Cahokia Mounds: The CITY OF THE SUN

The remnants of the Mississippians’ central city – now known as Cahokia for the Indians who lived nearby in the late 1600s – are preserved within the 2200-acre tract that is the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, located just eight miles east of downtown St. Louis, Missouri, near Collinsville, Illinois.

From the New York Times:

POP REVIEW | DEVENDRA BANHART

‘Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs,’ and That’s Not All

By KELEFA SANNEH

When you first hear Devendra Banhart’s high, braying voice, you may be tempted to laugh: the two words that spring to mind are “tiptoe” and “tulips.”

    It’s hard to say whether Mr. Banhart would be pleased to hear himself compared to Tiny Tim. But in any case, his music is too compelling and too weird to be merely a put-on.
    
On Sunday he played a short, intriguing set at Tonic, sitting cross-legged on the stage with an acoustic guitar in his lap, singing about a world in which animals and plants act out mysterious allegories.

    Mr. Banhart, 21, just released his excellent debut album, “Oh Me Oh My . . . The Way the Day Goes By the Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit” (Young God). He tends toward verbosity, but many of his songs last little more than a minute, just long enough for him to sketch an image.

    On Sunday he was joined by Will Lemon, who sometimes played harmonica and sometimes percussion, although his only rhythm instrument was a container of roasted soybeans. Mr. Banhart usually picked broken chords on his guitar, sometimes strumming when the songs grew more forceful.

    Near the beginning of the set he played “Michigan State,” one of his longest and most memorable songs. At the beginning there was barely any music, just Mr. Banhart’s tentative voice: “My friend has my favorite teeth/They bend backwards when she breathes/And it whistles.”

    By the time the first chorus arrived, the narrator was no longer a mere observer. The delicate introduction gave way to a more insistent two-chord pattern, and Mr. Banhart’s voice got louder and plainer in the refrain, an unusual lyric of desire: “Oh, Michigan, Michigan state, how I’d love to live in
you.” In Mr. Banhart’s anthropomorphic world, states have just as much personality as teeth, or
dogs.

    The second verse of “Michigan State” is a series of not-quite-logical propositions.    

With each flight of fancy, his voice grew more urgent, which created the
impression that he was rushing toward a momentous conclusion: “The salt keeps the sea from feeling heat/And my toes have my favorite feet/If I sweat salt and the earth sweats heat. . . .”

    Mr. Banhart’s voice trailed off, as if he were overwhelmed by the possibilities, and then he sang the chorus again.

Why I Love Christmas

From Crackpot by John Waters

Being a traditionalist, I’m
a rabid sucker for Christmas. In July I’m already worried that there are
only 146 shopping days left. “What are you getting me for Christmas?” I
carp to fellow bathers who haven’t even decided what to do for Labour Day.
As each month follows, I grow more and more obsessed. Around October I
startle complete strangers by bursting into my off-key rendition of “Joy
to the World.” I’m always The Little Drummer Boy for Halloween, a grouchy
one at that, since the inconsiderate stores haven’t even put up their Christmas
decorations yet. November 1 kicks off the jubilee of consumerism, and I’m
so riddled with the holidays season that the mere mention of a stocking
stuffer sexually arouses me.

    By December
I’m deep in Xmas psychosis, and only then do I allow myself the luxury
of daydreaming my favourite childhood memory: dashing through the snow,
laughing all the way (ha-ha-ha) to Grandma’s house to find the fully decorated
tree has fallen over and pinned her underneath. My candy-coloured memories
have run through the projector of my mind so many times that they are almost
in 3-D. That awful pause before my parents rushed to free her, my own stunned
silence as I dared not ask if Granny’s gifts to us had been damaged, and
the wondrous, glories sight of the snow semi-crooked tree, with balls broken,
being begrudgingly hoisted back to its proper position of adoration. “O
Christmas tree! O Christmas tree!” I started shrieking at the top of my
lungs in an insane fit of childhood hyperventilation before being silenced
by a glare from my parents that could have stopped a train. This tableau
was never mentioned again, and my family pretended it never happened. But
I remember–boy, do I remember!

    If you
don’t have yourself a merry little Christmas, you might as well kill yourself.
Every waking second should be spent in Christmas compulsion: career, love
affairs, marriages, and all the other clutter of daily life must take a
backseat to this holiday of holidays. As December 25 fast approaches, the
anxiety and pressure to experience “happiness” are all part of the ritual.
If you can’t maintain the spirit, you’re either a rotten Communist or badly
in need of a psychiatrist. No wonder you don’t have any friends.

    Of course,
You-know-who was supposed to have been born on Christmas, but the real
Holy Trinity is God the Father, the Son and the Holy Santa Claus. You don’t
see fake Josephs and Marys in department stores asking kids what they want,
do you? Face it, mangers are downwardly mobile. True, swiping a sheep or
a wise man for your apartment from a local church is always good for a
cheap thrill and invariably gets you in the paper the next day. And Madalyn
Murray O’Hair (the publicity-crazed atheist saint) always gets a rise by
successfully demanding in court the removal of Nativity scenes from her
state capital on Christmas Eve. But we all know who the real God is, don’t
we? That’s right, the Supreme One, Santa Claus.

    But if
you think about it, Santa Claus is directly responsible for heroin addiction.
Innocent children are brainwashed into believing the first big lie their
parents ever tell them, and when the truth finally hits, they never believe
them again. All the stern warnings on the perils of drugs carry the same
credibility as flying reindeer or fat men in your chimney. But I love Santa
Claus anyway: All legends have feet of clay. Besides, he’s a boon to the
unemployed. where else can drunks and fat people get temporary work?

    Of course,
to many, Santa is an erotic figure, and fore these lucky revelers, the
Christmas season is a smorgasbord of raw sex. Some people just go for a
man in a uniform. Inventive entrepreneurs should open a leather bar called
the Pole where dominant wrinkle fetishists could dress like old St. Nick
and passive gerontophiliacs could get on all fours and take the whip like
good reindeer. Inhaling poppers and climbing down mock chimneys or opening
sticks ‘n’ stones from the red-felt master could complete the sex-drenched
atmosphere of the first S&M Xmas bar.

    You could
even get fancy about it. Why hasn’t Bloomingdale’s or Tiffany’s tried a
fancy Santa. Deathly pale, this never-too-thin-or-too-rich Kris Kringle,
dressed in head-to-toe unstructured, over-size Armani, could pose on a
throne, bored and elegant, and every so often deign to let a rich little
brat sit near his lap before dismissing his wishes with a condescending
“Oh, darling, you don’t really want that, do you?”

    Santa
has always been the ultimate movie star. Forget White Christmas, It’s a
Wonderful Life and all the other hackneyed trash. Go for the classics:
Silent Night, Bloody Night, Black Christmas or the best seasonal film of
all time Christmas Evil (“He’ll sleigh you”). This true cinematic masterpiece
only played theatrically for a few seconds, but it’s now available on videocassette
and no holiday family get-together is complete without it. I t’s about
a man completely consumed by Christmas. His neurosis first rears its ugly
head as he applies shaving cream to his face, looks in the mirror, hallucinates
a white beard and begins to imagine that he is Santa Claus. He gets a job
in a toy factory, starts snooping and spying on the neighbourhood children
and then rushes home to feverishly make notes in his big red book: “Jimmy
was a good boy today,” or “Peggy was a bad little girl.” He starts cross-dressing
as Claus and lurks around people’s roots ready to take the plunge. Finally,
he actually gets stick in a nearby chimney and awakens the family in his
struggle. Mom and Dad go insane when they find a fat lunatic in their fireplace,
but the kids are wild with glee. Santa has no choice but to kill these
Scroogelike parents with the razor-sharp star decorating the top of their
tree. As he flees a neighbourhood lynch mob, the children come to his rescue
and defy their distraught parents by forming a human ring of protection
around him. Finally, pushed to the limits of Clausmania, he leaps into
his van/sleigh and it takes off flying over the moon as he psychotically
and happily shrieks, “On Dancer! On Prancer! On Donner and Vixen!” I wish
I had kids. I’d make them watch it every year and if they didn’t like it,
they’d be punished.

    Preholiday
activities are the foreplay of Christmas. Naturally, Christmas cards are
you first duty and you must send one (with a personal, handwritten message)
to every single person you ever met, no matter how briefly. If this common
courtesy is not reciprocated, never speak to the person again. Keep computerized
records of violators and hold the grudge forever; don’t even attend their
funeral.

    Of course,
you must make your own cards by hand. “I don’t have time” you may whine,
but since the whole purpose of life is Christmas, you’d better make time,
buster. We Christmas zealots are rather demanding when it comes to the
basic requirements of holiday behaviour. “But I can’t think of anything
. . . .” is usually the next excuse, but cut those people off in mid-sentence.
It’s easy to be creative at Christmastime. One year I had a real cute idea
that was easy to design. I bought a cheap generic card of Joseph and Mary
holiday the Baby Jesus and superimposed Charles Manson’s face in the place
of the homeless infant’s. Inside I kept the message “He is born”. Everybody
told me they loved it and some even said they saved it. (For the record,
I’m against donating your cards to nursing homes after Christmas. One would
think that after all these years on earth, senior citizens would have had
a chance to make a friend or two on their own. Don’t do it!) This season,
I’m dying to produce my dream card that I’ve wanted for years. I’ll be
sitting in a Norman Rockwell-style Christmas scene, dressed in robe and
slippers, opening my gifts moments before I notice a freak fire that has
begun in the tissue paper and is licking and spreading to the tree.

    Go deeply
in debt over Christmas shopping. Always spend in exact correlation to how
much you like the recipient. Aunt Mary I love about $6.50 worth; Uncle
Jim–well, at least he got his teeth fixed–$8. If your Christmas comes
and goes without declaring bankruptcy, I feel sorry for you–you are a
person with not enough love inside.

    You can
never buy too many presents. If you said “Excuse me” to me on a transit
bus, you’re on my list. I wrap gifts for nonexistent people in case somebody
I barely know hands me a present and I’m unprepared to return this gesture.
Even though I’m the type who infuriates others by saying “Oh, I finished
my shopping months ago,” as they frantically try to make last-minute decisions.
I like to go into the stores at the height of Christmasmania. Everyone
is in a horrid mood, and you can see the overburdened, underpaid temporary
help having nervous breakdowns. I always write down their badge numbers
and report them for being grumpy.

    If you’re
a criminal, Christmas is an extra-special time for you and your family.
Shoplifting is easier and cars in parking lots are loaded with presents
for your children. Since everyone steals the checks you must leave for
the mailman and garbagemen, I like to leave little novelty items, like
letter bombs. Luckily, I live in a bad neighbourhood, so I don’t have to
worry; the muggers live in my building and go to the rich neighbourhoods
to rob. If you’re quick, you can even steal the muggers’ loot as they unload
the car. Every child in my district seems to get rollerskates for Christmas,
and it’s music to my ears to hear the sudden roar of an approaching gang
on skates, tossing back and forth like a hot potato a purse they’ve just
snatched.

    “Santa
Claus Is a Black Man” is my favourite Christmas carol, but I also like
The Chipmunks’ Christmas Album, the Barking Dogs’ “Jingle Bells” and “Frosty
the Snowman” by the Ronettes. If you’re so filled with holiday cheer you
can’t stand it, try calling your friends and going caroling yourself. Especially
if you’re old, a drug addict, an alcoholic or obviously homosexual and
have a lot of effeminate friends. Go In packs. If you are black, go to
a prissy white neighbourhood. Ring doorbells, and when the Father Knows
Best-type family answers, start screeching hostilely your favourite carol.
Watch their faces. There’s nothing they can do. It’s not illegal. Maybe
they’ll give you a present.

    Always
be prepared if someone asks you what you want for Christmas. Give brand
names, the store that sells the merchandise and, if possible, exact model
numbers so they can’t go wrong. Be the type who’s impossible to buy for
so that they have to get what you want. Here was my 1985 list and I had
checked it twice; the long-out-of-print paperback The Indiana Torture Slaying,
the one-sheet for the film I Hate Your Guts and the subscription to Corrections
Today, the trade paper for prison wardens. If you owe someone money, now
is the time to pay him back, mentioning at the same time a perfect gift
suggestion. If you expect to be receiving a Christmas stocking as a forerunner
to a present, tell the giver right off the bat that you don’t go for razor
blades, deodorants or any of the other common little sundries but anticipate
stocking stuffers that are original, esoteric and perfectly suited to you
and you alone.

    It helps
to be a collector, so the precedent is set on what to expect as a gift.
For years friends have treated me to the toy annually selected by the Consumer
Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action as the “worst toy”
to give your child at Christmastime. “Gobbles, the Garbage-Eating Goat”
started my collection. “That crazy eating goat” reads the delightful package,
and in small print, “Contains: One realistic goat with head that goes up
and down. Comes complete with seven pieces of pretend garbage.” This Kenner
Discovery Time toy’s instructions are priceless. “Gobbles loves to eat
garbage when he’s hungry, and he’s ALWAYS hungry. (1) Hold Gobbles mouth
open by the beard. Stuff a piece of pretend garbage straight into his mouth
and (2) pump the tail until the garbage disappears.” It ends with an ominous
warning, “Feed Gobbles only the garbage that comes with the toy,” and in
even smaller print “If you need additional garbage, we will, as a service,
send it to you direct. For 14 pieces of garbage send $1 (check or money
order; sorry, no C.O.D.) to . . . . ” I can’t tell you the hours of fun
I’ve had with Gobbles. Sometimes when I’m very bored, Gobbles and I get
naked and play-play.

    Over
the years my collection has grown. There’s “My Puppy Puddles” (“You can
make him drink water, wet in his tray and kiss you”). “Baby Cry and Dry”
about whom the watchdog group warned: “Take her out of the box and she
smells, the odor won’t go away” and “Baby Cry for You.” (“The tears don’t
just drop out, they whoosh out in a three-foot stream.”) Of course, I still
cover the winner of the first annual prize (before my collection began)–a
guillotine for dolls. “Take that, Barbie.” “Off with your head, Betsy Wetsy!”

    No matter
what you think of your presents, each must be answered with an immediate
thank you note. Thinking of what to write can be tricky, especially for
distant relatives who send you a card with two crisp $1 bills inside. Be
honest in your reply–“Dear Uncle Walt. Thank you for the $2. I bought
a pack of Kools and then put the change in an especially disgusting peep
show, it was fun!” or “Dear Aunt Lulu, I was thrilled to receive your kind
gift of $5. I immediately bought some PCP with it. Unfortunately, I had
a bad reaction, stabbed my sister, set the house on fire and got taken
to the hospital for the criminally insane. Maybe you could come visit me?
Love, Your nephew.”

    I always
have an “office party” every year and invite my old friends, business associates
and any snappy criminals who have been recently paroled. I reinforce all
my chairs, since for some reason many of my guests are very fat, and after
a few splintered antiques, I’ve learned my lesson. I used to throw the
party on Christmas Eve, but so many guests complained of hideous hangovers
I had to move up the date. No more moaning and dry heaving under their
parents’ tree the next day as their brothers and sisters give them dirty
looks for prematurely ejaculating the Christmas spirit.

    I usually
invite about a hundred people and the guest know I expect each to get everyone
else a present. Ten thousand gifts! When they’re ripped open at midnight,
you can see Christmas dementia at its height. One thing that pushes me
off the deep end is party crashers. I’ve solved the problem by hiring a
door many who pistol-whips anyone without an invitation, but in the old
days, crashers actually got inside. How rude! At Christmas, of all times,
when visions of sugarplums are dancing orgiastically through my head. One
even brought her mother–how touching. “GET OUT!” I snarled after snatching
out of her hand the bottle of liquor that she falsely assumed would gain
her (and her goddamn mother) entry.

    I always
show a film in one room: Wedding Trough (about a man who falls in love
with a pig and then eats it) or Kitten with a Whip (Ann-Margret and John
Forsythe) or What Sex Am I? (a clinical documentary about a sex-change
operation). When it’s finally time for the guests to leave, I blatantly
get in bed and go to sleep; they know they better get home. Santa is on
his way.

    Christmas
day is like an orgasm that never stops. Happiness and good cheer should
be throbbing in your veins. Swilling eggnog, scarfing turkey and wildly
ripping open presents with your family, one must pause to savor the feeling
of inner peace. Once it’s over, you can fall apart.

    Now is
the time for suicide if you are so inclined. All sorts of neuroses are
permitted. Depression and feelings that it somehow wasn’t good enough would
be expected. There’s nothing to do! Go to a bad movie? You can’t leave
the house between now and January 1 because it’s unsafe; the national highways
are filled with drunks unwinding and frantically trying to get away from
their families. Returning gifts is not only rude but psychologically dangerous–if
you’re not careful you might glimpse the scum of the earth, cheap bastards
who shop at after-Christmas sales to save a few bucks. What can you look
forward to? January 1, the Feat of the Circumcision, perhaps the most unappetizing
High Holiday in the Catholic Church? Cleaning up that dirty, dead, expensive
Christmas tree that is now an instant out-of-season fire hazard? There
is only one escape from post-Christmas depression–the thought that in
four short weeks it’s time to start all over again. What’re ya gonna get
me?

From http://www.maketradefair.com/default.asp

Demand that Nestlé drop their claim against Ethiopia!

Take action now to stop Nestlé,
the world’s largest coffee company, demanding $6 million from a country
where 11 million people are facing famine. What are Nestlé doing
to help fight hunger in Ethiopia? They are demanding the Ethiopian Government
pay $6m in compensation for a company that was nationalised 27 years ago,
a company that they didn’t even own at the time. The CEO of Nestlé
has said that companies like his will be held to account for their part
in the fight against hunger in developing countries – so take action now
– e-mail Nestlé telling them to drop the claim for $6m from Ethiopia.

Click
here to take action now!

4 Nov 2002 press release:

THE GREAT TRADE ROBBERY

Rich world swindles millions
from the benefits of trade as global wealth divide widens to all time high

OXFAM today accused the rich
world of robbing the poor world of $100 billion a year by abusing the rules
governing world trade and denying millions of poor people their best escape
route from poverty.

    “For
every dollar we give in aid two are stolen through unfair trade, costing
the poor world $100 billion a year. Globalisation is leaving millions in
despair, creating a world more unequal than ever before, when it could
do the exact opposite. The wealth divide is at an all time high and the
anger and social tensions that accompanies such morally unacceptable inequalities
threaten us all,” warned Jeremy Hobbs, Execitive Director of Oxfam International
during the launch of Make Trade Fair, a global campaign in 18 countries
to change the rules of trade.

    The campaign
is launched as the 144 countries of the World Trade Organization start
to work on a new agenda of trade negotiations that will determine how world
trade will be regulated in the future. WTO negotiations risk widening the
global divide unless the rich world changes its approach to the concerns
of developing countries.

    In a
new report Rigged Rules and Double Standards Oxfam shows that 128 million
people could be lifted out of poverty if Africa, Latin America, East Asia
and South Asia each increased their share of world exports by just one
percent.

    However,
rich world hypocrisy and double standards stop this from happening because
the rich world is rigging global trade rules by:

· Subsidising rich
farmers $1bn a day. Over-production of agricultural surpluses is dumped
onto world markets, suppressing world prices and destroying local markets
in poor countries

· Influencing the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank polices to prise open poor
countries’ markets with little regard to the social consequences. These
are policies the rich world has itself rejected.

· Stopping or penalising
poor countries from exporting their goods into rich world markets. Goods
from poor countries are taxed at four times the rate of goods from rich
countries.

· Being indifferent
to erratic, falling commodity prices that condemn many poor economies to
failure, while generating huge profits for big corporations.

· Allowing big corporations
to ride rough shod over internationally recognised workers rights.

The report also highlights
that while some countries appear to be successfully boosting their economies
through increased exports this has had little impact on levels of poverty.
Oxfam is calling on poor country governments to adopt policies so that
the economic benefits of trade help to alleviate poverty and do not increase
inequality.

    People
can join the campaign at a dedicated website: http://www.maketradefair.com

Where the campaign will be
launched

The campaign will be launched
in New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Bangladesh, India, South Africa,
Senegal, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Great Britain,
Ireland, Canada, United States, Mexico and Brazil.

To find out more go to http://www.maketradefair.com

Wealth divide widens

The wealth divide is
at an all time high. In the last decade the world’s poorest five per cent
lost almost a quarter of their real income while the top five per cent
gained 12 per cent. Trade, though not exclusively, has been an important
factor in this widening gap. For every $100 generated by world exports
$97 goes to the high and middle income countries and only $3 go to low
income countries.

Double standards

Nowhere in international
relations is the rich world’s double standards and hypocrisy so blatant
as in its attitude to trade. It demands the poor world slash support for
its farmers yet subsidises its own farmers to the tune of  $1bn a
day. This leads to over production that is then dumped onto the world market,
suppressing prices which poor farmers cannot compete against.

    Topping
the rogues’ league of double standards is the European Union. It’s dumping
of surplus powdered milk on to the Jamaican economy has all but ruined
the local dairy industry. The US has done the same with dumping its subsidized
rice on Haiti forcing thousands of poor rice farmers off the land. In Haiti’s
rice growing area child malnutrition is now among the most severe in the
country.

IMF and World Bank

Through its influence at
the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank the rich world demands
the poor world open up its markets with no regard to the social consequences
yet keeps its own markets tightly shut. It has created a race where the
weakest have to jump the highest hurdles. The rich world taxes imports
from poor countries four times the rates it charges imports from industrialised
countries.

Aid debt and trade

For every dollar of aid
to the poor world two dollars are swindled out of the poor world through
unfair trade. Africa is of particular concern. A one per cent increase
in world exports for Africa is worth a staggering fives times the amount
it receives in aid and debt relief combined. Yet Africa is increasingly
sidelined from any benefits from trade.

Import tax hikes and the
commodity crisis

Many poor countries are
locked into only producing the raw food and materials we consume. The moment
they begin to process these goods, therefore getting a higher price, they
face high import taxes hikes, called tariff peaks, at rich world ports.
Fully-processed manufactured food products are subject in the EU and Japan
to import taxes twice as high as products in the first stage of processing.
In Canada, taxes on processed food are as much as 13 times higher than
those on unprocessed products. Thirty per cent of all tariff peaks applied
by the EU protect the food industry. These range from 12 to 100 per cent
and affect sugar-based products, cereals, and canned fruit. In the US,
where the food industry accounts for one-sixth of all tariff peaks, including
orange juice (30 per cent) and peanut butter (132 per cent). Forty per
cent of all Japanese peak tariffs protect the food industry, affecting
a wide range of products from cocoa powder and chocolate to canned meat
and fruit juices.

    Many
poor economies are heavily dependent upon the export of a single commodity.
Falling and erratic commodities prices are at crisis point. In 2000/01
poor countries sold nearly 20 per cent more coffee than in 1997/98, yet
they were paid 45 per cent less. Had they sold it at the 1997/98 price,
they would have been around $8 billion better off. This means less money
for farmers but also cut backs in social spending on health and education.
And this crisis is not restricted to coffee. Between 1996 and 2000 Ghana
increased cocoa production by almost a third but was paid a third less.

Corporations and workers’
rights

When poor countries attempt
to industrialise they also face many obstacles. Large trans-national corporations
(TNCs) are powerful players in the globalised economy. Two-thirds of all
trade takes place within TNCs. They are a major influence on labour standards
in poor countries. Either directly through the people they employ or more
significantly through their sub-contractors.

    The IMF
and the World Bank trumpet successful export led economic growth of star
pupils such as Mexico, Bangladesh and Honduras. However their export success
does not trickle down to the rest of the economy. Their economic growth
has been dominated by special export processing zones (EPZs). These are
low wage ghettos for simple assembly of imported parts. The wealth it generates
is spirited out of the country or left in the hands of a tiny minority.

Changing rules of the World
Trade Organisation

Many of the rules of the
World Trade Organisation (WTO), for example those on intellectual property,
protect the interests of rich countries and powerful TNCs, while imposing
huge costs on developing countries. This bias raises fundamental questions
about the legitimacy of the WTO. By including new issues like investment,
government procurement or competition rules, the new Doha trade round risks
widening the globale divide.

Women on the front line

Women workers are becoming
increasingly crucial in these EPZs as cheap labour. They are the super-exploited
in the new globalised economies. Women now make up about one-third of manufacturing
workers in developing countries but they earn about three-quarters of their
male colleagues. They may earn more money than before but they have fewer
rights, less time to care for the family and more burden. In China they
are forced to work 12-hour days in appalling conditions. In the sweatshops
of Bangladesh they are denied the right to join a union. In the flower
exporting market gardens of Colombia compulsory pregnancy testing is common
before women are granted employment contracts. Summary dismissal has become
standard practice for avoiding employer based maternity pay.

Oxfam is calling for a radical
reform of the international trading system so that trade can become the
engine for poverty reduction.

· Ending the use of
conditions attached to IMF-World Bank programmes which force poor countries
to open their markets regardless of the impact on poor people.

· Improving market
access for poor countries and ending the cycle of subsidised agricultural
over-production and export dumping by rich countries, without demanding
further concessions of developing countries.

· Creating a new
international commodities institution to raise prices to levels consistent
with a reasonable standard of living for producers, and changing corporate
practices so that companies pay fair prices.

· Establishing new
intellectual-property rules to ensure that poor countries are able to afford
new technologies and basic medicines, and that farmers are able to save,
exchange, and sell seeds.

· Prohibiting rules
that force governments to liberalise or privatise basic services that are
vital for poverty reduction.

· Enhancing the quality
of private-sector investment and employment standards.

· Democratising the
WTO to give poor countries a stronger voice.

· Changing national
policies on health, education, and governance so that people can develop
their capabilities, realise their potential, and participate in markets
on more equitable terms.

From Associated Press:

Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s popular Grammy-winning pop star, accepted an offer from President-elect Luiz Inacio
Lula da Silva to become the country’s next culture minister.

    Gil,
60, was one of the creators of Tropicalia, which opened traditional bossa
nova to rock ‘n’ roll, reggae and Latin sounds. He campaigned for Silva
and is the most prominent member of Brazil’s Green Party, which is allied
with Silva’s Workers Party.

    Gil initially
was reluctant to take the position, explaining he couldn’t maintain his
lifestyle on the $26,000 salary. But he told reporters he has Silva’s permission
to continue making money from his music. “I can work from Monday through
Friday at the ministry and do shows on Saturday and Sunday,” he said.

From the Dec. 19 LATimes:

Hundreds Are Detained After Visits to INS

Thousands protest arrests of Mideast boys and men who complied with order to register.

By Megan Garvey, Martha Groves and Henry Weinstein, Times Staff Writers

Hundreds of men and boys
from Middle Eastern countries were arrested by federal immigration officials
in Southern California this week when they complied with orders to appear
at INS offices for a special registration program.

    The arrests drew thousands of people to demonstrate Wednesday in Los Angeles.

    Immigration
and Naturalization Service spokesmen refused Wednesday to say how many
people the agency had detained, what the specific charges were or how many
were still being held. But officials speaking anonymously said they would
not dispute estimates by lawyers for detainees that the number across Southern
California was 500 to 700. In Los Angeles, up to one-fourth of those who
showed up to register were jailed, lawyers said.

    The number
of people arrested in this region appears to have been considerably larger
than elsewhere in the country, perhaps because of the size of the Southland’s
Iranian population. Monday’s registration deadline applied to males 16
and older from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria. Men from 13 other nations,
mostly in the Mideast and North Africa, are required to register next month.

    Many
of those arrested, according to their lawyers, had already applied for
green cards and, in some instances, had interviews scheduled in the near
future. Although they had overstayed their visas, attorneys argue, their
clients had already taken steps to remedy the situation and were following
the regulations closely.

    “These
are the people who’ve voluntarily gone” to the INS, said Mike S. Manesh
of the Iranian American Lawyers Assn. “If they had anything to do with
terrorism, they wouldn’t have gone.”

    Immigration
officials acknowledged Wednesday that many of those taken into custody
this week have status-adjustment applications pending that have not yet
been acted on.

    “The
vast majority of people who are coming forward to register are currently
in legal immigration status,” said local INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice.
“The people we have taken into custody … are people whose non-immigrant
visas have expired.”

    The large
number of Iranians among the detainees has angered many in the area’s Iranian
communities, who organized a demonstration Wednesday at the federal building
in Westwood.

    At
the rally, which police officials estimated drew about 3,000 protesters
at its peak, signs bore such sentiments as “What Next? Concentration Camps?”
and “Detain Terrorists Not Innocent Immigrants.”

    The arrests
have generated widespread publicity, mostly unfavorable, in the Middle
East, said Khaled Dawoud, a correspondent for Al Ahram, one of Egypt’s
largest dailies. He questioned State Department official Charlotte Beers
about the detentions Wednesday after a presentation she made at the National
Press Club in Washington. Egyptians are not included in the registration
requirement.

    Beers,
undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs, was presenting
examples of a U.S. outreach campaign for the Middle East, which includes
images of Muslims leading happy lives here. Dawoud asked how that image
squared with the “humiliating” arrests in recent days.

    “I don’t
think there is any question that the change in visa policy is going to
be seen by some as difficult and, indeed — what was the word you used?
— humiliating,” Beers said. But, she added, President Bush has said repeatedly
that he considers “his No. 1 … job to be the protection of the American
people.”

    Relatives
and lawyers of those arrested locally challenge that rationale for the
latest round of detentions.

    One
attorney, who said he saw a 16-year-old pulled from the arms of his crying
mother, called it madness to believe that the registration requirements
would catch terrorists.

    “His
mother is 6 1/2 months pregnant. They told the mother he is never going
to come home — she is losing her mind,” said attorney Soheila Jonoubi,
who spent Wednesday amid the chaos of the downtown INS office attempting
to determine the status of her clients.

    Jonoubi
said that the mother has permanent residence status and that her husband,
the boy’s stepfather, is a U.S. citizen. The teenager came to the country
in July on a student visa and was on track to gain permanent residence,
the lawyer said.

    Many
objected to the treatment of those who showed up for the registration.
INS ads on local Persian radio stations and in other ethnic media led many
to expect a routine procedure. Instead, the registration quickly became
the subject of fear as word spread that large numbers of men were being
arrested.

    Lawyers
reported crowded cells with some clients forced to rest standing up, some
shackled and moved to other locations in the night, frigid conditions in
jail cells — all for men with no known criminal histories.

    Shawn
Sedaghat, a Sherman Oaks attorney, said he and his partner, Michelle Taheripour,
represent more than 40 people who voluntarily went to register and were
detained.

    Some,
he said, were hosed down with cold water before finding places to sleep
on the concrete floors of cells.

    Lucas
Guttentag, who heads the West Coast office of the American Civil Liberties
Union’s immigrant rights project, fears the wave of arrests is “a prelude
to much more widespread arrests and deportations.”

    “The
secrecy gives rise to obvious concerns about what the INS is doing and
whether people’s rights are being respected and whether the problems that
arose in the aftermath of 9/11 are being repeated now,” he said.

    Many
at Wednesday’s protest said they took the day off work to join the rally,
because they were shocked by the treatment.

    “I
came to this country over 40 years ago and got drafted in the Army, and
I thought if I die it’s for a good cause, defending freedom, democracy
and the Constitution,” said George Hassan, 65, from the San Fernando Valley.

    “Oppressed
people come here because of that democracy, that freedom, that Constitution.
Now our president has apparently allowed the INS vigilantes to step outside
the Constitution.”

   
Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California,
called the detentions doubly disturbing because “a lot of the Iranians
are Jews who fled Iran because of persecution, and now they are undergoing
similar persecution here…. This is just terrible.”

    Attorney
Ban Al-Wardi, who saw 14 of her 20 clients arrested when she went with
them to the registration, said that although everyone understands the need
to protect the nation against terrorist attacks, the government’s recent
action went too far.

    “All
of our fundamental civil rights have been violated by these actions,” she
said. “I don’t know how far this is going to go before people start speaking
up. This is a very dangerous precedent we are setting. What’s to stop Americans
from being treated like this when they travel overseas?”

Mary Hansen, 1966-2002

When my wife wants me to buck up and find the good in a bad situation, she flashes a toothy smile, adopts an Australian accent, and says, “There’s lovely noodles on the balcony.” That’s what Mary Hansen of Stereolab said to me in 1996 when my band showed up for our first-ever gig in London and found we were playing a goddamn restaurant. On the afternoon of December 9, Hansen was struck and killed by a vehicle while riding her bicycle on City Road in London. She was 36. The second female voice in Stereolab, Hansen joined in 1992 and added her churchy falsetto to 11 albums, including the recent ABC Music: The Radio One Sessions. Hansen was responsible for carrying out much of Stereolab’s central sonic strategy: the la-la-la’s and chew-bac-ca’s that float above so many songs. She appeared on recordings by Mouse on Mars, Tortoise, High Llamas, and Brokeback, and released a solo 7-inch as the Horizontalist. In an almost unbearable synchronicity, her face appeared on an album for the first time the day after her death˜on the cover of Common’s Electric Circus. There, touching Common’s bald head at 11 o’clock, is Head #39: Mary Hansen, pictured with her eyes closed.

    Hansen was the bubble in Stereolab’s soda, the one who smiled onstage, the one who made a long, boring day in the studio feel giddy and short. In a world of monosyllabic “geniuses” and haughty record geeks, Hansen was a hilarious, lightening presence. We know the world is going to hell in handbasket,
and even the good bits feel unlovely right now. Mary came from, and will be buried in, Maryborough, Queensland, home of the Maryborough Sugar Museum and the Mary River.

Sasha Frere-Jones

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

SADDAM’S SWAN SONG

Iraq Makes a Philosophically Flawed Effort to Disprove a Negative

By EMILY EAKIN

How many pages does it take to prove a negative? Iraq is hoping 12,000 might do the trick. That, roughly,
is the number of pages in the declaration it turned over to the United Nations in a last-ditch effort to convince the world that it has no weapons of mass destruction. For the moment, the United Nations and the United States are playing along, scouring the document page by page last week for signs that Iraq is lying or fudging the truth.

    But while the exercise may make for good politics, as a philosophical proposition
it is arguably deeply flawed. In fact, some scholars would say the task
the world has assigned Iraq ˜ to prove it has no weapons of mass destruction
˜ is logically impossible.

    The problem
is not, as is frequently assumed, that proving a negative simply can’t
be done.

    “If I
say I have no coins in my pocket, you can just search me,” said Colin McGinn,
a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, pointing out that people
verify modest negative statements all the time with little difficulty.

    But philosophically
speaking, there’s a big difference between claiming there are no coins
in your pocket and claiming there are no coins in the pockets of New Yorkers,
or, more to the point, no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in the nearly
170,000 square miles that make up the state of Iraq.

    As the
scope of the claim grows, so do the number of philosophical objections
and practical obstacles to proving it. This is where the work of the 18th-century
Scottish philosopher David Hume comes in. In a dazzling insight that changed
the course of Western philosophy, Hume demonstrated that the common practice
of induction (inferring general rules from particular observations) is
inherently circular and unreliable.

    Philosophers
like to explain Hume’s argument using swans. Ronald J. Allen, a law professor
and evidence expert at Northwestern University, put it this way: “Suppose
somebody claims all the swans are white. He says, `I’ll prove it to you.’
He takes you to the zoo, and there are 20 swans there, all white. Well,
he’s merely showing you a finite set of swans. This can’t establish that
all swans are white.”

    Because
no one can ever observe all the swans in the world, but only particular
groups of swans, according to Hume it would be logically indefensible to
conclude that all swans are white no matter how reasonable such an inference
seems.

    This
same difficulty arises in trying to prove some large-scope negatives, Mr.
Allen points out. “Suppose you assert that there are no black swans,” he
said. “You’d have to produce all the swans in the world to show there are
no black ones” ˜ an impossible undertaking.

    This,
he said, is the situation faced by Iraq. “You can see the perversity of
it,” Mr. Allen said. “The Iraqis have to show that there’s no state of
the universe inconsistent with the statement that they have no weapons
of mass destruction.”

IF Mr. Allen is right, weapons
inspections that turn up nothing, and a 12,000-page declaration that discloses
no violations, are of extremely limited value. Like groups of white swans,
they might tell us something particular but nothing general. They certainly
don’t prove anything about Iraq’s claim that it possesses no weapons of
mass destruction.

    Of course,
it is possible to argue that Iraq’s situation more closely resembles Mr.
McGinn’s single pocket example (a small-scope, easily verified negative)
than it does Mr. Allen’s black swan example (a large-scope, unverifiable
negative).

    “Iraq
is big, but not that big,” said Simon Blackburn, a professor of philosophy
at Cambridge University and a leading authority on Hume. “There is no more
difficulty to prove there are no weapons of mass destruction than to prove
there’s no rhinoceros in my sitting room.”

    But other
scholars concede that the burden of proof placed on Iraq by the United
Nations is so great that no amount of evidence is likely to suffice. The
Bush administration has often spoken of Iraq’s intention to acquire weapons
of mass destruction, said Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy
at the University of Texas at Austin. Once intention becomes a factor,
he said, Iraq’s situation begins to look more and more like the black swan
problem ˜ an unverifiable negative.

    “I’m
willing to venture it’s impossible for anyone to prove they don’t have
the intention to do something,” he said, adding that placing such a burden
on an American criminal defendant ˜ who, unlike Iraq, is guaranteed a presumption
of innocence ˜ would be unthinkable.

    If Iraq’s
task is demonstrably impossible, on what basis can it be justified? Ultimately,
the best defense may hinge not on logic or law but on more nebulous concepts
like experience and common sense.

    “The
thing we’re asking them to prove, whether you put it positively or negatively,
is so extremely hard to prove that we’re almost rigging the outcome by
the way we put the question,” said Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard professor
of constitutional law. “But it doesn’t follow that we’re acting in a way
that’s contrary to all our conventional jurisprudential principles.”

CITING Iraq’s past use of
weapons of mass destruction and long record of duplicity on the issue,
Mr. Tribe argued that “we’re acting in a preventative mode where we’re
not prepared as an international community to take the risk that potential
mass destruction will go uncontrolled.”

    That’s
a statement that Hume might have found perfectly reasonable. A practical
man, he realized that in the absence of certain knowledge, experience and
common sense are often the best guides to judgment. The danger arises when
fallible human judgments are confused with truth.

    In the
end, Hume argued, the inevitable uncertainty of knowledge requires, in
response, a rigorous policy of “mitigated skepticism” ˜ the constant application
of “a degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty, which, in all kinds of
scrutiny and decision, ought for ever to accompany a just reasoner.”

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/dec02/melodies.shtml

MELODIES IN YOUR MIND

Researchers map brain areas that process tunes

HANOVER, N.H. ˆ Researchers
at Dartmouth are getting closer to understanding how some melodies have
a tendency to stick in your head or why hearing a particular song can bring
back a high school dance. They have found and mapped the area in your brain
that processes and tracks music. It‚s a place that‚s also active during
reasoning and memory retrieval.

The study by Petr Janata,
Research Assistant Professor at Dartmouth‚s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience,
and his colleagues is reported in the Dec. 13, 2002, issue of Science.
Their results indicate that knowledge about the harmonic relationships
of music is maintained in the rostromedial prefrontal cortex, which is
centrally located, right behind your forehead. This region is connected
to, but different from, the temporal lobe, which is involved in more basic
sound processing.

——————————————————————————–

The orange and red area indicates
where Janata and his collegues tracked and mapped musical processing in
the brain. The blue and purple areas are also processing music, but these
areas did not track the harmonic changes as consistently as the red and
orange areas.

——————————————————————————–

„This region in the front
of the brain where we mapped musical activity,‰ says Janata, „is important
for a number of functions, like assimilating information that is important
to one’s self, or mediating interactions between emotional and non-emotional
information. Our results provide a stronger foundation for explaining the
link between music, emotion and the brain.‰

Using functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, the researchers asked their eight
subjects, who all had some degree of musical experience, to listen to a
piece of original music. The eight-minute melody, composed by Jeffrey Birk,
Dartmouth class of ‚02, when he was a student, moves through all 24 major
and minor keys. The music was specifically crafted to shift in particular
ways between and around the different keys. These relationships between
the keys, representative of Western music, create a geometric pattern that
is donut shaped, which is called a torus.

„The piece of music moves
around on the surface of the torus, so we had to figure out a way to pick
out brain areas that were sensitive to the harmonic motion of the melody,‰
explains Janata. „We developed two different tasks for our subjects to
perform. We then constructed a statistical model that separated brain activation
due to performing the tasks from the activation that arose from the melody
moving around on the torus, independent of the tasks. It was a way to find
the pure representation of the underlying musical structure in the brain.‰

The two tasks involved 1.)
asking subjects to identify an embedded test tone that would pop out in
some keys but blend into other keys, and 2.) asking subjects to detect
sounds that were played by a flute-like instrument rather than the clarinet-like
instrument that prevailed in the music. As the subjects performed the tasks,
the fMRI scanner provided detailed pictures of brain activity. The researchers
compared where the activation was on the donut from moment to moment with
the fluctuations they recorded in all regions of the brain. Only the rostromedial
prefrontal area reliably tracked the fluctuations on the donut in all the
subjects, therefore, the researchers concluded, this area maintains a map
of the music.

„Music is such a sought-after
stimulus,‰ says Janata. „It‚s not necessary for human survival, yet something
inside us craves it. I think this research helps us understand that craving
a little bit more.‰

Not only did the researchers
find and map the areas in the brain that track melodies, they also found
that the exact mapping varies from session to session in each subject.
This suggests that the map is maintained as a changing or dynamic topography.
In other words, each time the subject hears the melody, the same neural
circuit tracks it slightly differently. This dynamic map may be the key
to understanding why a piece of music might elicit a certain behavior one
time, like dancing, and something different another time, like smiling
when remembering a dance.

Janata adds, „Distributed
and dynamic mapping representations have been proposed by other neuroscientists,
and, as far as we know, ours is the first paper to provide empirical evidence
for this type of organizational principle in humans.‰