Egypt: 'Facebook generation kickstarted it'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/29/egypt-mubarak-tunisia-palestine
Other despots should quail


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/16/tunisia-first-arab-revolution-ben-ali
Tunisia: the first Arab revolution

Chris Hedges on the Liberal Class

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/where_liberals_go_to_feel_good_20110124/


"The only gatherings worth attending from now on are acts that organize civil disobedience, which is why I will be at Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., at noon March 19 to protest the eighth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq."

Barry Wain's book: Maznah's review and Q&A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2amKDOFQE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTyyVXPgs20&feature=related

'Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times' Dec 2009

“We will protest, we will protest, until the government collapses!”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/world/africa/18tunis.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

"In the streets, the Tunisian revolution continued to evolve. It began in the hard-pressed provinces with demands for more jobs, especially for Tunisia’s soaring number of young college graduates, nearly a third of whom are estimated to be unemployed or seriously underemployed. It spread to the workers, small business owners and the coastal professional class as a revolt mainly against the flagrant corruption associated with Mr. Ben Ali’s family.

But on Monday, the protesters in the streets appeared more working class, including some hardened, veteran dissenters abused by Mr. Ben Ali’s government."

Ben Anderson: The Chinese in Indonesia

http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_13_/pdf/banderson.pdf

"There hasn’t been major anti-Chinese violence now for a

decade. The last one was in 1998  and actually the main victors

were Chinese. The problem is that the state policy was to reeducate

the Chinese in many ways.  Chinese were completely

excluded from political power. In the whole time there was only

one Chinese minister—who was a  crony—and he was appointed

in the last weeks of the regime. At no time were they in any

bureaucratic positions; Chinese were excluded completely from

the military and the police. So what were they going to do if they

didn’t fill professional positions and become doctors or lawyers?

They created businesses, so they became more visible as a group

that couldn’t do anything except business and who got rich and

became arrogant, which is indeed very often what did happen.

The problem with the Chinese community in Indonesia and in

fact with the overseas Chinese population generally is that this

was a  community which had no regrets and which had no

memory. Prestige and influence depended heavily on money,

something Kwee criticized all the time. Chinese were in the habit

of a visible and ostentatious display of money, which they saw as

perfectly reasonable. It looked terrible from the outside. And it’s

interesting, in many of the earlier riots, the actions aren’t directed

against the person who was Chinese. The most famous one was

the one in 1963. In fact nobody was hurt, but hundreds of

automobiles were burned. Houses were burned, not taken over.

Basically it was a protest against Chinese arrogance.

At the same time, one has to say that, as pretty often happens,

minorities produce courageous people precisely because they can’t

have political power. Far and away the most famous human rights

lawyer Yap Thiam Hien, who died 8  or 9  years ago [Yap  Thiam

Hien died  in 1989. —ed.] was a  national hero to everybody, and

wasn’t in the regime. He was incredibly brave and went to prison

a  couple of times. By having things barred to them by a regime,

perhaps part of the energy flows into this kind of heroism which

native Indonesians with much different opportunities are less

likely to do."

Lumumba: 50 Years After

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/opinion/17hochschild.html

An Assassination’s Long Shadow - By ADAM HOCHSCHILD

"TODAY, millions of people on another continent are observing the 50th anniversary of an event few Americans remember, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. A slight, goateed man with black, half-framed glasses, the 35-year-old Lumumba was the first democratically chosen leader of the vast country, nearly as large as the United States east of the Mississippi, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

This treasure house of natural resources had been a colony of Belgium ... "

Why the South seceded 150 years ago

Succinct, this also busts five common myths on the causes of the US Civil War:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/07/AR2011010703178.html

By the author of 'Lies My Teacher Told Me':   http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

Hobsbawm on the US Empire (2004)

http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=7315

"The United States has in my view three assets at the present, from an imperial point of view. Possibly four.  One is, it has enormous techno-military superiority. Way beyond what anybody else can possibly reach. 

Second, it is, thanks to the fact of having virtually uncontrolled immigration, of the developed countries of the world, the old Western developed countries, the only one that is still growing.  It's a very big country which keeps growing, unlike Europe, for instance, which demographically speaking is not growing. 

Third, it has an enormous accumulation of wealth and economic influence. But especially, over the last fifty years, the enormous accumulation of what you might call the rules of economic transactions have been very largely since 1945 rewritten in North American terms. In much the same way that international world credit agencies, Standard and Poors and others, are actually U.S. agencies which determine what other states can borrow or not.

 And finally I suppose you could add, although I'm not quite so clear about it, the cultural influence of American popular culture and the English language.

As against this, the United States, even big as it is, is a small and a relatively diminishing part of the global population. The United States is a distinctly diminishing part of the world economy. A lot of people keep asking, is the growth of the world economy going to resume? The growth of the world economy has resumed, but not so much in the West. It has resumed in China and in Asia. We see the relative decline of the American economy; not so much as a holding company of people who own things, but as an economy it is declining."  

The Pillars of Creation: Eagle Nebula

The Eagle Nebula:  7,000 light-years away.

http://outerspaced.blogspot.com/

Earth in the Whole

"Those riveting Earth photos reframed everything. For the first time humanity saw itself from outside.  The visible features from space were living blue ocean, living green–brown continents, dazzling polar ice and a busy atmosphere, all set like a delicate jewel in vast immensities of hard–vacuum space.  Humanity's habitat looked tiny, fragile and rare. Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to."

http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=31

Hobsbawm on His Memoir

Hobsbawm has defined and explained the progress of the last century as mankind learning to 'live in expectation of apocalypse'. 


http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=7315
" ... the B side, the flip side, of the main record, which is my history of the twentieth century, Age of Extremes."

"If I want to say briefly what personal effect it had on me I would say the first effect, of not merely living under these circumstances but also of having a kind of difficult childhood, which you can read about in my book, [was that I learned that you] handle your problems yourself. Don't talk about them. If you can't solve them, nobody else will. That's one. 

Second, try and not have any illusions about the world you live in. That sounds funny for somebody that has a lot of illusions, but the fact is that you had hopes. But try, living in this situation, not to have uncritical hopes. 

And the third, not to be a quitter. To stick to what you want. The only thing that would keep you going is a firm hold on yourself and your loyalties and what you wanted to do and what you felt you had to do."

Singing

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times

- Bertolt Brecht