Jefe's House

Edwin Poots

Does he now?

Ireland’s silent but deadly Environment Minister Edwin Poots, known to be a real gas, is pushing for council reform because it could save taxpayers money.  Let’s hope his plan doesn’t backfire.

[photo via newsletter.co.uk]

Now that Hillary Clinton is beating the drums of war and calling on the entire world to rise to its “duty” to respond to North Korea’s supposed attack on a South Korean warship and the murder of 46 crew, a flood of frightening analogies and comparisons come to mind. The most obvious one is that this is strikingly similar to how US involvement in Vietnam began in 1964: with a false attack attributed to North Vietnam against the US warship Maddox, then exploited as a real attack by LBJ.  By the rules of our SETO treaty this “attack” gave Lyndon Johnson the legal greenlight he needed to take military action in Southeast Asia.

Is South Korea’s Cheonan to USS Maddox as North Korea’s “torpedo sub” is to North Vietnam’s nonexistent Tonkin ghost ships of ’64? Let’s hope not.

The recent events surrounding North Korea also call to mind how Bill Clinton found a way to win the world’s approval to remove mega-mobster Milosevic from power by having NATO bomb Europe (and, by the way, use depleted uranium weapons in Kosovo even after he promised not to do so — way to “help” the Kosovo Albanians) by citing the faked massacre of 45 Albanian civilians (actually KLA soldiers killed during a firefight) by Yugoslav police at Racak, Kosovo in 1999. The American public swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

Of course, neither Democrat Lyndon Johnson nor Democrat Bill Clinton have anything on Republican George W. Bush’s trickery to get us into an oil war in Iraq, ostensibly to remove Saddam from power and “help” the Iraqi civilians but at the loss of thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians’ lives.

Have Hillary and Obama learned from these masters how best to position a US — I mean South Korean (right) — bombing run into North Korea to get rid of the latest Milosevic, Kim Jong Il? We’ll soon find out. I hope I’m wrong.

Sure KJI is evil and crazy, but let’s hope our aggressive rhetoric of late won’t result in hundreds of thousands of dead North Korean civilians we’re supposedly liberating from oppression, over a relative handful of dead South Korean soldiers.

Hillary’s lustily rattling her sabre, and South Korea’s president Lee Myung-bak is cocking his rifle, and our big trade partner Red China is pretending to be on the fence but leaning heavily toward siding with the US.   The North Korean leadership is just as full of hype as the rest of these players but they’re still calling this whole mess a “wild provocation.” Are they right? If they did torpedo the ship then why be bashful about it? Something’s not right here.

I had to look elsewhere to find out some apparently objective facts beyond all the hype and rhetoric coming from the the West and its flunkies via our mainstream media. The following is culled from South Korea-based pro-democracy news organization NKnet, the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights –

Despite North Korea’s rhetoric that “all communication links between North and South Korea are severed,” and “the North-South Economic Cooperation Council Office in the Kaesong Industrial Complex is being frozen and abolished, and all South Korean workers are to be immediately deported,” … the North Korean military authorities granted entrance to the Kaesong Complex for South Korean personnel this morning. Movement into and out of the Kaesong Complex is continuing normally, while fixed line telephones connecting the Kaesong Industrial Complex and parent corporations in South Korea are operating without any problems, too. This appears to display North Korea’s underlying desire to continue operating the Kaesong Industrial Complex.”

These don’t seem like the actions of a small country eager to go to war against the US, Japan, China and South Korea.

It seems no one over in this hemisphere, in our government or in our media, is interested in reporting such hopeful signs that this will be resolved peacefully. Why is that the case?  It’s more fun, and more lucrative, to beat the drums of war.

Something’s up, y’all.

[photo via infowars.com]

I really need a smartphone but in the meantime here’s some bad cell phone footage of Al Stewart and Dave Nachmanoff, both of them astounding guitar virtuosi, at Michael “Knitting Factory” Dorf’s City Winery last night.  Scottsman Al Stewart (Time Passages, Year of the Cat, oh but there’s so much more to this brilliant songwriter) is holding his own at 64,  still an unbelievable guitar player with a boyish, elfin voice that sounds exactly like it did 40 years ago. He’s also a hilarious, energetic wisecracker who chews up the stage, and a high end wine dealer when he’s not on tour.  Who knew?

I’m not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on are the things that don’t last

Hear the echoes and feel yourself starting to turn
Don’t know why you should feel
That there’s something to learn
It’s just a game that you play

That’s it. I am literally never going to listen to the radio, watch TV or read news stories on the Internet ever again. Literally. I am literally going to gouge out my eyeballs with a ballpoint pen.  Literally.

NBC Dateline segment Follow the Money, 5/2/10 (rerun, originally aired Nov. 2009):

SGT. JAMES PEREZ OF FAIRFIELD, CT:  She’s so close. She could almost see the money. She can smell it, she can taste it in her bank account.

CHRIS HANSEN: The scammers managed to get Shireen to be emotionally invested here.

SGT. PEREZ: Right. They’re literally pulling the puppet strings.

No, Sergeant, the Nigerian email scammers are figuratively pulling the puppet strings, that’s your point. They did not literally have strings tied around Shireen’s joints controlling her arm, leg and head movements.

Next up, NPR’s All Things Considered segment on the government’s Minerals Management Agency (5/11/10), which sells leases for oil and gas production. 

For the exploding Gulf rig the agency gave BP a Categorical Exclusion, “which means there is no public review, no scientific analysis, no discussion of alternatives…it’s literally a rubber stamp process,” said Bill Snapes, Chief Counsel for Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group.

No, Bill, it’s figuratively a rubber stamp process, that’s your point. I don’t think the MMA literally inked CATEGORICAL EXCLUSION – APPROVED onto a series of BP’s mimeographed  lease documents with a big rubber stamp.

And lastly, this AP story about “Crude” documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger being ordered to hand over footage regarding a long-running legal case against Chevron in Equador (5/7/10):

Chevron lawyer Randy Mastro…said it was not a case about the First Amendment. “It’s a case about a lawyer who decided he wanted to star in a movie,” he said. “It is literally candid camera.”

No, Randy, it’s figuratively Candid Camera, that’s your point.  Was the lawyer in the documentary shown shooting a TV show hosted by a Funt and featuring actors pulling good-natured practical jokes on unsuspecting dupes?  No, Randy, he wasn’t.

[pictures via amazon.com, sentinelprint.com and seattleweekly.com]

Tagore Celebration in Kolkata, 5/8/10

Rabindranath Tagore (May 8, 1861 – August 8, 1941)  the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born 150 years ago this weekend.  Celebrations are underway in India, especially in his hometown of Kolkata, West Bengal, and across the globe.  Would that I were there.

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A few of my pix from the historic Tagore family home Jorasanko, winter 2010, Kolkata.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Tagore family home, Jorasanko, earlier this year, which continued to turn me on to this Bengali Renaissance Man’s works in poetry, theatre, fiction and music.  Today Jorasanko is a museum operated by nearby Rabindra Bharati University named in Rabindranath’s honor and focusing on performing arts and the humanities.  My fellow travelers and I were fortunate to have a personal tour guide at Jorasanko, music faculty Prof. Ghosh.  He also took me to visit the campus and meet with the Performing Arts chair and some of the faculty, and I wound up giving an impromptu lecture and Q&A about contemporary US theatre to the bright, informed and eager undergrads in an Ancient Greek Theatre class.

The visit to Jorasanko and the university campus wound up indirectly turning me on to the works of Tagore’s precursors such as Ishwar Chandra Gupta (1812-1859), largely forgotten today in Tagore’s long shadow.

I leave you with one of Tagore’s poems:

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Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

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He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.
Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

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Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found?
Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation;
he is bound with us all for ever.

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Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense!
What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained?
Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.

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The above poem is very Walt Whitman, eh?  It’s from Tagore’s Nobel-winning collection Gitanjali.

The man, the legend, Rabindranath Tagore. Statue at the entrance to Rabindra Bharati University, winter 2010, Kolkata.

Einstein and Tagore keepin' it real in Berlin, July 14, 1930

[pix taken from indiablooms.com and schoolofwisdom.com; the rest are mine]

Of the 18 feature films in the 2010 Cannes main competition not a single one is directed by a woman.

“[Y]ou have to wonder what Cannes 2010 poster girl Juliette Binoche would have done had she known that the festival for which she’d swing that light-painting brush leaned 92 percent male over the last decade — plus, famously, exactly one female Palme d’Or winner (Jane Campion in 1993) in nearly 60 years. Yikes. There’s always 2011.”

Continued at Where Are All the Women Directors in This Year’s Cannes Competition? | Movieline