Gil Scott-Heron is back with the devil

Gil Scott-Heron ist back. For those who don’t know him, he was one of the most outspoken black poets and social critics of the 70ties. He is widely considered to be a frontrunner for modern hiphop. His most famous poem is “The revolution will not be televised”.

The Guardian has an interview up now:

“People keep saying I disappeared,” the singer tells me, laughing heartily, when I speak to him. “Well, that’s a gift I didn’t know I had. You ever see someone disappear? That makes me a superhero, right?”

The humour, though, conceals a great deal of heartbreak and an epic struggle with addiction, both of which are referred to obliquely on his raggedly brilliant version of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil” on the new album. “Early this mornin’, when you knocked upon my door”, he sings, “And I said, “Hello, Satan, I believe it’s time to go.”

Though Gil Scott-Heron insists he did not disappear, that he kept playing club gigs in America and did the occasional tour, that he was writing, if not recording, the news that kept on filtering back from his long winter in America was always bleak. It seemed at times as if the most astute musical social commentator of the 70s and 80s had metamorphosed into a character from one of his own sad songs of suffering and struggle. On the sombre and still-startling “Home Is Where The Hatred Is”, recorded in 1971, he described a junkie trapped in a blighted inner-city ghetto who lived inside “white powder dreams”. Thirty-odd years later, he seemed to be living those lyrics.

On talented children…

The New York Magazine is currently running a long article on the way we look at talent and intelligence in children. And, what’s worse, how we take the results of intelligence tests applied to little children at the fragile age of 4 and turn them into tickets to their entire school careers. Gifted programs or rubbish schools, those options very much depend on the result of these tests. But the correlation between intelligence test findings and real intelligence, i.e. a person’s ability to absorb and apply knowledge and do well in life  is an arbitrary one, if there is one, since the IQ is a figure which isn’t absolute or etched in stone. It’s a relative number expressing how well you do vis-a-vis your peers, and that relation changes as you grow up. In other words, if by age 4 you’re not on top of your school game, you’ve pretty much dumped your career already. Surely, a free society should look at the bigger picture and still give kids a chance when they get the hang of things a bit later on.

The Atlantic has a short recommendation for the article and a great quote that outlines in a few sentences why the exaggerated faith in testing can lead to the exact opposite of a meritocracy (a system where those to do well or work hard succeed).

Intelligence is a process, not a fixed, gene-determined, thing. This process begins very early on, before we can even really see it, and we therefore often confuse these early, invisible stages with some sort of innate giftedness. Then we test kids and report the results as innate differences–this one is gifted, this one is not. This one has extra promise; that one does not. We send the “gifted” ones to good schools with small class sizes, better-trained teachers, better infrastructure, better relationships with parents, and higher expectations. We send the apparently-unpromising kids to under-funded, teach-to-test schools with minimal expectations.

And then there’s the New York Magazine article in full. Well worth reading if you’re in education or a parent or both.

What’s surprising is that a single test, taken at the age of 4, can have so much power in deciding a child’s fate in the first place. The fact is, 4 is far too young an age to reach any conclusions about the prospects of a child’s mind. Even administrators who use these exams—indeed, especially the administrators who use these exams—say they’re practically worthless as predictors of future intelligence. “At information meetings,” says Steve Nelson, head of the famously progressive Calhoun School, “I’ll often ask a room full of parents when their children started to walk.” Invariably, their replies form a perfect bell curve: a few at 9 and 10 months, most at 12 or 13, a few as late as 15 to 18. “And then I’ll ask: ‘What would you think if you were walking down the street, and you saw a parent yanking a 1-year-old child up from the sidewalk, screaming, ‘Walk, damn it?’ ” The same, he says, is true of a system that insists a child perform well on a test at 4 years of age. “Early good testers don’t make better students,” he tells me, “any more than early walkers make better runners.”

Stewart and O’Reilly

Even though they might be considered (and somehow are) opponents in the media field, I keep wondering how the two, who make it their daily business to slag off the other’s show and audience, manage to keep such a civil and good-natured tone when they guest on the other’s programme every once in a while. It’s like playing the dozens. Both are hitting the punchlines, but will only go so far as the other’s dignity isn’t hurt. Which is normal for Jon, but an exception for Bill. So kudos for sucking it in, Bill.  Stewart shows his superiority (and implicitly Bill’s boneheadedness) by going the self-deprecating route, cracking jokes at his own expense, which Bill is very reluctant to  do. Not that he couldn’t, it’s just that his audience doesn’t get irony. It’s probably the Fox News network’s policy to not get people thinking by throwing them off with irony and satire.

Currently, Jon is going to be interviewed on The O’Reilly Factor today and tomorrow night (CET) and I’d be curious how that goes.

For old time’s sake, here’s an appearance Jon made on The O’Reilly Factor 6 years ago (when the US were one year into the Iraq invasion.) Great stuff.

For the brandnew interview, peep O’Reilly. The interview is in three parts.

What to do with unsold clothes…

NATO-Geheimarmeen (Daniele Ganser)

Der Historiker an der Uni Basel, Daniele Ganser, hat mit seiner Doktorarbeit vor ein paar Jahren einen internationalen Knüller gelandet. Zum ersten Mal arbeitete jemand systematisch die lange geheim gehaltenen Geheimarmeen (daher der Name) der NATO auf. Diese Armeen waren so geheim, dass manche Verteidigungsminister wie auch die Parlamente in Europa selber davon keine Ahnung hatten. Das Schweigen wurde vom italienischen Premier Giulio Andreotti erst 1990 gelüftet. In der Folge kam im gleichen Jahr die Schweizer Version der europaweiten “Operation Gladio” ans Licht und wurde von einer parlamentarischen Untersuchungskommission unter die Lupe genommen. Hier war sie Projekt 26 (P-26) getauft worden. Allgemein wurden nur in drei Ländern parlamentarische Untersuchungen betrieben (Belgien, Schweiz, Italien). Im Rest Europas dauerte die Enthüllung zum Teil noch Jahre.

Abzeichen des italienischen Gladio-Zweigs.

Zweck der Geheimarmeen: Im Falle einer kommunistischen Besetzung Westeuropas hätten die Geheimarmeen aktiv werden und mit Guerrilla-Taktik den Feind bekämpfen sollen. Allerdings sollen diese Verbände auch sozialistische oder kommunistische Strömungen in der Politik behindert oder sogar sabotiert haben. Der Verdacht, dass dafür auch Terrorakte inszeniert worden und den Kommunisten in die Schuhe geschoben worden seien, ist noch nicht überzeugend widerlegt…

Ein Zitat aus dem Bericht der ETH:

Ziel war es, in Italien um jeden Preis eine Regierungsbeteiligung der Kommunisten zu verhindern. Minister dieser Partei, so die Befürchtung, könnten Geheimnisse an die Sowjetunion verraten und so die Nato von innen heraus schwächen. Gladio schreckte nicht vor feigen Terroranschlägen gegen die eigene Bevölkerung zurück. Das Volk sollte verunsichert werden, damit es den Staat um mehr Sicherheit bittet. Durch falsche Spuren und Einflussnahme auf die Justiz gelang es, die Taten dem politischen Gegner in die Schuhe zu schieben.

Auch in Frankreich, Deutschland (wo auch ehemalige SS-Offiziere involviert waren), Norwegen und Belgien verübten die Geheimarmeen Terroranschläge. In Griechenland war sie in den Militärputsch involviert, und in der Türkei unterstützte die “Counter-Guerilla” den Kampf gegen die Kurden. Nach den Enthüllungen der PUK-EMD wurde in der Schweiz der Verdacht geäussert, auch die P26 habe Anschläge verübt. Der Verdacht konnte aber nicht bestätigt werden.

Ein grossartiger Vortrag, aufgenommen an der Uni Basel, anlässlich einer öffentlichen Veranstaltung am 14.9.09, um das grosse Interesse zu befriedigen.

Klick aufs Bild öffnet den Videovortrag, unterteilt in Kapitel.
Dauert rund 2 wohlinvestierte Stunden.

Gladio (Deutsch)

P-26 (Englisch)

P-26 (Deutsch)

Bericht zur Konferenz “Nato Geheimarmeen und P26″

On human compartmentalization (Haiti/Gaza)

… and by compartmentalization I’m not even attempting a clever pun on the people of Gaza being stuffed into a physical compartment, which they are, of course. It’s about how the human mind can split its perception of two similar things and feel quite different about either one. Or how one can be totally concerned by one problem on the other side of the globe and forget there’s much the same going on outside my own home, but nah, let’s file that under “forgettable.”

Haiti: disaster, misery, Israeli cargo plane with goods and doctors goes out to the rescue. Bravo.

Now let’s see how that works with this strip of land at Israelis’ doorstep. Not the same now, is it? Or is it?

Israel’s compassion in Haiti can’t hide our ugly face in Gaza
by Akiva Eldar

Who said we are shut up inside our Tel Aviv bubble? How many small nations surrounded by enemies set up field hospitals on the other side of the world? Give us an earthquake in Haiti, a tsunami in Thailand or a terror attack in Kenya, and the IDF Spokesman’s Office will triumph. A cargo plane can always be found to fly in military journalists to report on our fine young men from the Home Front Command.

Everyone is truly doing a wonderful job: the rescuers, searching for survivors; the physicians, saving lives; and the reporters, too, who are rightfully patting them all on the back. After Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon became the face we show the world, the entire international community can now see Israel’s good side.

But the remarkable identification with the victims of the terrible tragedy in distant Haiti only underscores the indifference to the ongoing suffering of the people of Gaza. Only a little more than an hour’s drive from the offices of Israel’s major newspapers, 1.5 million people have been besieged on a desert island for two and a half years. Who cares that 80 percent of the men, women and children living in such proximity to us have fallen under the poverty line? How many Israelis know that half of all Gazans are dependent on charity, that Operation Cast Lead created hundreds of amputees, that raw sewage flows from the streets into the sea?…

The missiles that Israel Air Force combat aircraft fired there a year ago hit nearly 60,000 homes and factories, turning 3,500 of them into rubble. Since then, 10,000 people have been living without running water, 40,000 without electricity. Ninety-seven percent of Gaza’s factories are idle due to Israeli government restrictions on the import of raw materials for industry. Soon it will be one year since the international community pledged, at the emergency conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, to donate $4.5 billion for Gaza’s reconstruction. Israel’s ban on bringing in building materials is causing that money to lose its value…

Even the images of our excellent doctors in Haiti cannot blur our ugly face in the Strip.

Haiti is being “helped” to death

Before anyone accuses me of denying emergency aid to the people of Haiti, I want to point out that I’m all for giving Haitians every bit of help we can afford — just not only now, in the form of food deliveries and water tanks and search-and-rescue teams. The world needs to look at Haiti (and almost all so-called Third World countries) in the bigger picture, looking at what goes into the country and, more importantly, what comes out of the country.

A clue: foreign debt plus interest.

This article in The Nation outlines quite nicely how instantaneous help in the form of food and credits may seem a noble gesture, but on the flipside of this uneven relationship between Haiti and the “world community”, these same measures create more long-term problems than they solve in the short run, much like giving a homeless person a heroin habit instead of a job — and charge them for the drug, too. Haiti is still unashamedly being bled out: food aid at dumping prices, sponsored by the US govt, is good money for the US farming industry, while rice prices in Haiti (a former rice exporter) fall into the cellar, robbing farmers of their livelihoods. And to add interest to injury, the cost of paying back its foreign debt outweighs all the “help” the country gets. To think that Haiti was the very first slave nation to gain independence (on paper), but that has since spent the roughly two centuries under the yoke of financial pressure, would seem to give enough reason to just scratch the slate clean and give them a real, new chance at independence.

Haiti’s vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor–by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.

Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake. To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF’s extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.

For Haiti, this is history repeated. As historians have documented, the impoverishment of Haiti began in the earliest decades of its independence, when Haiti’s slaves and free gens de couleur rallied to liberate the country from the French in 1804. But by 1825, Haiti was living under a new kind of bondage–external debt. In order to keep the French and other Western powers from enforcing an embargo, it agreed to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners (yes, that’s right, freed slaves were forced to compensate their former masters for their liberty). In order to do that, they borrowed millions from French banks and then from the US and Germany. As Alex von Tunzelmann pointed out, “by 1900, it [Haiti] was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments.”

It took Haiti 122 years, but in 1947 the nation paid off about 60 percent, or 90 million francs, of this debt (it was able to negotiate a reduction in 1838). In 2003, then-President Aristide called on France to pay restitution for this sum–valued in 2003 dollars at over $21 billion. A few months later, he was ousted in a coup d’etat; he claims he left the country under armed pressure from the US…

Then of course there are the structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s. In 1995, for example, the IMF forced Haiti to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent, leading to a massive increase in rice-dumping, the vast majority of which came from the United States. As a 2008 Jubilee USA report notes, although the country had once been a net exporter of rice, “by 2005, three out of every four plates of rice eaten in Haiti came from the US.” During this period, USAID invested heavily in Haiti, but this “charity” came not in the form of grants to develop Haiti’s agricultural infrastructure, but in direct food aid, furthering Haiti’s dependence on foreign assistance while also funneling money back to US agribusiness…

A 2008 report from the Center for International Policy points out that in 2003, Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million. In other words, under a system of putative benevolence, Haiti paid back more than it received.

Real talk by Craig Ferguson

With all the phoniness and bickering and backstabbing between the late night TV hosts, here’s a bit of late night talk we don’t get enough of. Craig Ferguson uses a pledge to make no more Britney Spears jokes to move onto a deeply personal story of how he realised he himself had an alcohol problem. This is plain awesome and refreshingly honest, yet funny at the same time. How come he isn’t moved up to the 10 o’clock spot and everybody else goes back to playing with their LEGO?

BTW, the video is from two years back, so it’s not a direct response to this “late night war” going on outside (no man is safe from*), but that just means Craig is ahead of his time.

* classic, completely unrelated, but must-use quote. listen around 0:20

The end of gaiety in New Jersey

New Jersey state senators dumped the bill asking for gay marriage to be allowed in the Garden of Eden State. What’s striking, and Wyatt Cenac nails this in his report for the Daily Show, is the complete lack of a historical perspective on the debate. Black people, hasidic Jews and more minorities were up in arms about the prospect of people having the freedom to marry who they want.

Here’s where my quote of the week comes in. (Click picture to watch.)

“It was just as our forefathers had envisioned. That one day, people who had been discriminated against for their religion or their color of their skin could come together to discriminate against people for their sexual orientation — without the slightest sense of irony.” (Wyatt Cenac)

Anyway, what’s with every reactionary ignoramus always trying to piggyback the founding fathers? At the time, they were amongst the most modern and visionary of their time, actually putting into law the ideals of the French Revolution which, even in France, was quickly compromised. (Okay, let’s leave slavery and the slaughtering of Indians out of this for half a second…)

The fox and the sheep

So Sarah Palin is actually going to get paid to sit on Fox News as a “political analyst”? Really? When’s the last time she ever analysed anything, leave alone come up with original and share-worthy insight that a pet turtle couldn’t divulge in between two nibblings of tomato?

Accordingly, she’s getting a bit of a pointing, laughing and bashing by the few, usual media that haven’t entirely lost their minds, and quite tellingly, also by some of her former political allies right down to none other than Fox News posterchild Bill O’Reilly himself.

Column from The Nation:

O’Reilly had just shown John Heilemann, coauthor of Game Change, on 60 Minutes saying, “She still didn’t really understand why there was a North Korea and a South Korea, she was still regularly saying that Saddam Hussein had been behind 9/11, and literally the next day her son was about to ship off to Iraq and when they asked her who her son was going to fight, she couldn’t explain that.” While Sarah flashed a fixed smile and told Bill that she didn’t let that sort of thing get to her, it started to dawn on me that, in one important respect, Fox and Palin are quite different: Sarah Fox is not nearly as clever as cable Fox…

Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson, on Monday night’s Countdown, said it best: “Sarah Palin is the latest in a line of populists, but she’s very different in one way. Populists historically have pretended not to know anything. They’ve actually been part of a fairly intellectual group of people. But she really doesn’t know anything. And it’s in God’s plan apparently that she not learn anything.”