pressure on Damascus

"If, however, you ask me if I'm expecting an armed attack (from the United States), well I've seen it coming since the end of the war in Iraq. It's from then that tensions have been rising," he added.
Asked if a "settling of scores" was imminent, Assad said: "I don't think so, for now it's just skirmishing. True, the White House language, if looked at in detail, leads one to expect a campaign similar to the one that led up to attack on Iraq."
"Will we be the next target of Israel and the White House? All of this has been written for a long time. Iraq was the first phase, then it will be Iran's and Syria's turn. But it's not a given that things will go that way."
The opposition in Lebanon has accused the Lebanese and the Syrian governments of having a role in Hariri's killing, and backed by the U.S. and former colonial power France, has demanded the immediate pullout of Syrian forces from Lebanon.
Assad strongly rejected the accusations, saying: "If we really killed Hariri, that would be political suicide for us. Beyond ethical and human principles, the question is, who benefits from the crime? Certainly not Syria."

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad/La Repubblice(It.)/AlJazeera.com 28.Feb.05

the fear in their eyes
Mexico, which unlike its Central American neighbors was never a member of George Bush's "Coalition of the Willing", now has the largest contingent of any Latin nation fighting on the ground in Iraq--8000 Mexican and Mexican-descent troops who voluntarily joined the U.S. armed forces.
[...]

Lance Corporeal Andres Raya did not fall fighting the enemy in Iraq. A humvee driver pushing unprotected vehicles in and out of Fallujah for seven months, Raya was exposed to attacks by the resistance and roadside bombs every day he served on Iraqi soil. Home on holiday in the California central valley farming town of Ceres and haunted by rumors that his unit would soon be sent back to Iraq, Raya, 19, snapped, provoking a three hour running gun battle with back-ups from four different California police departments.

Leaping over backyard fences and dashing down dirt alleys in the town where he grew up as an undocumented field worker's son, Raya assured neighbors they were not in harm's way if they were "innocent civilians." Reportedly shaken by Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11", Raya stopped to ask one witness if he had voted for Bush.
Finally cornered after killing one officer and gravely wounding another with an outlaw assault rifle, the young Marine was cut down by 18 rounds when he charged a police barricade. "Andres Raya died like a true Mexican standing on his feet" a neighbor, Hilda Mercado, shouted out at a tension-packed reconciliation meeting a few days later. "Andy was a casualty of war," Lalo Mercado who grew up with the dead Marine told the New York Times.
Raya's rampage tripwired brown-white rage in Ceres. Andres had grown up in a migrant labor camp here and as a teenager, was often rousted by the local police--as recently as a week before his rampage, he was stopped despite being in uniform. When friends sought to build an altar to Raya in the alleyway where he died, police repeatedly tore it down...

John Ross/Counterpunch 21.Feb.05

The Speed of Dreams / Part Two

Elections pass, governments pass. The resistance remains as it is, one more alternative for humanity and against neoliberalism. Nothing more, but nothing less.

However, consistent with the aversion we profess for dogmas, we will always admit that we could be wrong, and it could be, in effect, as the fashionable hacks are now predicting, necessary, urgent, essential, to deliver ourselves up unconditionally into the arms of those who, from above, are promoting changes which can only be achieved from below.

We could be wrong. When we realize it because stupid reality gets in the way of our path, we will be the first to recognize that mistake in front of everyone, those who are with us and those who are opposed. It will be that way because we believe, among other things, that honesty in front of the mirror is necessary for all of those who, in word or in fact, are committed to the building of a new world.

In any event, we give life to our wise moves and to our mistakes. I sincerely believe that, ever since the dawn of the first of January of 1994, we have won the right to decide for ourselves our path, its rhythm, its speed, its accompaniment, continuous or sporadic.

We shall not cede that right. We are willing to die to defend it.

We shall continue doing what we believe is our duty. And without regard to the "ratings" our actions receive, the space we occupy in the news, or the threats and prophecies which they are good enough - from both sides of the political spectrum - to prescribe for us every time we don't do what they want us to do or we don't say what they want us to say (something which happens all the time).

We will not join in the hysterical clamor of the political class, and of their fans in the "political analysis" columns. Those people who try to impose, always from above, an agenda which has nothing to do with what is happening below in our country, the implacable dismantling of the foundations of national sovereignty.

Nor will we flail about concerning the calendar, hastening 2006 and its uncertainty, its festival of vanities, its cynical squandering of resources and stupidity. Even less will our actions be guided by those who are demanding that we contribute the names of prisoners, disappeared and dead, while they contribute names to the nominating lists.

This does not mean that we do not listen. We do, and we shall continue to do so. From all over the world we receive words of encouragement and of criticism, advice and warnings, support and condemnation. We listen to everything, and we keep it in the collective heart which we are. Anyone, anyplace in the world, can be certain that the zapatistas will listen to them.

But it is one thing to listen and another thing to obey.


Letter to Pierluigi Sullo
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
Mexico, September of 2004. 20 and 10.

where else am I going to shop?

Not many months ago, polleros (people smugglers) in Tapachula, Chiapas, on Mexico's southern border, wheedled $5,000 each from six Guatemalans and two other undocumented workers whom they promised to deposit safely in the United States.

Moving through Mexico stealthily in an old bus with its curtains drawn and slipping immigration officials the obligatory mordida (little bite, or bribe) to ease through the checkpoints, the smugglers arrived in Chihuahua City, 100 miles south of the U.S. border, drove out to an upscale suburb, and dropped their load off in front of an enormous Wal-Mart, informing the clueless clients they had arrived on "the Other Side." The Wal-Mart shared the gleaming mall with a Wendy's, a KFC, even an Applebee's, and the ten-plex "Hollywood" Cinema.

"It looked just like how it looked on television" a rueful indocumentado told Froilan Meza of the local Chihuahua Herald.

John Ross/Progressive March 2005

How about a war on horror?

A group that wants to assist free speech in authoritarian nations is looking for a technically savvy person -- a CTO or lead engineer type -- who can do a short term study, possibly leading to a longer-term job. This is a paying gig for the right person.

The project is intended, in its intitial form, to make possible blogging that is impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to trace. One of the people involved calls it an "anonymous, anti-tyranny blogging service."

If you're interested, please send e-mail to Jim Hake at jim@spiritofamerica.net

link Dan Gillmor

on the road to Mogadishu

In Brazil's favelas, murder is the leading cause of death for 10-year-olds. In these urban hyper-barrios, police patrol in helicopter gunships. Any delusion of crime prevention gave way to containment and suppression long ago. At night, black children hide from both rogue cops and gang members; the rich venture from their fortress homes nearby only in armored vehicles or private planes. In the midst of Rio de Janeiro's splendor, favelas are at a tipping point — on the way to joining Mogadishu as wholly failed "feral" cities, engulfed by gangs, black markets, rapacious crime and dysfunction.

Could Los Angeles be headed down this road? No, not anytime soon, at least for the vast majority of the city. But the hot spots of underclass Los Angeles are well on the way. If ignored, they will metastasize, and eventually pose a real danger to the larger region.

L.A.'s hot zones are tiny, intensely dangerous areas where nothing works, where law has broken down and mainstream institutions simply fail. Places where mail carriers and meter readers balk when the bullets fly. Where paramedics and firefighters are hesitant to enter because of the crossfire. Where police officers go in only heavily reinforced or with helicopters; in the LAPD's South Bureau there was an 80% increase in sniper fire on police in 2004, according to a report by LAPD Chief William Bratton.

These zones are often found in and near public housing projects, although the worst privately owned slums — like the gang-ridden apartment complex at 69th and Main that was recently ordered evacuated by the city — mirror the conditions.

In Jordan Downs, for instance, one of three gang-dominated housing projects in Watts, the predominantly African American Grape Street Crips routinely beat Latinos (among others), engage in regular home-invasion robberies and have been known to murder residents who dare report their activities. When the LAPD set up a police kiosk in Jordan to quell rising crime, the gangs blew it up; the LAPD left and did not return for more than a decade. In the Ramona Gardens housing project, the last three black families didn't survive long enough to suffer the perpetual abuse that residents of Jordan have endured: Latino gangsters firebombed them out of their units.

Schools near these complexes boast 70% dropout rates, violence-related lockdowns and children with post-traumatic stress disorder levels as high as those seen in civil wars. The neighborhoods host hundreds of prison-brutalized men wed to cults of destruction and the hyper-masculinity of the powerless. Ex-cons who try to change must defy a dehumanizing dragnet that draws 70% of them back into prison. All face relentless search-and-destroy policing. With job prospects virtually nonexistent and few other exit ramps from the prison-parole hamster wheel, escape is rare.

Years ago I asked gang members what happened to kids who "just said no" to the Bloods or V-18s. They brought me a videotape other gang members had made for a 14-year-old boy who had refused to join them. The tape showed gang members raping his 13-year-old sister. The boy joined the gang so that its members wouldn't return to kill her.

Constance L. Rice
LATimes/AriannaOnline 23.Dec.05

Peter Benenson, the founder of the worldwide human rights organisation Amnesty International, died 25 February. He was 83.
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From Benenson's article in the Observer(UK), 28 May 1961:

One story is of the revolting brutality with which Angola's leading poet, Agostino Neto, was treated before the present disturbances there broke out. Dr. Neto was one of the five African doctors in Angola. His efforts to improve the health services for his fellow Africans were unacceptable to the Portugese. In June last year the Political Police marches into his house, had him flogged in front of his family and then dragged away. He has since been in the Cape Verde Isles without charge or trial.

From Rumania, we shall print the story of Constatin Noica, the philosopher, who was sentenced to twenty-five years' imprisonment because, while "rusticated," his friends and pupils continued to visit him, to listen to his talk on philosophy and literature. The book will also tell of the Spanish lawer, Antonio Amat, who tried to build a coalition of democratic groups, and has been in trial since November, 1958; and of two white men persecuted by their own race for preaching that colored races should have equal rights- Ashton Jones, the sixty-five-year-old minister, who last year was repeatedly beaten-up and three times imprisoned in Lousiana and Texas for doing what the Freedom Riders are now doing in Alabama; and Patrick Duncan, the son of a former South African Governer-General, who, after three stays in prison, has just been served with an order forbidding him from attending or addressing any meeting for five years.

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"In 1961 his vision gave birth to human rights activism. In 2005 his legacy is a world wide movement for human rights which will never die."

Dionisio Ribeiro Filho, 59, was shot in the head with a shotgun at the Tingua federal reserve, about 19 miles (30 km) from Rio de Janeiro city, after he defended it for over 15 years from poachers and illegal palm tree cutters, police said on Wednesday.
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Dorothy Stang was shot four times in the face and head near the rural town of Anapu on the Trans-Amazon Highway (whose very existence made destruction of the rainforest possible).
Stang had worked in Brazil for 37 years, and had been a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur for 56. The death threats--aimed at stopping her work on behalf of the Amazon's beleaguered rainforest and its desperately poor inhabitants--had escalated recently.

Scott Ritter Says U.S. Plans June Attack On Iran

Sibel Edmonds is suing the FBI

Brian Avery has returned to Israel to seek justice

What Prince Charles and Camilla Bowles are are failed celebrities, celebrities whose glamor isn't shiny enough, whose exploits are too mundane, and who have only alienated the God of celebrity and his angels in the media. A key to the intensity of negative reaction to their existence is how often their looks are commented on, by people whose own symmetries and aestethic values are meager. It's because the only community those people know is inside the box, the rest of the world isn't quite real anymore, and in there they're surrounded by nice-looking at worst fellow citizens, and often seem to be sitting close to beautiful and truly glamorous individuals, while those individuals act out their glamorous moments - braving danger, saving the day.
The context is as always the absolute neutrality of the media, which is now in possession of the political infrastructure of the United States and a good chunk of Britain's as well. That neutrality being a sacred principle taught to everyone, by the media itself.
So it's absurd to wonder if Charles hasn't pissed off someone in power, or threatened to, or worse; because even if he had, the media wouldn't ridicule him unless he really deserved it. Because the media is neutral, absolutely neutral - moral, but only as moral as the people it serves, whose values it reflects. Because it can only reflect the values of the people who consume it, who watch it, read it, take it in, it has no moral character of its own; because it is, ultimately and essentially, nothing but a vividly realistic reflection; the media is nothing but a mirror held up to the soul of the public, reflecting their values - it's absurd to suggest the media reflects the values of the people who own the media. Nonsense - there's no money in that, and the media are first and finally a business, even more than a service. The idea that a mirror that is also a business might distort the things it reflects is absurd. The idea - that the media is a brainwashing tool whose efficacy has been refined for decades, controlled by an invisible minority whose disdain for the people is immense - is near treason in its opposition to the common good.
The media simply reflects the values and interests of the people it serves.
Even as it spends all its time and most of its resources shaping those values. And then reflecting them back to the public again. And again. And so on.

28:13 But the word of the LORD was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little; that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.

28:14 Wherefore hear the word of the LORD, ye scornful men, that rule this people which is in Jerusalem.

28:15 Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves:

28:16 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.

28:17 Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.

28:18 And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it.

28:19 From the time that it goeth forth it shall take you: for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and by night: and it shall be a vexation only to understand the report.

28:20 For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on it: and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it.

28:21 For the LORD shall rise up as in mount Perazim, he shall be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon, that he may do his work, his strange work; and bring to pass his act, his strange act.

Isaiah - KJV

Voltairine de Cleyre
Exquisite Rebel
"In a time when the law treated women like chattel, "Voltairine de Cleyre's whole life," says Avrich, "was a revolt against this system of male domination which, like every other form of tyranny and exploitation, ran contrary to her anarchistic spirit. "That such a brilliant, unusual woman would be a feminist is no surprise. " Let every woman ask herself," cried Voltairine, "Why am I the slave of Man? Why is my brain said not to be equal of his brain? Why is my work not paid equally with his? Why must my body be controlled by my husband? Why may he take my children away from me? Will them away while yet unborn? Let every woman ask." "There are two reasons why," Voltairine answered in her essay "Sex and Slavery" "and these ultimately reducible to a single principle - the authoritarian supreme power GOD-idea, and its two instruments - the church - that is, the priests - the State - that is, the legislators...These two things, the mind domination of the Church and the body domination of the State, are the causes of Sex Slavery."
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"It is the old story: "Aim at the stars, and you may hit the top of the gatepost; but aim at the ground and you will hit the ground."
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link path Society of Control

If they kill me

"If, by the hand of the devil, those perverse plans succeed... forget about Venezuelan oil, Mr Bush," he said.
Chavez said he was convinced that Washington was "sketching out the assassination plans" before his Bolivarian Revolution advances in Venezuela and Latin America.
Chavez revealed a week ago that Cuban President Fidel Castro had warned him of a US assassination plot.
"Now, I am going to say it. Neither Fidel Castro nor I talk nonsense."
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently called Chavez "a negative force" in Latin America, and the State Department backed Colombia in a recent dispute between the Caribbean neighbours over the arrest of a Colombian rebel in Caracas by Colombian officials without Venezuela's knowledge or consent.
"If something happens to me, I blame the president of the United States," Chavez said.

Aljazeera 21.Feb.05
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...it was Chavez who -- a month later-- heightened the situation into a crisis . Perhaps it was an attempt to please his political base and garner some kind of solidarity from an international community more and more sensitive about issues of sovereignty. But his belated reaction did more to highlight his unpredictability than to convince anyone he suddenly had become an advocate for international law.
In fact, Chavez has rejected any assistance from the international community to resolve the crisis, including offers of mediation from Peru, Brazil and Mexico. Instead, Chavez, who sees the dispute in personal terms, would prefer a handholding session only after Uribe has asked him for forgiveness.
Marcela Sanchez
[Sanchez is the sock puppet of Richard Lugar, who is in turn one of the phalanx of petroleum/Jesus/Armegeddon/zombies whatever is behind all this sends out to do its bidding. Sanchez will be more and more prominently placed in the media if and when the plan to take Chavez down is implemented.]
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Former President Jimmy Carter, who gave his blessing to Venezuelan leftist leader Hugo Chavez's controversial victory in a recall referendum last year, has now come up with a proposal that -- if accepted -- could send Chavez into instant retirement at a Cuban beach resort.
In an address Tuesday to the 34-member Organization of American States (OAS), Carter called for injecting new life into an inter-American treaty aimed at preventing democratically elected presidents from seizing all powers, and becoming de facto dictators. Which is exactly what Chavez seems to be doing.
"Let us strengthen the charter and not be afraid to use it," Carter said, bolstering the idea we suggested in this column a few weeks ago.
The OAS Democratic Charter was signed in 2001 in the aftermath of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori's takeover of Peru's Congress, but it has rarely been used.
The problem is that it calls for collective diplomatic sanctions against Fujimori-styled one-shot attacks on the rule of law, but it does little to address Chavez-styled cases of piecemeal destruction of the democratic system.
Andres Oppenheimer
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both of the above pieces courtesy of the honestly and somewhat prophetically named
Petroleum World

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Duran subrayo que la denuncia presidencial es "muy grave" y constituye "una escalada de Chavez en su confrontacion con Estados Unidos que es su enemigo estrategico luego de superar la crisis politica interna."
"O en efecto Bush esta planificando un magnicidio lo que seria de una gravedad inconmensurable que todos los venezolanos deberiamos condenar o Chavez miente", sentencio.
El Universal
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Rodolfo Frometa, a Cuban, and former Army Captain Luis Eduardo Garcia (a Venezuelan) are named in the article as the leaders of the paramilitary coalition formed by the "F-4 Commandos" and "The Venezuelan Patriotic Junta." Garcia, a former Captain, was one of the leaders of the defeated coup against democratically-elected president Hugo Chavez Frias in Venezuela in April 2002.
The training camps located in the Florida Everglades seem to have escaped the reach of the US Department of Homeland Security ... which was created by President Bush as a way of protecting the United States against terrorist attacks. This oversight seems to come from the fact that this coalition was not set up to attack the United States; instead, it follows the tradition of the Contras and their terror campaign in Nicaragua, and other groups such as Alpha 66 and the F-4 itself and their terror campaigns against Cuba. This time the coalition between F-4 and the Venezuelan Junta has been set up to train paramilitary forces to terrorize Venezuela.
Shortly after the Wall Street Journal article came out, the Venezuelan government made information available to the US Embassy in Venezuela, specifically detailing the activities carried out by these two groups.
The Venezuelan government did not receive a response from the US embassy at that time. It was not until plans to assassinate President Chavez surfaced, during his planned visit to Harlem, New York last September, that the Venezuelan government went public denouncing the plot and the existence of terrorist groups, training freely in Florida, conspiring to overthrow the government. In addition, in a televised appearance before the international media, Chavez revealed that his government is in possession of a video, secretly recorded by his security forces, of a CIA officer giving a class to Venezuelans on surveillance.
*Even though President Chavez did not cite the Wall Street Journal article specifically, the international media picked up the report and have challenged the US government to come forward with an explanation for its double standard on terrorism.
The United States was slow in responding. September 30, a few days after Chavez' statements, US Ambassador to Venezuela, Charles S. Shapiro stated "it is not necessarily a crime ... but we are in the full process of collecting information and we must follow all legal procedures ... if there is anyone to blame, our government knows what to do."
Showing a certain disdain and even annoyance he also stated, "some Venezuelans have been receiving military training in the United States."
He further admitted that the information was also published in a Miami newspaper a year ago, but he was unable to explain why no action was taken by the US Homeland Security Department. "We're not going to take action against anybody ... we haven't been able to make any headway."
The Venezuelan President has been relentless in pursuing the issue. "Who gave the United States government the right to bomb cities, invade countries, overthrow governments?" Chavez asked. "No one gave this right to the United States government. And here, we will keep saying that."

VHeadlines 16.Oct.05
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On January 11, Ambassador Brownfield made headlines in Venezuela during a visit to the site of destruction from torrential flooding that occurred back in 1999. He declared that the U.S. Government will always "support the people of Venezuela" and assured assistance in case of any future natural disasters. He announced the donation of $33,000 in USAID funding for a local day care center, a mere fraction of the more than $15 million given by USAID to the political opposition in Venezuela over the past few years to overthrow President Chavez. But Brownfield's appeasing disposition was clearly directed at Venezuelans and not their government. Just a day later, the "good cop, bad cop" game the U.S. Government has been playing with Venezuela became evident. Former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, Charles Shapiro, accredited shortly before the coup in April 2002 and remaining, through rocky relations, until August 2004, published an Opinion article in Miami's Spanish newspaper, El Nuevo Herald, justifying U.S. intervention in Venezuela.
Shapiro, now the Adjunct Vice Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs of the Department of State, affirmed the U.S. Government's commitment to continue financing Venezuela's opposition movement to President Chavez, referring to coup leaders and illegal strike instigators as "Venezuelans seeking to protect their democratic rights". The U.S. Government has funneled more than $20 million to opposition organizations and parties since 2001, through its two financing entities, the National Endowment for Democracy and United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Continuing with the media campaign, on January 13, Senator Richard Lugar, head of the international relations committee of the U.S. Senate, made public a letter sent in November 2004 to the U.S. Government Accountability Office expressing profound worry over an eventual disruption in oil supply from Venezuela. Lugar affirmed that the Department of State no longer considers Venezuela a reliable supplier of oil due to "political instability" that threatens oil production. No mention was made of the fact that the U.S. Government has been the prime instigator of such "political instability".
Eva Golinger/Venezuelanalysis 26.Jan.05
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Our Chavez problem

Venezuelan strongman's erratic pronouncements and enmity toward Bush unsettle Houston interests.
In the summer of 2003, Luis Marin was picked to be CEO of Citgo, the U.S. refining and marketing arm of Venezuela's state oil company. Marin decided to move Citgo's headquarters from Tulsa, Okla., to Houston.
Now Marin is out and Citgo's parent company, Petróleos de Venezuela, has put Citgo on the block. What gives?
The answer lies with Venezuela's authoritarian, faux leftist president, Hugo Chavez. Chavez's political support lies with Venezuela's poor, of whom there is no shortage. He cements his support by directing much of the country's oil revenues to social programs, although lately he has sought to spend heavily on warplanes and other weaponry. Chavez's other tactics include muzzling the press, befriending and imitating Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and accusing the Bush administration of having imperialist designs.
Even astute foreign policy analysts have difficulty distinguishing Chavez's propaganda and rants from real policy pronouncements. Chavez recently accused Citgo of paying no Venezuelan taxes, hiring no Venezuelans and sending home no profits.

Houston Chronicle
18.Feb.05
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link 11abril

The parents of Giuliana Sgrena, along with more than 100,000 others
in Rome Saturday, ask for peace and the liberation of all hostages in Iraq

other days

Lawrence H. Summers, on filling the gap

"What does one make of that? I think it is hard-and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively-to say that there are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That's not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe.
[...]
"The second problem is the one that Gary Becker very powerfully pointed out in addressing racial discrimination many years ago. If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap."

Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce
Lawrence H. Summers

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Rather than the simplistic non-issue - the what: whether girls can do things boys can do just as well boys can - the idea I'd have liked to see explored somewhere is the how, and the why of it. The easiest place to begin that pretty much taboo exploration is at the crux of a lot of these contemporary questions, the place where they all reveal a similar lacuna, a blank place on the page.
You can train a dog to do a lot of things. Some dogs are more trainable than others, but most dogs share that malleable quality to some degree. Working stock dogs, some of them, have a telepathic ability - or what seems like a telepathic ability - to follow the simplest commands into complex activities. But there must have been a time when the trainableness of dogs wasn't a general trait, when they were still close to the original wild canids they came from. So that the dogs who did have that quality were recognizable. And what happened was we selected the trainable, valued them, rewarded them, and in most cases, killed the untrainable.
We also learned to breed the prized examples of one desired trait with others, and to cross-breed for other traits, intelligence, height etc.
The obvious connection is for some reason so taboo it's dangerously groundbreaking to mention it.
I'm suggesting that's so people don't realize that they're being selected, bred, their genetic features shaped and molded, and have been for some time. That the Darwinian process never stopped, not even to this day, it just slowly shifted away from the "natural" world, to the control, conscious or otherwise, of human institutions and human environments.
And I'm suggesting that at some point, after you've raised generations of women to subservience and indirection, to believe they're incapable of certain "masculine" activities, and all the other varying attributes women have been raised to believe about themselves, and men with them, at some point you start breeding for those qualities, bogus as they were to start with.
When Summers says
"They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment..."
how old is that society? Where are its roots? What are its founding documents? Because I'm convinced those things become like a set of plans, a template, a standard to which consciously or not the breed is aimed.
So is "our society" this one, now? And what's that?
An aunt I spent childhood time with was a teenager before there were cars on the road as a matter of course. My family didn't have a televison in the house until I was 7. Those are two different societies right there, though they overlap linguistically and geographically. And both are different than the one Summers addresses as "our".
So I think that "our society" business needs particular attention, and definition. The little bit I know about the Iroqouis Confederacy has left me with the impression that at least some of the Eastern indigenous tribes had strong female leadership, not in the celebrity sense of politics and heroic action figures, but in the actual directing of the course of events. Wisdom that was backed up with power and traditions of honor and respect. Certainly that's not "our society".
Maybe President Summers needs to be reminded of the imprisoned women who were force-fed gruel through rubber tubes shoved down their throats, when they went into hunger strikes - after they'd been imprisoned for demanding the right to vote. Is that "our society"? Not as easy to answer, that one.
Because if that's not "our society" when did it change? Where on the timeline did "we" stop being a society that would do that to women who demanded the right to vote?
World War 2 perhaps. Though really it was a slow movement over time from that moment to this. 100 years ago women couldn't vote in "our society".
Things are better now, in some ways. But I think Summers needs to clarify what he means; not because his argument will be clearer and more precise, but so that the fallacy underneath it, and the bias that created it, will be too obvious to need describing, and we can get down to fighting about what's really going on.
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When Summers says
"If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind..."
it gets clearer that rather than a good-faith argument what we're looking at is cultural bias trying to preserve itself. Exceptionalism is the current meme for what that is.
True on the face of it, what's deeper in is so obviously not what Summers is saying that you have to start translating. It's as though there's a planet where all the colleges are, and they draw their faculties out of a kind of reincarnation/rebirth process from other nebulous worlds about which we know nothing.
His diagram posits an undescribed but necessary pool of value-neutral cultural nurseries, where the institutions that aren't discriminating can recruit their minority candidates. It's a lot like a more genteel affable version of the reasonable arguments against school integration itself, back in the 50's. Less than 50 years ago there were public arguments, in reasonable tones from men of influence, as to the unnecessary disruption school integration would bring. And those who argued against them were on the margins, getting beaten, and harrassed, and in more than a few cases, murdered. Less than 50 years ago in "our society".
And then there's the petulant shallow aggravation of the anti-affirmative-action champions of more recent times.
The trouble is there's this unspoken concept of "jubilee" - a day where all debts are canceled and the whole cultural group just "moves on". Only it only seems to apply to the powerful.
Slavery, and its less-legislated sisters unjust wages and intolerable working conditions, created fortunes that still exist in "our society", whose returns still support the heirs of the men who made them, and that's seen as well and good. But these social crimes were finally seen as immoral, and legislated against, and condemned legally, and stopped - for the most part. But the harm they caused, the disruption and damage, the altered lives and the who-can-calculate-them effects that made them outlawable, persist. And there you have the largest crack in Summer's edifice of "we're just built that way".
Things are like they are because of how they were, and that was not good how they were, that way was not a good way. He reduces the terms of the argument to things he can safely espouse, and leaves out the context entirely, achieving a calm reasoned tone to run the con, like the professional bureaucrat he is.
He does that with gender issues overall, talking about his daughters playing house with their toy trucks as though all there was in his world at that time was him, his wife, his daughters, and the trucks.
I've worked in daycare, I've seen kid-memes spread faster than you could write them down - among 4 and 5 year olds, ripples of like and/or dislike spreading around the break table like a change of direction in a flock of birds.
And television is what most of those kids went home to, not the cultural heart and arteries of a grandparent's stories.
It's too plain that Summers doesn't want to acknowledge the feedback loop of commercial television's pandering to audience demand while it sculpts that demand toward its own well-being, at the expense of everything else - including the well-being of the children it now raises.
Any discussion of gender differences, innate or cultural, elective or instinctual, that doesn't include the cultural presence of television as a third, and more culturally representative, parent; and, at this point, doesn't place it higher on the scale of influence than working parents in most children's lives, is either wishful thinking or an outright lie.
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The short versions: Cultural selection over time becomes genetic selection.
Arguments against altering provably harmful cultural norms that proceed from a premise of genetic inalterability are defensive posturing.

Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donavan, Ita Ford
Killed by a death squad in El Salvador, 1980
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images: KryssTal


Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donavan, Ita Ford
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"Now what I ask you is to please advise the Guards. Those who did it. Not to tell anyone. No one. Not any superior at the last minute. Do you understand what I am telling you? You can be in deep shit because the command can take you down if they're put in a bind. Do you understand what I am telling you?"
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New York--In a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Human Rights First urges the State Department to request the appropriate US authorities to conduct an immediate investigation of how the former Director General of the Salvadoran National Guard was permitted to become a resident of the United States despite authoritative finding that he was involved in a cover-up of the 1980 murder of three US nuns and a lay missionary.
Human Rights First also requested release of previously undisclosed information in the possession of the State Department, including "special Embassy evidence," that would shed new light on the case.
"We were shocked by the recent revelation that Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, the Director General of the National Guard at the time of the murders of the churchwomen, has been permitted to reside in this country," said Scott Greathead and Robert Weiner, who are representing the families of the dead women.
Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan, were brutally raped and murdered in El Salvador on December 2, 1980. In May 1984, five enlisted members of the National Guard of El Salvador were convicted of the crime, and sentenced to thirty years in prison.
Greathead and Weiner traveled to El Salvador last week to interview the four National Guardsmen who said for the first time that they acted on orders of higher ups.
"The statements of the convicted Guardsmen we interviewed last week are consistent with significant circumstantial evidence, as well as testimony in the court record, indicating that they were acting pursuant to higher orders to murder the churchwomen," said the letter to Secretary Albright.
"It has been over seventeen years since the churchwomen were murdered, and nearly fourteen years since the five Guardsmen were tried and convicted of the crime. We do not believe any compelling reason exists to justify any further delay in releasing the (evidence)," said Human Rights First.

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tortured by Salvadoran security forces

During a four-week trial that began on June 24 the plaintiffs told of being detained and tortured by Salvadoran national guardsmen and police under the command of the two generals. The jury began deliberations on Thursday afternoon, and deliberated for a total of some 20hours.
In addition to receiving electric shocks and other forms of brutal torture, Romagoza had been shot in the arm and suspended from his fingers so as to damage his hands and thus ensure that he would never be able to perform surgery again. Gonzalez, who was eight months pregnant at the time she was tortured, was raped and stomped on. Her son died two months after birth as a result of the injuries. She was forced to watch the torture and execution of another prisoner and drink his blood, and was left for dead by the national guardsmen. Mauricio was subjected to horrific beatings and was strung up with his hands over his head for long periods of time.
The case is one of the few cases since the Tokyo trials following World War II in which a foreign commander has been held liable under the doctrine of command responsibility for war crimes committed by his troops.
Global Policy Forum-

John Negroponte wasn't running things when these particular nuns were killed, but he was running things when their murders were being covered up, and he was running things when thousands of other, equally innocent, people were killed. Not in the name of freedom, or democracy, or Christianity, but in the name of the opposite of those things, the precise opposite.