Iran: Protest with a spray-can

From France24:

"The most famous piece of Iranian graffiti is probably the deathly Statue of Liberty painted on the wall of the former US Embassy in Tehran. There's far more to street art than anti-American paintings however, and in the past two years, it's become more popular than ever."

Farhad Roozbeh (not his real name) is a graffiti artist from Tehran. He wishes to remain anonymous. He writes [and go here to view more graffiti]

"They are no legal surfaces to graffiti on in Tehran. Even if the owner of a house wanted an artist to paint the outdoor wall of his property, the police would be sent round to warn them that it's forbidden and the city council would then remove the painting. It's not about making the city look clean, it's about controlling it.

The police don't pay any more attention to street artists than they do other artists. Besides there are very few of us and we draw in secluded places; we're not in it for the fame. They haven't found a particular way to catch us yet. However, like other cultural ‘crimes', graffiti is considered a dissident activity. A graffiti artist caught by the police is sentenced in the same way as a political activist. Journalists, graphic designers; we all risk being imprisoned for what they call ‘the security of the nation'.

Many people here have taken up graffiti in the past two years. There are street artists as young as 12 in Tehran. I think that Farsi websites like irangraffiti.blogspot.com and kolahstudio.com are helping to promote graffiti and advise budding artists. We are influenced a lot by foreign styles - especially from the West. But we also try to inject a bit of eastern flare into our design".

Rogue or rouge woman?

Leaving to one side the 2 books to have hit the US bookstores these last days - Sarah Palin's Going Rogue and The Nation's Going Rouge: An American Nightmare - by all accounts the hype surrounding the woman has been extra-ordinary. She is being touted as the leader of the GOP and 2012 presidential candidate.

Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish on The Atlantic says this:

"This is only the second time in its nearly ten-year history that the Dish has gone silent. The reason now is the same as the reason then. When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life. There are so many fabrications and delusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it - and comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality she has previously provided - is a bewildering task. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. And the fact that she is now the leader of the Republican party and a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility. We take this seriously as we always have. We want to be fair to her, and to her family, and to the innocent people she has brought into the spotlight. And we are not reporters. We are merely analysts trying to make sense of evidence already in the public domain, evidence that points in all sorts of directions, only one of which can be true.

Since the Dish has tried to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Palin's unhinged grip on reality from the very beginning - specifically her fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy - we feel it's vital that we grapple with this new data as fairly and as rigorously as possible. That takes time to get right. And it is so complicated we simply cannot focus on anything else."

Contrast this with The Guardian's report of Palin's attendance at a book-signing:

"In launching one of the most remarkable book tours in American political and publishing history, Palin is becoming a dizzying mix of celebrity and politician. Her folksy blend of right-wing rhetoric, uber-patriotism and winning smile is as heady a brew as ever for those millions – and they do number in the millions – of Americans for whom she is a hero.

For them Palin is not a liberal media joke or a stumbling backwoods politician who fluffed her chance at the big time. She is a truth-teller and their last best hope against the encroaching horrors of socialism. She is St Sarah of American Capitalism.

Nothing else could explain the utter devotion and enthusiasm of the thousands of people (almost all of them white) who showed up at the first stop of Palin's 14-state, three-week tour of the American heartland.

They queued for 24 hours just to be first in line, bringing tents and camp chairs to a gigantic mall on Grand Rapids' outskirts.

They braved rain and cold for Palin's signature on a book and an estimated 5 seconds each of face-time with their idol."

"Final nail in the coffin"

The talk of "settlements" in Israel and the West Bank conjures up a picture of an outpost of a few houses, perhaps even shacks, and an odd collection of caravans in the like.

Well, the above is a so-called "settlement" - Gilo, now the centre of controversy as Israel announces that a further 900 homes will be built in Gilo.

The Israeli PM snubs his nose at the world and says the plans will proceed. Well they might - who is going to stop Israel? - but the peace process now seems dead and buried, as Press TV reports:

"Former Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qureia calls Israel's plan to build more housing units in Gilo the “final nail in the peace process' coffin”.

"This proves that the international community must realize that our statements regarding the collapse of the two-state solution are not slogans," Qureia urged.

On Tuesday, Israel announced plans to construct 900 homes in Gilo, one of a dozen settlements in the illegally annexed East Jerusalem (Al-Quds) in the occupied West Bank.

Qureia, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's Executive Committee, warned the failed peace process would bring about "an eternal conflict that will lead the region and the entire world towards instability."

The Israeli move came under fire from the international community for complicating the already stalled Middle East peace negotiations and putting a kibosh on international peace efforts.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the controversial decision clearly illustrated "why hopes for salvaging two-state solution and restarting genuine negotiations are rapidly fading, and why Israel is not a partner for peace."

Now it's cyberware to contend with

Be scared.....for if this report in the SMH is correct, then we are confronted with a new dimension of conflict between nations.

"Warning of a "cyber arms race," top web security firm McAfee says that China, France, Israel, Russia and the United States have developed cyber weapons.

"McAfee began to warn of the global cyber arms race more than two years ago, but now we're seeing increasing evidence that it's become real," said Dave DeWalt, president and chief executive of McAfee on Tuesday.

"Several nations around the world are actively engaged in cyber-war-like preparations and attacks," he said. "Today, the weapons are not nuclear, but virtual, and everyone must adapt to these threats."

The Santa Clara, California-based McAfee, in its fifth annual Virtual Criminology Report, said China, France, Israel, Russia and the United States were countries that have developed "advanced offensive cyber capabilities."

McAfee said cyber attacks were on the rise and "cyber warfare is a reality."

The warning couldn't be more dire

A Spanish reservoir suffers from drought

All the signs are that the upcoming Climate Change conference in Copenhagen isn't going to achieve any positive outcomes - other than be one big talk-fest and photo op for the politicians attending. Looks like they are "doing" something when precisely the opposite is the case!

The attendees need to read the dire state in which the world finds itself - as The Independent reports in "World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists":

"The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. Such a rise – which would be much higher nearer the poles – would have cataclysmic and irreversible consequences for the Earth, making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and threatening the basis of human civilisation.

We are headed for it, the scientists said, because the carbon dioxide emissions from industry, transport and deforestation which are responsible for warming the atmosphere have increased dramatically since 2002, in a way which no one anticipated, and are now running at treble the annual rate of the 1990s.

This means that the most extreme scenario envisaged in the last report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, is now the one for which society is set, according to the 31 researchers from seven countries involved in the Global Carbon Project."




:

Not as rich as some would have us believe

The US is often touted as the richest country in the world. Of course it ignores the realities. For instance, the US is mightily indebted to the Chinese. So when Obama sits down with the Chinese during his present visit there, it is they who can, and doubtlessly will, call the shots.

And then there are America's hungry. An indictment on a a country with such abundance of wealth. Crikey explains in this piece:

"For all the talk of a recovery in the US economy, the rebounding financial markets (with Wall Street at 13-month highs overnight), gold at record highs, and a rise in October retail sales, a grim reality has been outlined in Washington for all the world to see.

America can't feed all its 303 million people, with one in seven going short at some stage in a week.

The country's agricultural department reckons 49 million Americans struggle to get enough to eat, the highest reading in an annual survey in the 14 years it has been conducted.

And the figure probably understates the problem because the survey was done at the end of 2008 when unemployment was starting to accelerate and was a long way from the current reading of 10.2% (about 15.7 million) out of work.

America's underemployment rate is a nasty 17.5%, or more than 25 million people.

About 36 million people are estimated to be on food stamps, and yet there looks like there's another 13 million or more who are unable to get enough food to eat and who are beyond government help.

Details of the survey were in the USDA's annual report was based on a survey conducted in December 2008, soon after financial markets slumped.

The report said that about 14.6% of US households, equal to 49.1 million people, "had difficulty obtaining food for all their members due to a lack of resources" during 2008, up 3.5 percentage points from 2007 when 11.1% of households were classified as food insecure.

About 5.7% of households, or 17.3 million people, had "very low food security," meaning some members of the household had to eat less. Typically, food runs short in those households for a few days in seven or eight months of the year, USDA said.

During a briefing last week, a senior Wal-Mart executive said his company had noticed people lining up at some of its stores at midnight on the night before federal food aid or state unemployment benefits were due to be paid into their bank accounts. He said these people entered the stores soon after midnight and started buying food and other goods in bulk when they had confirmed the money was in their accounts.

The executive said that anecdotally, the company had discovered that many of its poorer customers went without meals in the days approaching the payment of benefits to make their meagre resources last.

The department said this year's report also revealed "that one third of food-insecure households had very low food security (food intake of some household members was reduced and their eating patterns disrupted at times during the year). This is 5.7% of all US households or about 6.7 million. This is up from 4.7 million households (4.1%) in 2007, and the highest level observed since nationally representative food security surveys were initiated in 1995.

"Even when resources are inadequate to provide food for the entire family, children are usually shielded from the disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake that characterise very low food security. However, children as well as adults experienced instances of very low food security in 506,000 households (1.3% of households with children) in 2008, up from 323,000 households (0.8% of households with children) in 2007."

She's [that's Sarah Palin] back

There is no denying that the woman has guts - even if little evident brain! Now on the circuit promoting a book of hers to be released this week, Sarah Palin has been hard at it making her usual uninformed and inflammatory statements.

Max Blumental, writing on TomDispatch in " The Palin Effect: How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party" provides a background to the woman and her re-emergence on the American political scene:

"Sarah Palin's heavily publicized book tour begins in earnest this Monday, but weeks before, her ghostwritten memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, had already vaulted into the number one position at Amazon. Warming up for a tour that will take her across Middle America in a bus, Palin tested her lines in a November 7th speech before a crowd of 5,000 anti-abortion activists in Wisconsin. She promptly cited an urban legend as a "disturbing trend," claiming the Treasury Department had moved the phrase "In God We Trust" from presidential dollar coins. (The rumor most likely originated with a 2006 story on the far-right website WorldNetDaily.)

In fact, a suggested alteration in its position on the coin was shot down in 2007 after pressure from Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Nonetheless, Palin did not hesitate to take up this "controversy," however false, since it conveniently pits a tyrannical, God-destroying, secular big government against humble God-fearing folk. In doing so, of course, she presented herself as this nation's leading defender of the faith.

In a Republican Party hoping to rebound in 2010 on the strength of a newly energized and ideologically aroused conservative grassroots, Palin's influence is now unparalleled. Through her Facebook page, she was the one who pushed the rumor of "death panels" into the national healthcare debate, prompting the White House to issue a series of defensive responses. Unfazed by its absurdity, she repeated the charge in her recent speech in Wisconsin. In a special congressional election in New York's 23rd congressional district, Palin's endorsement of Doug Hoffman, an unknown far-right third-party candidate, helped force a popular moderate Republican politician, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. In the end, Palin's ideological purge in upstate New York led to an improbable Democratic victory, the first in that GOP-heavy district in more than 100 years."