyrics.
But the French Culture Minister, Frederic Mitterrand, nephew of the late President Francois Mitterrand, says Orelsan, like other artists, should be free to express himself and that his concerts should not have been cancelled.
Mr Mitterrand drew a parallel between the rapper and the 19th Century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud.
“Rimbaud wrote much more violent things that went on to become classics,” he said.
However, Ms Royal said the rapper’s work was offensive to women and that the issue was not censorship.
Women’s groups argue that the law should be as tough on sexism as it is on racism.
Regional councillor Michele Loup says Orelsan’s songs “are full of hatred and violence against women”.
“If he wants to do that, OK, but we consider that public money shouldn’t finance it,” she adds.
Ms Loup and other local politicians have led a lobbying effort to persuade local authorities to drop him from festivals which they are helping to finance.
Disaffected youth
But many commentators agree with the government that this comes dangerously close to censorship.
“Art doesn’t have to be politically correct,” says Stephane Davet, a music journalist on the newspaper Le Monde. “If you censor this, you could end up censoring many respected authors.”
Mr Davet says politicians should try to tune into what rappers have to say about disaffected young people.
He points out that rappers were predicting riots in French suburbs long before they happened in 2005.
Orelsan, he says, “gives a very interesting description, a pretty dark description of a generation of frustrated, white trash kids, born with a PlayStation in their hands, spending their time on the internet, looking for sex websites, and one should listen to that instead of saying, we should censor him”.
At the Gare de Lyon railway station in Paris, I came across groups of teenagers practising dance moves as if the station concourse were a studio or a gym.
Not surprisingly, they supported Orelsan, although several of them told me that they did not like their younger brothers and sisters to listen to rap songs with violent lyrics.
They said politicians did not try to understand their generation.
“They want us to be exactly like them,” one youth told me. “They don’t try to help us and they want to take away our personality.”
That is also a predicament recognised by Orelsan himself. In one of his less controversial songs, he raps: “Old folk don’t understand what’s going on in the heads of the young.”
European Bodyworlds exhibits withdrawn
Matthew Hunt: September 22, 2009
http://www.matthewhunt.com/blog/2009/09/european-bodyworlds-exhibits-withdrawn.html
Bodyworlds, the anatomical exhibition of preserved human corpses organised by Gunther VonHagens, has been touring the world for the past twelve years. Famously, when the exhibition came to London in 2002, VonHagens performed a public autopsy which was later televised.
This year, two corpses posed in mid-coitus were added to the exhibition, though they had to be removed before the exhibition was shown in Cologne (Germany), Augsburg (Germany), and Zurich (Switzerland).
[FACT comments: This is precisely the rub with all moral order campaigns whether conducted by religion or government.]
More Teen Births in Religious States
Mother Jones: September 16, 2009
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/09/more-teen-births-religious-states
Why’s is this not a surprise? The states with the strongest conservative religious beliefs also tend to have the highest rates of teen pregnancies and births. This according to a new paper forthcoming in Reproductive Health.
I posted a blog on a similar story a while back about religious teens having more abortions.
Live Science reports that this little piece of paradox is likely due to the fact that communities with high religiosity frown upon contraception as well as sex education. The combination is as good as a euphemism for pregnancy.
The top 10 states for conservative religious beliefs:
1. Mississippi
2. Alabama
3. South Carolina
4. Tennessee
5. Louisiana
6. Utah
7. Arkansas
8. North Carolina
9. Kentucky
10. Oklahoma
The top 10 states for teen births:
1. Mississippi
2. New Mexico
3. Texas
4. Arkansas
5. Arizona
6. Oklahoma
7. Nevada
8. Tennessee
9. Kentucky
10. Georgia
Researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh speculates: “We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself.”
‘Cause nobody can do that. Ask Bristol Palin.
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Recession Behind Bars
Kenneth E. Hartman
The New York Times: September 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06hartman.html
EVERY weekday morning the prison’s not on lockdown, the yard holds its collective breath waiting for the pale-orange package cart to appear through multiple layers of chain-link and razor-wire fences. For most prisoners, this lumbering vessel is their only tangible, physical connection back to the free world. The last couple of years the cart has arrived less often and with visibly lighter loads.
We get broadcast television, so the state of the economy outside is no secret. Our families and friends tend to come from the segments of society that are the worst off in the best of times, and worse off still in times like these. Our mothers and fathers, wives and children, those to whom the ties that bind haven’t been unbound by the course of our lives, tell us how hard it is out there.
The first inkling of financial difficulties in here surfaced in the chow hall. All of a sudden prison officials became concerned about our overeating. In the last couple of years, our brown plastic trays have started to look and feel a lot emptier. Even the old staples, beans and rice, shrank into bite-sized portions. Luxury items like frosted cake and meat cut from the carcass of a once-living thing vanished. The new menus, chock full of potatoes and meat substitutes, seem right out of a Spartan’s cookbook.
Prison is a world reflected in a looking glass, however. The past 25 years were generally prosperous for California; the economy boomed and fortunes were made in the sunny San Fernando Valley. But during this time, the lives of prisoners became much drearier. We were forced into demeaning uniforms, with neon orange letters spelling out “prisoner,” and lost most of the positive programs like conjugal visits and college education that we had had since the ’70s. Money was flowing outside the prison walls, but new “get tough” policies against criminals were causing our population, and our costs, to soar.
It is a quirk of California politics that it is among the bluest of states but has some of the reddest of laws. No politician here ever lost an election for being too tough on crime or prisoners. Consequently, all through the ’80s and ’90s billions of dollars were poured into a historic prison-building boom. Private airplane pilots tell me it’s easy to navigate at night from San Diego to Los Angeles and on up the Central Valley to Sacramento by simply following the prisons’ glowing lights. Good times in the free world meant, in here, ever-longer sentences, meaner regulations and ever-decreasing interest in rehabilitation. “Costs be damned; lock ’em up and be done with it” became the unofficial motto of the Department of Corrections.
The last time I received a visit from my family, in early July, the air-conditioning in the visiting room had been broken for more than a month. This matters because my prison is in the high desert north of Los Angeles. Temperatures here in the summer commonly rise above 100 dusty, windy degrees. Pack 150 people into an airless room and you’ve got the makings for human meltdown. Two industrial-sized fans only made a hot situation noisy, too.
The next day I asked one of the administrators what could be done to get the air-conditioning fixed, and he told me an amazing story. The free-world contractor who services the prison’s air-conditioning systems had refused to come out to replace the part that was broken, because the state owed the company tens of thousands of dollars in back fees and could pay only in i.o.u.’s. There would be no cool air until the state’s budget negotiations were concluded.
Now that the economy is suffering, there is talk of reforming the prisons, of reviving the discredited concept of rehabilitation, of letting some prisoners out early. Some people have even mentioned doing away with the death penalty because of the exorbitant cost to the state of guaranteed appeals. For those of us who have endured a generation of policies intended explicitly to inflict pain, this has a surreal quality to it. After all, it was only a year ago that the state authorities were planning the next phase of prison expansion. Obviously, all the passionate arguments that have been made about the moral wrongs of mass incarceration, of disproportionately affected communities, of abysmal treatment and civil rights violations were just so much hot air. Only when society ran out of ready cash did prison reform become worthy of serious consideration. What this says about the free world is unclear to me, but it doesn’t feel like a good thing.
The talk in here contains an element of schadenfreude. When the TV shows legislators complaining about how deep in the hole the state budget is, laughter fills the day room. Our captor turns out to be simply inept.
From the four-inch-wide window in the back of my cell, I watched, for seven years, the construction of a housing tract across the street — a subdivision we call Prison View Estates. We marvel at the hubris of building chockablock stucco mini-mansions within shouting distance of a maximum-security prison. Today, a year after the gaudy balloons from the grand opening deflated, the row of houses directly across from my window looks to be unoccupied.
From my cell I can also observe the inner roadway on which prison vehicles pass. A fleet of new, shining-white super-security transportation vans still drives by daily. Leviathan hasn’t quite adjusted to the Golden State’s diminished firmament.
Kenneth E. Hartman, the author of the forthcoming “Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars,” was sentenced in 1980 to life without parole for murder.
Lockerbie: Megrahi Was Framed
John Pilger
Dissident Voice: September 16th, 2009
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/09/lockerbie-megrahi-was-framed/
The hysteria over the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber reveals much about the political and media class on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Britain. From Gordon Brown’s “repulsion” to Barack Obama’s “outrage”, the theater of lies and hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those who call themselves journalists. “But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?” whined a BBC reporter to the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. “What will you say to your constituents, then?”
Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he “pays” for his “heinous crime”: the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose “compassion” allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to “face justice from a higher power.” Amen.
The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as “a babbling brook of bullshit.” Such eloquence summarizes the circus of Megrahi’s release.
No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of “strategic interests.”
“The endgame came down to damage limitation,” said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, “because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi’s] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice.” New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft — he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shop owner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognize him in the courtroom.
The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, “discovered” in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in Megrahi’s suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was “transferred” through two airports undetected to Flight 103.
A “key secret witness” at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi and his co-accused al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted) loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a “protected witness.” The defense exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyans’ conviction, up to $4m as a reward.
Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in “neutral” Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a “mass of conflicting evidence” and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance.. Their 90-page “opinion”, wrote Foot, “is a remarkable document that claims an honored place in the history of British miscarriages of justice”. (Lockerbie — the Flight from Justice by Paul Foot can be downloaded from www.private-eye.co.uk for £5).
Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt canceled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the “architect” of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr. on 11 January 1990, she agreed to “low-key” the disaster after their intelligence services had reported “beyond doubt” that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group contracted by Tehran as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship’s captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer.”
Perversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran’s support as he built a “coalition” to expel his wayward client from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. “Like lazy and overfed fish,” wrote Foot, “the British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and op en warmongering against Libya.” The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since then, a US Defense Intelligence Agency report, obtained under Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely bomber; it was to be centerpiece of Megrahi’s defense.
In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi’s case for appeal. “The commission is of the view,” said its chairman, Dr Graham Forbes, “that based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”
The words “miscarriage of justice” are missing entirely from the current furor, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that “higher power.” What a disgrace.
