[APR-news] December 22, 2005

Thu Dec 22 18:25:34 GMT 2005

Alternative Press Review - Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream
www.altpr.org - December 22, 2005

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain

"Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes 12
years of public schooling and 4 more years of college to beat it out of
them." - Edward Abbey

"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct.
Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying
privacy-these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to
prevent, on one pretext or another." - John Taylor Gatto

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave those kids alone
(Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall)

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http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=558&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
Guardians of Power: Exclusive interview with Media Lens' editors David
Edwards and David Cromwell
By Gabriele Zamparini

It's ironic that we tend to associate this kind of thought control with
Soviet-style systems, but in fact it's far more important in an ostensibly
democratic society like ours. If you are to convince people in our society
that they are free, you can't just censor everything as they did in the
Soviet Union, because then everyone knows they're living in a kind of
prison. In our society people are bombarded with business and political
propaganda that shapes their assumptions about the world. But they also have
access to some honest ideas in comparatively small circulation newspapers
like the Guardian and the Independent, and primarily through one or two
honest writers like John Pilger and Robert Fisk. This acts as a kind of
vaccine - tiny doses of dissent that inoculate people against the idea that
they are subject to thought control. But the reality is that this dissent is
flooded and overwhelmed by propaganda that keeps us thinking the right way,
keeps us passive and in line. By the way, we don't intend to suggest that
this is the result of any kind of conspiracy. It happens as a kind of
side-effect of the media's pursuit of maximised profits in a
state-capitalist society.

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Other articles of interest

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1221-22.htm
A Risk of Total Collapse: We would be foolish to take for granted the
permanence of our fragile global civilization
Dylan Evans, The Guardian

Is it possible that global civilization might collapse within our lifetime
or that of our children? Until recently, such an idea was the preserve of
lunatics and cults. In the past few years, however, an increasing number of
intelligent and credible people have been warning that global collapse is a
genuine possibility.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/112105_eating_locally.shtml
EATING LOCALLY IS HARDER THAN YOU THINK
Wendy Talaro, From the Wilderness

Though I engaged in this two-week exercise as a specific homework assignment
for a graduate school level Ecological Agriculture course, I would not
hesitate to recommend that absolutely everyone living in industrialized
countries participate in their own local food sourcing experiment. Where is
your food grown and harvested? Not just some of it - this is a query about
each and every component of your current diet, whether you're eating junk
food for pleasure and solace, or enjoying mindful dining for nutritional
health. Restrict your food purchases to items grown within a specific
mileage radius and write out the rationale for the distance of the boundary.
Find out as best you can about the farm sources of the produce, dairy, eggs
and meat that you eat and ask grocers for this information if a food item's
origin is not clearly labeled. If components of your standard diet are not
locally available and readily accessible within the radius, make notes of
all the food items that would otherwise be missing if not for global
commerce and far-flung food transport. It is an eye-opening, if disturbing,
exercise. Food security vulnerabilities are ordinarily easy to overlook
until the veneer of plenty is ripped away.

http://www.rockrivertimes.com/index.pl?cmd=viewstory&cat=4&id=11948
We are facing a severe survival test
Joe Baker, Rock River Times

Peak Oil and Gas are beginning to weigh upon us. Experts in the energy field
have been saying for months that natural gas will be our biggest problem
this winter, and we are seeing its cost heading for the moon as supplies
tighten up. Some look at the prices at the gasoline pump and believe it all
is a matter of big oil companies gouging the consumer, but that analysis is
misleading.

http://www.thetyee.ca/Views/2005/12/16/Unschooling/
Unschooling: Education that unleashes the creative spirit
Jeremiah Vandermeer, The Tyee

Gatto is by no means alone in his claims. Noam Chomsky, the great linguist
and political activist once called "arguably the most important intellectual
alive," by the New York Times, writes in Understanding Power that public
education is a "system of imposed ignorance," that was instituted in the
United States and elsewhere as "a technique to beat independence out of the
heads of farmers and turn them into docile and obedient factory workers."
"In fact," Chomsky writes, "the whole educational and professional training
system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too
independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be
submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions."

http://www.counterpunch.org/salasin12222005.html
Classroom in a Cage: High Expectations and Comfortable Prisons
Elisa Salasin, CounterPunch

The above image shows California Youth Authority students in their
classroom. The students are the ones inside the cages, and they are being
taught to read. A friend drew my attention to this photo after I shared a
story about a similar kind of prison, about kids learning to read in cages,
albeit ones where the bars, while not visible, are nonetheless solidly
constructed.

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/06/05/news-lewis.php
ELF: Does the radical environmental group really exist?
Judith Lewis, LA Weekly

When the American Civil Liberties Union this week released a new batch of
documents obtained from the FBI verifying that the federal agency has been
monitoring domestic environmental- and animal-rights groups, it was only the
latest evidence of government working on behalf of the anti-environmentalist
industry and property-rights advocates to, as one of those advocates put it
in 1992, "destroy the environmental movement." It's an effort that's been
under way since the 1980s, using various tactics from intimidation to
slander. Only recently have the anti-environmentalists hit upon their most
promising idea yet: Linking environmentalism to terrorism.

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/jacobs211205.html
>From a US Resistance Primer: A Conversation with Randy Rowland
Ron Jacobs, MRZine

He was part of the staff of a Tacoma, Washington GI underground newspaper in
the 1970s.  Tacoma is literally right next door to one of the largest US
Army bases in the world -- Ft. Lewis.  McChord Air Force Base is less than
an hour away.  If those of us who work in independent media ever wonder
about our reach and effectiveness, this anecdote that Randy shared should
give us hope.  He was at a party a few years back and found himself in a
conversation with a fellow veteran from the Vietnam era.  The two men had
never met before this particular party.  As the conversation wound its way
through the paths such conversations take, the fellow vet mentioned to Randy
that the best thing he remembered from his days in the service was reading
the Ft. Lewis underground paper.  In fact, it was that paper that helped
convince this vet to oppose the war.

http://valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com/2005/12/making-of-enemy-part-two.html
The Making of the Enemy [Part Two]
Manuel Valenzuela, Valenzuela's Veritas

The manufacture of the war on terror - along with the systematic branding of
Arabs and Persians as America's enemy - has coincided perfectly with the
race in a geopolitical chess match to see who can secure the remaining
fields of the resource known as the devil's excrement, the black blood
needed to run the machines of mankind. Had the vast amounts of oil fields
been in Latin America instead of in the Middle East and Central Asia the war
on terror would be taking place in Brazil or Ecuador or Venezuela, and
Hispanics would be today's bogeymen. Instead, America finds herself having
lied and deceived her own people, trying to find justifications to penetrate
and control the remaining oil fields, unleashing psychological war on us the
easier to manipulate the population and using terror as a pretext to invade
and occupy a most important geopolitical and geostrategic prize, Iraq.

http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=cdb8a33d2a06499110bde7f306d8e8ed
Bush Domestic Spying is Old News
Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media

The big puzzle is why anyone is shocked that President Bush eavesdropped on
Americans. The National Security Agency for decades has routinely monitored
the phone calls and telegrams of thousands of Americans. The rationale has
always been the same, and Bush said it again in defending his spying, that
it was done to protect Americans from foreign threat or attack. The named
targets in the past were Muslim extremists, Communists, peace activists,
black radicals, civil rights leaders and drug peddlers. Even before
President Harry Truman established the NSA in a Cold War era directive in
1952, government cryptologists jumped in the domestic spy hunt with
Operation Shamrock. That was a super-secret operation that forced private
telegraphic companies to turn over the telegraphic correspondence of
Americans to the government.

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NewsWire

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article334686.ece
Big Brother: Britain will be the first country where every journey by every
car will be monitored and recorded

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/nyregion/22police.html
New York Police Covertly Join In at Protest Rallies

http://www.slate.com/id/2132810/nav/tap1/
Listening In and Naming Names: The old tricks of the National Security
Agency

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20051221210134764
Democrats and Republicans Reach Agreement to Eliminate Your Freedoms

http://www.newsnet5.com/news/5580743/detail.html
Gestapo Alert: Bill Would Allow Jackbooted Government Thugs to Arrest Anyone
For No Reason Whatsoever In Any Public Place

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/news-d22.shtml
New York City transit workers defiant: "Bloomberg and his friends are the
thugs, not us"

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/13451168.htm
Fewer blacks enlisting to become cannon fodder for Empire

http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick12212005.html
Iraq Election Spells Total Defeat for US

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,69595,00.html
Pharmaceutical drug cartels using poor in India as guinea pigs

http://www.cbc.ca/north/story/protestthreat201205.html
Yukon high school students who attended peace demonstration in Alaska
labeled a threat by U.S. Homeland Security

http://www.newkerala.com/news.php?action=fullnews&id=71086
Bolivia's Morales states the obvious: Bush is a "terrorist"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1671774,00.html
Melting of permafrost threatens homes and roads, scientists warn

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/national/21pollute.html
Gas emissions reach new record high in US

http://www.survival-international.org/news.php?id=1278
Andaman tribes who survived tsunami 'may be wiped out' by invading settlers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/brazil/story/0,,1671106,00.html
US research 'endangered Amazon villagers'

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