Depuis l’ouverture des frontières (accords de Schengen et autres absurdités), dealers et délinquants étrangers prospèrent dans nos murs. Ils ne paient pas d’amendes et ignorent les billets d’avion qu’on leur offre pour qu’ils rentrent chez eux. De plus, on les relâche dans la nature où ils s’empressent de récidiver.

Sachant que la loi ne permet pas de renvoyer les sans-papiers, ils brûlent tout simplement leurs passeports!

De l’irresponsabilité endémique de la gauche genevoise:

Pourquoi personne ne peut conseiller ou raisonner les édiles genevois de gauche à ce sujet. C’est parce que la plupart du temps ils sont en état « d’ébriété politique » et, réagissant comme les universitaires, ils savent, tout simplement! …  (texte entier).

Conférence et Débat public le 16 septembre 2010 de 13h30 à 19h00 à Uni-Dufour, Auditoire Rouiller, Rue du Général-Dufour 24, 1204 Genève, en présence de Madame Ruth Dreyfuss, entrée libre, inscription souhaitée jusqu’au 14 septembre 2010: par e-mail, ou par Tél. 022 348 07 17 /Répondeur.

Accueil et bienvenue à 13.30h.

Flourishing drug demand in the U.S. and Canada has combined with the destruction of Mexico’s traditional economy to increase the power of the Mexican drug cartels. At the same time, the cartels are at war over the drug market in Mexico, with drastic results including the recent massacre of 72 undocumented migrants in Northern Mexico.

Bio of Bruce Livesey: … (full text – and comments of registred members).

In slightly over a month, on October 7, the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan will enter its tenth year.

The conflict represents the longest continuous combat operations in the history of the United States and Afghanistan alike. With the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the only time in its existence activating its Article 5 mutual military assistance clause in September 2001 and thus entering the Afghan fray, European nations that had not been at war since the Second World War are now engaged in an endless combat mission. 

There are 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 120,000 of them under the command of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Military personnel from over a quarter of the 192 members of the United Nations.

They include soldiers from almost every European country, several Asia-Pacific states, and nations in the Americas and the Middle East … //

… On August 24 Australia – a NATO Contact Country partner along with Japan, New Zealand and South Korea – lost its 41st soldier in Afghanistan. With 1,550 troops in the country, Australia is the largest non-NATO contributor.

On the same day Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, announced that Australian troops will stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014: “We will still be there…beyond the two to four years [scheduled for training Afghan army units], for a period of time.” [18]

Last week Singapore deployed a 52-troop Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Task Group to southern Afghanistan, which “will operate out of Multinational Base Tarin Kowt to augment the International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF’s) surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities in Uruzgan….” [19]

NATO’s role in Asia is not limited to 120,000 troops in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It is steadily deepening military partnerships with an expanding array of Asia-Pacific nations.

It is also consolidating its grip on the three former Soviet republics in the South Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, all of which have troops serving under the Alliance in Afghanistan.

The Ministry of Transport of Caspian Sea nation Azerbaijan announced earlier this month that “NATO is expected to increase shipping to Afghanistan via Georgia and Azerbaijan,” in particular that “A part of the equipment [of] the troops withdrawn from Iraq…will be sent to Afghanistan via Turkey, Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan.” An Azerbaijani government official estimated that “NATO countries transport 1,500 containers to Afghanistan via Azerbaijan every month.” [20]

In October NATO will conduct a regional training course on border security in Azerbaijan for Central Asian and other countries. According to a news source in Azerbaijan, currently “training is carried out with the involvement of Iraqi and Afghan border guards…at the State Border Service’s base.” [21]

The war in Afghanistan provides long-range integrated combat training for global NATO and a foundation for the U.S. to build a far-reaching military network unprecedented in scope. (full long text).

Pour passer de l’amour du pouvoir à la puissance de l’amour.

Inscription pour l’atelier RELATIONS ET JEUX DE POUVOIR:
veuillez d’abord copier et remplir le formulaire suivant et le renvoyer à mon secrétariat à l’adresse : info.jjc@videotron.caCette adresse email est protégée contre les robots des spammeurs, vous devez activer Javascript pour la voir … (suite à voir sur son site).

Lié avec picture of the year, avec Swissness and Islamic fundamentalism, avec Burqa versus Human Rights, avec THE BURQA: PRISON OR PROTECTION, avec a video: Inside Story – Burqa ban in France? – 25 June 09, 24.20 min.

Après que les plus hautes autorités religieuses musulmanes ont déclaré que les vêtements qui couvrent la totalité du corps et du visage ne relèvent pas du commandement religieux mais de la tradition, wahhabite (Arabie Saoudite) pour l’un, pachtoune (Afghanistan/Pakistan) pour l’autre, allez-vous continuer à cacher l’intégralité de votre visage? 

Ainsi dissimulée au regard d’au- trui, vous devez bien vous rendre compte que vous suscitez la défiance et la peur, des enfants comme des adultes. Sommes-nous à ce point méprisables et impurs à vos yeux pour que vous nous refusiez tout contact, toute relation, et jusqu’à la connivence d’un sourire ? Dans une démocratie moderne, où l’on tente d’instaurer transparence et égalité des sexes, vous nous signifiez brutalement que tout ceci n’est pas votre affaire, que les relations avec les autres ne vous concernent pas et que nos combats ne sont pas les vôtres.

Alors je m’interroge: pourquoi ne pas gagner les terres saoudiennes ou afghanes où nul ne vous de mandera de montrer votre visage, où vos filles seront voilées à leur tour, où votre époux pourra être polygame et vous répudier quand bon lui semble, ce qui fait tant souffrir nombre de femmes là- bas?

En vérité, vous utilisez les libertés démocratiques pour les retourner contre la démocratie. Sub version, provocation ou ignorance, le scandale est moins l’offense de votre rejet que la gifle que vous adressez à toutes vos soeurs opprimées qui, elles, risquent la mort pour jouir enfin des libertés que vous méprisez … (texte entier).

As students return to school this week, many will open their history books to learn that 90 years ago today women were given the right to vote when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was signed into law. The history books will explain how this event began to radically transform the role of women in our society. Today, women have more opportunities than ever before. For the first time, more women attend and graduate college than men, and women now make up half the workforce. 

In recent years we have witnessed Nancy Pelosi become the first woman elected Speaker of the House of Representatives; we’ve seen Hillary Clinton come closer to winning a major party nomination for president of the United States than any woman before her; and now, for the first time, we have three sitting female U.S. Supreme Court justices. Despite these historic milestones, women are still denied the one thing that would make us truly equal to men – equal protection of the law, which all men receive thanks to the 14th Amendment.

“When history books and the media celebrate women’s successful fight for the right to vote, they often imply that women now have constitutional equality,” says NOW President Terry O’Neill. “The fact is, sex discrimination against women is not unconstitutional, and statues prohibiting it have no constitutional foundation. It is time to write women into the Constitution by ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment” … (full text).

AT LAST, it’s out. Or rather, as is the way with these things, large chunks of it have been leaked to the press. The report by the United Nations high commissioner for human rights  into war crimes and human-rights abuses during Congo’s wars from 1996 to 2003 has been long in the making, and is also long in the reading—about 600 pages, apparently. The collapse of the country then known as Zaire in the mid-1990s precipitated Africa’s first continental war, involving eight countries, and caused the high number of deaths of any single conflict since the second world war—maybe as many as 4m in all. 

Many countries’ armies, militia groups and rebel groups were involved in the killings, and all get dishonourable mentions in the report. But attention will focus on the Rwandans, partly because they started Congo’s collapse by invading the country in 1996, but also because the present regime of Paul Kagame has been most vigorous in denying that its forces did anything wrong at all during that awful conflict, despite many peoples’ suspicions to the contrary. Indeed, Mr Kagame has generally taken a “holier than thou” attitude to the whole Congolese imbroglio, arguing that his soldiers alone had the right to act in eastern Congo, to hunt down the Hutu genocidaires who had fled there after the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

But the UN report will prove deeply embarrassing reading for Mr Kagame and his Western allies as it alleges that far from merely finding and killing genocidaires, Mr Kagame’s army and allied militias knowingly committed wholesale killings of Hutus, often “mostly children, women, old and ill people”. Indeed, the report goes on to say that some of the attacks could have amounted to a genocide, “if proved before a competent court” … (full text).

This film explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the “elitist theory of democracy” and the relationship between war, propaganda and class … //

… WATCH THE FULL-LENGTH FILM ONLINE, 99.02 min.

(full text).

October 2003 — The America I once knew seems like a distant memory, says one journalist after another these days. But how about this: “Times such as ours have always bred defeatism and despair.” Re-reading Einstein’s writings on peace, it is clear that America has been through an equally insane fit in the past – such as the madness following World War II.

Einstein was referring to the rush to build more A-bombs, to develop H-bombs, the plans to launch preventive war against a destroyed and helpless Russia (no UN “food for oil” program then), conscription, the Korean war, loyalty oaths, McCarthyism, and the electrocution of the Rosenbergs. 

The rest of the world was revulsed then as it is today, but then it was devastated economically, weak politically, without TV or Internet. After World War II the US emerged virtually unscathed as the victor. Yes, 300,000 US soldiers died, but compare that with losses in Europe and Russia – far more than 30,000,000. And US industry and housing were intact. A colossus in a world of pygmies, and yet it was to launch the most horrific and costly arms race in the history of mankind.

Einstein wrote: “The ‘Communist menace’ is being used here by reactionary politicians as a pretext to mask their attack on civil rights. The population is too misguided, and the intellectuals too intimidated, to defend their Constitutional rights… We have come a long way toward the establishment of a fascist regime. The similarity of general conditions here to those in the Germany of 1932 is quite obvious. What might happen if, in addition, the dreaded economic depression were actually to take place!” (private letter 1954)

Einstein was a lifelong advocate of détente. While criticizing Soviet internal policies, he sympathized with the dangers that the Soviet Union faced, which convinced him, on the whole, that it was the US that posed the greater threat to world peace. He also counted on Europe, the nonaligned countries (at that time the most prominent being India), and the smaller countries: “The less powerful nations may band together and thus force an international solution; but by no means do I overestimate the realization of that hope.” (1954)

Supranational Government: … (full long text).

A team of scientists published a paper today in the journal Science which provides some hopeful news.

Specifically, a team of scientists have discovered a new species of oil-eating microbes which thrive in the deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico:

The biological effects and expected fate of the vast amount of oil in the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon blowout are unknown due to the depth and magnitude of this event. Here, we report that the dispersed hydrocarbon plume stimulated deep-sea indigenous {gamma}-proteobacteria that are closely related to known petroleum-degraders. 

Hydrocarbon-degrading genes coincided with the concentration of various oil contaminants. Changes in hydrocarbon composition with distance from the source and incubation experiments with environmental isolates demonstrate faster-than-expected hydrocarbon biodegradation rates at 5°C.

Even better, the scientists believe that this new species (pronounced “gamma-proteo-bacteria”) may not suck up as much oxygen as previously-discovered species:

Based on these results, the potential exists for intrinsic bioremediation of the oil plume in the deep-water column without substantial oxygen drawdown.

This discovery is especially important given that a leading expert on oil-eating microbes – Dr. David Valentine – failed to find any of the leading known oil-eating bacteria in the deepwater plumes.

Many well-known bacteria – such as Salmonella, Yersinia (plague), Vibrio (cholera), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (lung infections in hospitalised or cystic fibrosis patients) and E. coli (food poisoning), as well as a number of geothermic ocean vent dwellers which eat methane or hydrogen sulfide – are members of the Gammaproteobacteria class of microbes. The scientists found a BP oil-eating species within that broader class of bacteria.

As Lawrence Berkeley Labs – a U.S Department of Energy lab – notes, the new species is closely related to Oceanospirillales, an order within the Gammaproteobacteria class of microbes: … (full text and Comments).

Pour fêter ses 5 ans d’existence et vous remercier pour votre soutien, l’ONG Graines de Paix vous convie à un verre de l’amitié. Nous vous attendons avec plaisir le Mardi 7 septembre 2010, de 18h30 à 20h30, RSVP avant jeudi 2 septembre

Graines de Paix, Rue Cornavin 11, CH-1201 Genève, Tel +41 22 700 9414, e-mail, Website /Homepage. A trouver aussi sur fr.wikipedia.
Voir aussi: Graines de Paix et l’Europe: en français; ainsi qu’en anglais; en russe, en arabe et en espanol.

• Nouvelle donne géopolitique au Proche-Orient, par Thierry Meyssan, 23 août 2010;
• Campagne contre l’indépendance de la Suisse –Cessons de trahir notre pays petit à petit, par Marianne Wüthrich, no 33, 23 août 2010;
• La Russie dessèche: l’arme climatique américaine est-elle en jeu? août 2010 – Source: RIA Novosti du 3/8/10;
• Le travail au service de la communauté, complément au travail rémunéré, par Hans Christoph Binswanger et Yolanda Kappeler*, août 2010. – Extrait du livre «Vorwärts zur Mässigung. Perspektive einer nachhaltigen Wirtschaft» par Hans ­Christoph Binswanger, Murmann-Verlag, Hamburg 2009.

http://www.davidicke.com/headlines/37830-the-torture-of-credo-mutwa-and-the-theft-of-the-necklace-of-mysteries-

and another video: CREDO MUTWA and DAVID ICKE: TEMPLES OF PEACE, 8.23 min.

http://www.davidicke.com/headlines/37884-credo-mutwa-and-david-icke–temples-of-peace

Recent statistics show that there are nearly one million BlackBerries in use in India compared to over 600 million other mobile phones. The obvious question one asks is this: why is the government so agitated by BlackBerry when its numbers are so small, while no fuss was made in the mass proliferation of Nokias, Samsungs and Motorolas?

Does this mean that the BlackBerry company, RIM (Research in Motion), is the only one bothered about our right to privacy, while all the other mobile phone brands and service providers like Airtel, Loop, and Vodafone don’t give a damn?

As it happens, the right to privacy isn’t an issue that particularly bothers us as a nation. It bothers Americans a lot and they are constantly fighting legal and political battles to preserve their privacy, sometimes going to absurd lengths, at least to our unconcerned eyes. 

This is particularly so now in the age of terrorism, when time and again phone tapping, hacking into e-mails and other forms of electronic surveillance have enabled American and British authoritiesto foil many major terrorist attacks before they happened. Shouldn’t we, therefore, sacrifice a little privacy for the greater good? we ask virtuously.

As it happens, it’s not a ‘little privacy’ we are talking about. Investigative agencies can access our phone call records; not just that, they can look at all our SMSes if we are under suspicion. And how many of us are aware that each and every conversation of ours can be accessed for a certain period if we are under investigation?

The thought is scary: all of us have unguarded private conversations, either with our family members, or business associates, or friends … //

… It turns out that the stand-off has nothing to do with the citizens’ right to privacy. In fact, it has to do with the exact opposite, with the government saying that a BlackBerry enables its user to send e-mails which the government cannot decipher. A BlackBerry’s encryption of e-mails apparently gives us a privacy the government doesn’t want us to have!

Apart from the government fighting a battle for us to not have privacy, there is another aspect of the BlackBerry versus government of India battle that should worry us.

Look at the obvious question: the BlackBerry device and the services it provides haven’t just entered the market.

They have been around in the developed world for a few years now. The United States is one of the biggest markets while Canada, most European nations and the UK aren’t lagging behind either.

Even China and Russia have many BlackBerry customers. So why is it that none of these countries have made a fuss about the device’s encrypted services? This is particularly surprising when you consider that countries like the US and China are almost paranoid about security and consider that more important than almost every other issue. It cannot be that RIM shared technological details with all of them which they are stubbornly hiding from us.

This leads us to a very uncomfortable and disconcerting conclusion: our surveillance agencies are technologically backward compared to the agencies of all the other countries.

These other countries didn’t need to confront RIM and demand technological information for the simple reason that they had worked out how to decode the BlackBerry services by themselves! Our agencies were able to do that with the lower technology of other hand-held devices, particularly the mobile phone, but when it comes to the BlackBerry, they are clueless. Apparently our agencies are also unprepared for 3G services.

They will need help in dealing with that technology even though it’s been around in many countries for a few years.

The right to privacy question should bother us more than it does. At the same time the technological backwardness of our snoops should bother our home minister far more than it seems to do so now. (full long text).

… According to the U.S. Census of 2000, 80 percent of the 285 million people living in the United States are urban dwellers. Those living in slums are well below 5 percent. If we translate the Iraqi statistic into the U.S. context, 121 million people in the United States would be living in slums.

If the United States had an unemployment rate of 25-50 percent and 121 million people living in slums, riots would ensue, the military would take over, and democracy would evaporate. So why are people in the United States not concerned and saddened by the conditions in Iraq? 

Because most people in the United States do not know what happened in Iraq and what is happening there now. Our government, including the current administration, looks the other way and perpetuates the myth that life has improved in post-invasion Iraq. Our major news media reinforces this message.

I had high hopes that the new administration would tell the truth to its citizens about why we invaded Iraq and what we are doing currently in the country. President Obama promised to move forward and not look to the past. However problematic this refusal to examine on the past — particularly for historians — the president should at least inform the U.S. public of the current conditions in Iraq. How else can we expect our government to formulate appropriate policy?

More extensive congressional hearings on Iraq might have allowed us to learn about the myths propagated about Iraq prior to the invasion and the extent of the damage and destruction our invasion brought on Iraq. We would have learned about the tremendous increase in urban poverty and the expansion of city slums. Such facts about the current conditions of Iraq would help U.S. citizens to better understand the impact of the quick U.S. withdraw and what are our moral responsibilities in Iraq should be.

Adil E. Shamoo is a senior analyst at Foreign Policy In Focus, and a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He writes on ethics and public policy. He can be reached by e-mail.  (full text).

… All wars, even when carried on by the strongest of nations against weak opponents, are chancy, and their costs, in every respect, are always much more than anticipated, even putting aside the physical destruction and the lives lost.

Nations that have started wars with the psychological certainty of winning rarely have, and when they have, the results were rarely lasting or those sought. As Gandhi once observed, “Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.”

The Crusaders, fighting under the banner of Christ, could not make Palestine a part of Christendom. France, under Napoleon, conquered most of Europe but lost it all and Napoleon ended up a broken man. Prussian militarism prevailed in the Franco-Prussian War, but in less than a century Germany had lost all. 

The Austrians in 1914 could not only not subdue the Serbs, the empire and its monarchial form of government were lost. The Germans and Japanese after 1939 and astounding initial successes were reduced to ruin.

But even the winners are losers.

Americans won the Mexican War and acquired the southwestern United States, but that conquest brought with it unfathomable and persistent problems—racial prejudice, discrimination, and an irresolvable problem of immigration and border insecurity. Americans likewise won the falsely justified Spanish American war and acquired a number of colonial states but were unable to hold most of them. The allies won the Second World War, but France and England lost the colonies they were fighting to preserve, and these two powers, which were great before the war, were reduced to minor status (although both still refuse to admit it). Israel has won five wars against various Arab states since 1948, but its welfare and security have not been enhanced, and Arab hatred and intransigence has grown more common.

People need to realize that after a war, things are never the same as they were before, and that even the winners rarely get what they fight for. War is a fool’s errand in pursuit of ephemera.

At the end of World War II, American leaders wrongly assumed that America’s superpower status gave it the means to impose its view of what the world should be like on others everywhere. Then came Korea and the assumption proved false. Despite all of the destruction and death inflicted on the North Koreans, their attitudes went unchanged. The lesson went unlearned. It went unlearned again in Viet Nam, after which Henry Kissinger is reported to have naively said, “I could not believe that a primitive people had no breaking point.” The Vietnamese never broke. Now again Americans are foolishly assuming that the peoples of the Middle East will change their attitudes if enough force is imposed for a long enough time and enough promises of a better future are made. History belies this assumption.

Unfortunately, history teaches its lessons to only those willing to learn, and the American oligarchy shows no signs of having such willingness.

• So let’s start singing bye-bye, Miss American Pie
• Warring is nothing but a bad way to die!

(full text).

Published on AlterNet, by , August 20, 2010.

(Read first in The New York Times: Web Plan Is Dividing Companies, by CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and BRIAN STELTER, August 12, 2010).

… The Verizon-Google Net Neutrality Proposal begins by stating that “Google and Verizon have been working together to find ways to preserve the open Internet.” Well, that’s nice. Imagine what they would have come up with if they had been trying to kill off the open Internet.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine it. Because that’s what this is. An effort to kill off the open Internet … // 

… But the Verizon-Google Proposal allows almost as much latitude to other internet carriers, like cable and DSL carriers. Under the heading “Network Management,” all carriers can “engage in reasonable network management,” which “includes any technically sound practice” (which means what?). And it specifically includes the power to “prioritize general classes or types of Internet traffic, based on latency.” The term “latency” means delays in downloading, from carrying video files and such. So if you want video, and YouTube won’t pay Verizon to provide it, then Verizon can “prioritize” other traffic. And then your two-minute video will take two hours to see. And let’s say you want to start a new website that offers video — good luck getting through to Verizon’s customer service department, to have Verizon place it in the right ‘tier’ of Verizon’s internet service. In my experience, customer service requests have extraordinarily high “latency.”

Furthermore, under the heading “Non-Discrimination Requirement” (that sounds promising!), wireline carriers cannot engage in “undue discrimination.” “Undue discrimination!” What, exactly, is “due” discrimination? And even then, the presumption of non-discrimination “could be rebutted.”

And if a carrier somehow manages to run afoul of these absurdly loose standards, the FCC doesn’t even have the power to act, unless someone actually finds out about the discrimination, complains about it, and can prove it. And even then, the Verizon-Google Proposal limits the penalty to $2 million. (full text).

‘Given the fact that Iran will not give an inch to the demands of the United States and Israel, which have already mobilised several of the means of warfare to their disposal, they will have to launch the attack as soon as the date agreed by the Security Council on June 9, 2010 – with the established rules and requirements – expires. There is a limit to all what man hopes to achieve, which he cannot surpass. In this critical case, President Barack Obama is the one who would give the order to start the so much announced and publicised attack, following the rules of the gigantic empire,’ proclaims Fidel Castro … // 

… There is a limit to all what man hopes to achieve, which he cannot surpass.

In this critical case, President Barack Obama is the one who would give the order to start the so much announced and publicised attack, following the rules of the gigantic empire.

However, just at the moment when he gives that order, which would be, besides, the only one he could give, taking into account the power, the speed and the uncountable number of nuclear missiles accumulated as a result of an absurd competition among powers, he would also be ordering the immediate death not only of hundreds of millions of persons, among them an incalculable number of citizens of his own country, but also the crew members of all the vessels of the US fleet deployed in the seas surrounding Iran. A war will break out simultaneously in the Near and Middle East as well as in all Eurasia.

Fate would have it that, on that precise moment, the US President would be a person of African and White, Mohammedan and Christian descent. HE WILL NOT GIVE SUCH ORDER!!!, unless we help him become aware of it. And this is what we are doing here.

The leaders of the most powerful countries in the world, whether allies or adversaries, with the exception of Israel, would encourage him not to do it.

After that the world will bestow upon him all the honours he might deserve.

The order that has been currently established in the planet shall not be able to last. Soon after, it will inevitably collapse.

The so-called hard currencies will lose their value as the instrument of the system that has exacted a contribution of wealth and unlimited sweat and sacrifice from the peoples.

New forms of distribution of goods and services, education and management of social processes will peacefully emerge, but if a war breaks out, the current social order will disappear abruptly at a much higher cost.

The population in the planet could be regulated; non-renewable resources could be preserved; climate change could be prevented; all human beings could be guaranteed a useful employment; the ill could be assisted; essential knowledge, culture and science to the service of man could be guaranteed. The children, adolescents and youth of the world will not perish in that nuclear holocaust.

This is the message I wanted to convey to you, dear comrades of our National Assembly.

I am now ready to account for my words, answer the questions you may want to ask me and listen to your opinions.

Thank you, very much. (full text).

(Speech to the FIRST SPECIAL SESSION OF THE SEVENTH LEGISLATURE OF THE NATIONAL PEOPLE’S POWER ASSEMBLY OF CUBA).

The onset of the financial crisis surprised most people. And until today most people have not yet realized the importance of it.

About 50 experts in my institute published a book as early as 2002 studying the question “What to do if the crash happens”? (“Was tun, wenn der Crash kommt?”), a book, which the dominant circles among bankers, politicians, journalists and unfortunately also my scientific colleagues laughed about and dismissed as absurd. In the meantime, however, our hypothetical analysis has become reality … //  

… After the crisis:

In each crisis there is a ray of hope: It does not last eternally. The last world economic crisis lasted 5 years. The corrections of this crisis won’t take much longer, perhaps less. We must thus try to get through the crisis with defensive strategies as well as possible during the next two or three years so that we will be able to reconstruct afterwards.

I don’t want to catastrophize but I want to prepare the reader for predictable developments so that the coming events won’t be suppressed but considered in due time. Only those who anticipate and accept a danger will be able to survive it.

We have to accept the identity crisis in this crisis as a challenge going beyond our self-interest, which has to do with our personal identity and the aims of our society: My generation experienced times after World War II when people were looking for new purposes in their lives. It was then that there was a sense of a new piety, the search for a life in Christian faith.

However, the Americans with the help of media manipulated by them, made it clear to us that idealistic aims were no longer on the agenda, but that our lives had to be dedicated to the achievement of prosperity and material goods. Our elite then changed from the arts into economic and technical disciplines and the economic miracle developed.

For too long a time we have however believed in prosperity as a purpose in life, even when we did no longer achieve genuine prosperity, but increasingly achieved a kind of illusory prosperity. This purpose in life of reaching material goods will now collapse in the crisis. People will realize that they stand empty-handed, having chased the wrong idol. Just like after 1945, they will be searching for a new and viable sense and purpose in life. No society can keep together without common aims. If the old aims proved to be a fallacy, the people need new ones in order to find not only the sense of their own lives, but also in order to stick together and develop the society that pursues common aims.

Where do we find the new sense of life for ourselves and for our society after the economic collapse?

We do not know this yet. 98 per cent of our people do not see the necessity for a new purpose in life yet, because they have not yet realized the crisis with the collapse of the old material values.

We therefore face two crucial questions:

• Where will we have to look for new viable purposes in life for ourselves and for our society?
• And from which groups can we expect the development of such new central ideas?

If we examine the different epochs in history and their central ideas, we will realize that there has always been a change between material and immaterial, idealistic or religious dominant ideas. The happiness of people was even more frequently considered to be immaterial than material. Remember the Gothic period, the Reformation, the Classic period, Romanticism or also the different socialist ideologies. They all saw the people’s happiness is being brought about in the realization of religious or idealistic instead of material aims. Indisputably, people can also be happy in their faith, in their idea, in the realization of personal aims, such as having a family or other immaterial aims.

When it becomes obvious, how thin and ephemeral material aims in life have become, the next central idea will probably be searched in idealistic, religious or humanitarian purposes in life. Whoever can formulate these new central ideas for our society after the collapse of materialism will be able to present a new sense in life and thus inspire people for a new beginning. Our task is thus to formulate new, non-materialistic central ideas which can show people how to live happily without prosperity.

If we think about who could develop such new central ideas, we will have to forget about the big world powers: The USA, as the export country of materialism, will implode in this crisis, will lose their empire and will be more severely hit than other countries. And China is only at the beginning of materialism, without an ethic change emerging. I assume therefore that new central ideas may be developed particularly in the classical cultural areas of Europe and India. Above all, it will happen in Europe, because Europe still owns a unique cultural variety and tradition despite all globalization and centralization tendencies.

Where however are the masterminds in Europe that can think about new central ideas, about idealistic happiness of the people and about viable ideas?
In former times, these viable central ideas for our Christian West were taken from the Christian churches. I doubt whether these still have the power for a new reformation today.

In Feudalism, new ideas and new values were predominantly developed by the upper class of the aristocracy. However, they have not only lost their function, but also their power and importance.

The middle classes remain, in particular the cultural middle classes. We owe them all the great ideas of the last 200 years. Just remember what the parsonages meant for our cultural history, for literature, philosophy and science. As a researcher of the Mittelstand, after the past 50 years of the enormous achievements of the SMEs and the entrepreneurs, I see a revival of the time of the cultural middle class – the scientists, the teachers, the artists or writers. Of all the subpopulations, they seem to be closest to new idealistic central ideas. But this would however require from our cultural middle class in Europe that it divorces the leadership and manipulation of the still materialistically oriented global media rule and gets deeper to the roots of our national education and ideas, mentally. This is the task for the best of our people, i.e. to look for a mental rise out of the economic crisis and to find new idealistic aims for the people beyond materialism.

Anyhow, it would be worth all nobles’ efforts to jointly meet such a task and adopt their new role in searching for a new central idea and the aim of the people’s happiness.

Let us understand the crisis as a chance in this sense. A lot will break down. From this collapse, however, new things will develop. It would be nice, if towards the end of the crisis a new idealistic and cultural resurgence were then developed by us and we could contribute to a new happiness of the people with new viable essential ideas. (full text).

(Translation Current Concerns).

It is better than 5, 10, 20, or 100 guilty men go free than for one innocent man to be put to death. This prinicple is embodied in the presumption of innocence. In 1895, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision in the case Coffin v. United States, 156 U.S.  432; 15 S. Ct. 394, traced the presumption of innocence, past England, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, and, at least according to Greenleaf, to Deuteronomy … //

… Greenleaf traces this presumption to Deuteronomy, and quotes Mascardus De Probationibus to show that it was substantially embodied in the laws of Sparta and Athens. Greenl. Ev. part 5, section 29, note. Whether Greenleaf is correct or not in this view, there can be no question that the Roman law was pervaded with the results of this maxim of criminal administration, as the following extracts show: 

“Let all accusers understand that they are not to prefer charges unless they can be proven by proper witnesses or by conclusive documents, or by circumstantial evidence which amounts to indubitable proof and is clearer than day.” Code, L. IV, T. XX, 1, 1. 25.

The noble (bivus) Trajan wrote to Julius Frontonus that no man should be condemned on a criminal charge in his absence, because it was better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent.” Dig. L. XLVIII, Tit. 19, 1. 5.
“In all cases of doubt, the most merciful construction of facts should be preferred.” Dig. L. L, Tit. XVII, 1. 56.

“In criminal cases the milder construction shall always be preserved.” Dig. L. L, Tit. XVII, 1. 155, s. 2.

“In cases of doubt it is no less just than it is safe to adopt the milder construction.” Dig. L. L, Tit. XVII, 1. 192, s. 1.

Ammianus Marcellinus relates an anecdote of the Emperor Julian which illustrates the enforcement of this principle in the Roman law. Numerius, the governor of Narbonensis, was on trial before the Emperor, and, contrary to the usage in criminal cases, the trial was public. Numerius contented himself with denying his guilt, and there was not sufficient proof against him … (full long text).

… “If we cannot afford to treat people, are we going to be able to afford the carnage?” asked Peter Mugyenyi, Director of Uganda’s Joint Clinical Research Centre, in a double session on the future of universal access at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna today.

Mugyenyi, a clinician who pioneered ART provision in Africa, focused on the remarkable healthcare advances that have been made since the introduction of public treatment programmes in the developing world. 

He also unpacked the arguments that have been used in the past to justify denying treatment to developing world populations. Mugyenyi stated: “The first argument was that Africa can’t do ART because the drugs require precision-timing and Africans have no watches. The second argument against treatment access was that Africa could not afford it, that even if ART was a glass of water, Africa could not afford it.”

Mugyenyi described the “groundbreaking effect” that resulted from PEPFAR and the Global Fund investments into HIV treatment programmes in Africa. He recounted how at the start of Uganda’s ART roll-out, the target was to initiate 5000 patients in the first year. Because of the flow of PEPFAR funding, the programme exceeded its treatment target and went on to initiate 28,000 patients in a single year.

Mugyenyi said that the financial support of PEPFAR and the Global Fund had “allowed Uganda and other countries to do what was described as impossible in Africa” … (full text).

The ASEAN Post-Nargis humanitarian effort in Myanmar came to an end on 31 July 2010 with the closure of the Coordinating Office of the ASEAN Humanitarian Task Force (AHTF) in Yangon.

Since it was set up in May 2008, the AHTF was instrumental in raising more than USD 600 million with the major contributions coming from Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Norway, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Contributions also came from Belgium, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Kuwait, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland.

These funds have been crucial in addressing the needs of the Cyclone survivors to rebuild their lives better. Notable achievements include having some 623,000 children benefitting from educational humanitarian response and 575,000 children receiving essential learning material packs. The funds also led to 356 multi-purpose building cum-cyclone shelters being built and 3,800 ponds constructed. More than 1.5 million people received agriculture support, 172,960 fishing gears distributed and 422 health facilities have been rehabilitated under the purview of the AHTF.

The decision to officially end the operations of the AHTF was made by the ASEAN Foreign Ministers at the 43rd ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Ha Noi on 20 July 2010. This ASEAN-led coordinating mechanism in Myanmar was established by the Foreign Ministers at their special meeting in Singapore in May 2008 in the wake of Cyclone Nargis that made landfall in Myanmar on 2 and 3 May 2008 … (full text).

Link: The Association of Southeast Asian Nations ASEAN on wikipedia, there last modified on 16 August 2010 at 01:26.