john4820

Two videos from al-Jazeera about the plight of Palestinians living under the Israeli occupation regime in the West Bank.  The first deals with the limitations Israel imposes on Palestinians freedom of movement access to transportation.
 

The second video deals with an increasingly important issue, that of access to water.  In the West [...]

Here is a video I dug up recently from Znet.








The Imperial College Political Philosophy Society, in association with Palestine societies at UCL, SOAS, Goldsmiths, LSE, Imperial and Kings, proudly present one of the greatest political philosophers of all time: MIT Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky. The topic is a facinating one, especially because it brings [...]

Here is a short video (in two parts) of an interview of Slavoj Zižek on  Democracy Now earlier this month.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Zižek he is just possibly the most important philosopher of our time.  You don’t always get noticed that much in the English speaking world, or anywhwere for [...]

The cancer rate in parts of Iraq have soared  the 2003 US led invasion.  In the province of Babil for example, the rate has risen close to ten times in the past three years.  What is behind the marked expansion in the rate of new cancer victims in Iraq?  Without a  thorough study of the situation it cannot be determined for sure, but almost all signs point to the US military's use of depleted uranium.   See the video below



The newly documented cases of cancer in Babil was 500 in 2003.  By 2004 the cases had doubled to 1,000.  In 2008 it had climbed to 7,000 and it has already surpassed 9,000 this year alone, approaching 10 times the pre-war rate.  These are the hidden casualty figures of war.  The civilians who are forced to live through the carnage and destruction inevitably end up suffering the most from it.  Generals, politicians, and newscasters all try to distort reality by giving body counts and saying that all possible caution is taken in trying to prevent civilian casualties.  What a blatant distortion of reality, what a lie.  The US used depleted uranium all over Iraq and white phosphorous in the well documented assault on Falujah in april 2004.  Israel followed the lead of the Imperium and used white phosphorous in its war on the people of Gaza this past year.  The use of nuclear and chemical weapons by the use and its allies is tantamount to war crimes and those responsible should be prosecuted at the highest levels.  The tragic-comdey that is the occupation of Iraq has come full circle, a truly Orwellian farce of epic proportions.  Iraq did not possess the weapons to bring mass destruction and yet that did not prevent Iraq from being destroyed.  Those weapons were courtesy of the US imperialism.  When war is peace and freedom is slavery then it is only fitting that Iraq was destroyed for possessing weapons it did not have.  It is also fitting that the most violent country on the globe with the largest stock piles of the vilest wea

Here is an interview with Richard Goldstone calling on the US to justify its claims that his UN special commission report on Israel's war on Gaza earlier this year is 'flawed'.  

A movie based upon the David Foster Wallace book, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, is set to open in limited release this Friday.  The book is a collection of short stories, the bulk of which are the response portions of interviews with men dubious character, typically describing sexual misdoings or emotional/intellectual misconduct perpetrated for a variety of reasons.  The remainder of the collection deals with the typical D.F.W. fare (drugs, ethics, depression, etc.)   in the typical D.F.W. fashion (obscure words, footnotes, jargon, etc.)

The movie version gives John Krasinski (The Office) his first shot at directing.  It seems that to tie together the incongruent 'interviews' from the book Krasinski (also getting screen writing credits), has added a graduate student to conduct these interviews, as a sort of catharsis, to recover from a difficult break-up.  The grad student is played by Julianne Nicholson of Law and Order: Who Even Cares? notoriety.

Having read Brief Interviews along  many other pieces by D.F.W. all I can say is I hope they didn't mess this one up.  With the name recognition of Krasinski this movie could be pretty big, I just hope the spirit of the original wasn't sacrificed so as not to offend the middle aged soccer mom fans of The Office who are certainly going to go out to support "Jim."

That said,  the trailer looks great. Plus, it could be worth $9.50 just for Will Arnett as subject #11

Here is the Trailer:



This is the first piece D.F.W. had published in Harpers way back in 1989

I just stumbled across this video and thought it would be interesting to share.  For those of you not familiar with Immanuel Wallerstein he is a prominent sociologist and senior research fellow at Yale.  He is widely recognized as pioneering the world-system thesis along with Fernand Braudel and Andre Gunder Frank (who has in more recent times broken with Wallerstein to advocate a world system approach, without a hyphen.  See his highly informative and paradigm challenging work ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age for more on the world system). His view that 'core-perphirary' relations define the different centers of capitalist development and underdevelopment has become widely recognized and utilized in many fields, notably history, historical sociology, anthropology, philosophy as well as many interdisciplinary efforts.  In this short interview Wallerstein talks about the path the world economy has been following over the past forty years and why he believes that the current economic crisis is but a minor tremor before the coming 'super-depression'.  Taken into consideration is the looming abandonment of the US Dollar as the international reserve currency and the implications that will have for the US economy, the loss of economic hegemony by the US beginning with the crisis of the early 1970's and its resulting multi-polar world, and the possible future alignment of the new poles of power as they compete against one another for a dominant position.