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By Les Blough, Editor
Axis of Logic
Thursday, Aug 28, 2003
Axis of Logic News & Information
Finding Clarity in the 21st Century Mediaplex
Our editorial group is comprised of a group of authors and researchers from across the country who come from a variety of cultural and professional backgrounds. We write, research and distribute news and information often not presented in the major news outlets. We also announce action alerts, conferences and seminars. If you wish to be taken off this list-serve, please reply accordingly. A free-flow of information is the bedrock of real democracy! Help us expand this service by forwarding this newsletter and referring a friend to our website. Have you asked someone to subscribe to the Axis newsletter at www.axisoflogic.com? Also, please remember that your comments, essays and article submissions are always welcome!
The form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation
exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
U.S. MILITARY
Frankensteins in the Pentagon: DARPA's Creepy Bioengineering Program, Cheryl Seal, The News Insider, August 2003 - DARPA Bioengineering Program Seeks to Turn Soldiers Into Cyborgs
POLITICAL ACTION!
There are times when a progressive demonstration, even a large activity, is little more than a symbolic protest. There are other times when a mass demonstration can function as a catalyst, a trigger unleashing new political energy; or serve as a vivid expression of a new genuine grassroots movement capable of stirring the country and changing the political landscape.
How do we treat our Heroes in the Anti-War Movement?, Les Blough, Axis of Logic Editorial, August 13, 2003
MEDIA
PROTEST! Corporate Media under-reporting deaths of U.S. Soldiers & Iraqis. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), August 19, 2003
He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit in the centre, and enjoy bright day:
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;
Himself his own dungeon.
-John Milton
PALESTINE
John Pilger: "Palestine is Still the Issue" . On your computer monitor - Watch this riveting film produced by John Pilger., Information Clearing House
CIVIL RIGHTS
Silencing the Others, Sheila Samples, Axis of Logic Editorial, August 26, 2003
Like so many others, when he came to America in 1987, he was full of hope. He was only 17, but his plans for education and success extended far into the future. Most of all, he wanted to live in peace and to enjoy the freedoms and justice upon which he truly believed this great country was founded.
"It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again."
-from Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
WORKERS & LABOR
"War Makes Privatization Easy" In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime, David Bacon, Counterpunch, August 25, 2003
Iraq's legal code may be in disarray. The streets of Baghdad may be filled with thieves and hijackers who seem to have little fear of being arrested. But US occupation authorities seem to have no trouble identifying one crime, at least. For the four million people out of work in Iraq, protest is against the law.
Work is good when it engages what Huston Smith and others have called "the vertical dimension" of life, the deepest and highest values and motivations that underlie the universe and all human life and activity. To see work as a day-to-day expression of value makes it of far more than economic significance. Then it is no less than the place where our temporal and spiritual dimensions converge to create acts in the world. When those possibilities are blocked or lost, the personal costs are invariably great.
- Peter N. Gillingham
THE ECONOMY
Analysts Predict Record $480B Deficit, Jim Abrams, Associated Press, August 26, 2003
Washington - The federal government is heading toward a record $480 billion deficit in 2004 and will rack up red ink of almost $1.4 trillion over the next decade, according to the latest analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
High oil prices hurt economic growth? Cheap oil fantasies and neo-Conservative delirium..., VHeadline (Venezuela's Electronic News), August 26, 2003
Defense Spending Drives Economy, Anna Willard, Reuters, August 28, 2003
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Soaring defense spending is driving the U.S. economy, but not doing too much for the unemployment picture as Americans still struggled to find jobs and corporations saw their profits fall, government reports on Thursday showed.
If you know something, really know it, and don't act on it,
then it will go sour on you, it will fester inside you.
E.F. Shumacher - from
his book Good Work.
LATIN AND SOUTH AMERICA
"Maybe the Zapatista Caracoles Could Illuminate Ecuador Movement’s Path", -La Jornada, translated by Narco News
The indigenous peoples of Latin America have spent more than a decade promoting social transformations that overcome racism and exclusion, and that permit them to imagine and construct different manners of coexistence and public regulation. They bring more than a decade, really, centuries, developing paths to achieve their goals.
Chavez Supporters March in Caracas, Jeremy Le Page, YellowTimes, August 26, 2003
Toronto (NFTF.org) -- Pounding drums and whistles announced their presence. Supporters of President Hugo Chavez flooded the streets of the nation's capital city Caracas this weekend, with up to 500,000 people shouting their devotion to the president's "Bolivarian Revolution"
Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce
the most--that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and
most menial tasks, have the least.
- Eugene V. Debs
AFRICA
"Our policy with respect to the continent of Africa at best has been a policy that is inconsistent and incoherent," said NAACP Executive Director Kweisi Mfume, in Miami Beach last weekend for the organization’s annual convention. "We've looked away in many instances because Africa was not politically correct or politically cute."
EDUCATION
No Child Left Behind — Except in Dallas, James Waghorne, Steet News Service, August 4, 2003
I have been told stories over the last two years that sickened me concerning the treatment of homeless people Dallas. I never thought to think that these things would include children and certainly not by an educational institution.
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
- John Berger
UNITED STATES
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?, Carol Giacomo, Reuters, August 24, 2003
Is Hope Lost for Clean Elections in 2004 and Beyond?, Vincent L. Guarisco, Axis of Logic Editorial, August 26, 2003
Forgiveness is better than revenge, for forgiveness is the sign of a gentle nature, but revenge is the sign of a savage nature.
-Epictetus
IRAQ
U.S. Soldier Killed in Iraq; Troops Hunt Guerrillas, U.S., Death Toll Continues to Mount, Andrew Marshall with Axis Editor's note, Reuters, August 26, 2003
Fisk: The Americans talk of criminal and subversive elements but this is a guerrilla war. They are not safe anywhere, Robert Fisk, The Independent (UK), August 21, 2003
In official US military documents, they 03are called "attackers" or just plain "Iraqis". - In the press handouts printed by the occupation authorities, they are - in the grand style of Soviet propaganda during the Afghan war - "subversive elements".
War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for
the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.
- Ernest Becker
AFGHANISTAN
The face of Afghanistan's resistance, Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, August 26, 2003
CHAMAN/SPIN BOLDAK, Pakistan-Afghanistan border - The significant increase in the number and nature of attacks on US targets, as well as on the Afghan administration, provides indisputable evidence that the Taliban are back with a vengeance, especially in the south of the country.
INDIA
Coca-Cola in India accused of leaving farms parched and land poisoned, Paul Brown, The Guardian (UK), August 25, 2003
The largest Coca-Cola plant in India is being accused of putting thousands of farmers out of work by draining the water that feeds their wells, and poisoning the land with waste sludge that the company claims is fertiliser. .
Zen wants to have this last trace of God-consciousness, if possible, obliterated. That is why Zen Masters advise us not to linger where the Buddha is, and to pass quickly away where he is not. All the training of the monk in the Zendo, in practice as well as in theory, is based on this principle of "meritless deed". Poetically this idea is expressed as follows:
The bamboo-shadows move over the stone steps
as if to sweep them, but no dust is stirred;
The moon is reflected deep in the pool, but the
water shows no trace of its penetration
- D.T. Suzuki
"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music."
-George Carlin
Thank you for reading. For great daily coverage of under-reported news & comment -
visit us daily at www.axisoflogic.com!
END
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