Ron Ridenour: "Book Review: Andre Vitchek's 'Point of No Return'" @ This Can't Be Happening!

Point of No Return, a mixture of novel and autobiography, is an engaging story of an intrepid war correspondent who resembles a saucy crime detective. It is superb story-telling.

Andre Vltchek’s just re-released Point of No Return is a revised third edition. First published in 2005, the French edition was widely praised, with one French critic compared the authors writing with that of Malraux and Hemingway.

The hero is Karel, who has covered dozens of foreign wars and internal liberation struggles. Most of the book concerns Israel-Palestine and Latin America, especially Peru. Indonesia’s aggression against East Timor and Egypt also play important roles. There are also stops in Paris, New York and Japan.

The author Andre has traveled to three-fourths of the world’s countries over two decades, communicating to whomever he can reach about the state of the world. He has written a score of non-fiction, fiction and poetry books. He is also a photographer and documentary film-maker.

The robust story flows rhythmically, sensually, enticingly. It is a sad reality that the veteran war correspondent encounters sometimes sickening things, which are just a reality of living and dying for three-fourths of the world’s seven billion people.

In Andre’s own words:

“Politicians and economists are blurring the whole picture…A small group of historically aggressive nations is still ruling the world. The economic system which it promotes has nothing to do with humanism, with solidarity, compassion, willingness to share. We have billions of people rotting in gutters all over the world; hundreds of millions of people dying from curable or at least controllable diseases. The rich world is still plundering the rest of the planet; stealing raw materials, employing people for a pittance.... If poor nations resist, the rich world stages coups or something worse.... And it is all legitimized through the United Nations, which was sidelined, made truly impotent...”

For the rest of this review by RON RIDENOUR in ThisCantBeHappening, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1756

Please, IF YOU VALUE THIS PUBLICATION, PLEASE SUPPORT US! (AND CHECK OUT OUR NEW T-SHIRTS BY SCROLLING DOWN THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE HOME PAGE. BE THE FIRST ON YOUR BLOCK TO BECOME “A MAJOR DESTABILIZING INFLUENCE”!)

Hard to believe it, but this publication is, rather improbably, approaching the end of its third year of publication! We did this all with almost no financial support--only what you, our readers, provided. Can you help us begin our fourth year, a whole lot better, by giving use more financial support, so that we can devote more time to being reporters? If you believe as we do that we need more independent journalism, please put your money where your convictions are, and back ThisCantBeHappening! Use the Paypal button at the bottom of the home page, or send us a check at the address listed on the “Support Us” page.

Andy Marso: "No-tax pledges factor in legislative impasse" @ Topeka Capital Journal

Radio Host Frequented By Gun Activists Calls For Shooting of Bush Family & Obama, Sexual Violence Against Hillary Clinton @ Right Wing Watch

5/18/13 Rozel, KS Tornadoes

King Charles Koch Craps On Detroit - Coming Soon on Radio Free Kansas!

Koch Brothers Dump Three-Story Pile of Toxic Byproduct on Detroit ow.ly/lalZS #Capitalism
— Abiyomi Kofi (@TheAngryindian) May 18, 2013

Available After 3pm Today!

Listen to our wiretap @tellsomebody now in RFK's Download Zone! Listen in now at tobtr.com/s/4715449. CIA Analyst R. McGovern (retd)
— Radio Free Kansas (@possecall) May 18, 2013

Eric Lach: "Question That Sparked IRS Scandal Was Planted" @ TPM Memo

[Daily Bleed] 5/18 Augusto Sandino &etc.

Come & see the blood in the streets,
come & see
the blood in the streets,
come & see the blood
in the streets!

— Pablo Neruda, "I Explain Some Things."


Web version,
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0518.htm

excerpts:

MAY 18

AUGUSTO SANDINO
Nicaraguan revolutionary leader, guerrilla, martyr.

VICTORIA DAY.

INTERNATIONAL GOODWILL DAY. Yep.

______________________________


1593 - Kyd Me Not?: Warrant issued for the arrest of
Christopher Marlowe, falsely accused of heresy by his
roommate Thomas Kyd in an effort to save his own ass.

1781 - Tupac Amaru II, leader of Inca Rebellion, Micaela Bastidas
& other leaders, drawn & quartered in the same Peruvian square as his
great-grandfather two centuries before (Plaza Mayor del Cuzco).

1814 - Anarchist activist/philosopher Mikhail Bakunin lives
(Julian calendar; he gets to do it again on the 30th). Karl Marx's
chief nemesis.

Bakunin, like many other Russian anarchists, including
Peter Kropotkin & Leo Tolstoy, is born into the educated class
but will spend his life fighting for the peasantry.

Competing with Marx for leadership of the International
Workingmen's Association, Bakunin believed the Marxist theory
of revolution as a recipe for either parliamentary misrepresentation
or elitist tyranny.

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/Bakunin.htm

1827 - Josiah Warren opens Time Store in Cincinnati — first
commercial cooperative.

See Kenneth Rexroth's chapters on Josiah Warren &
Robert Owen in Communalism
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/communalism6.htm

1855 - George Speed lives, active in the Haymarket defense of the
falsely accused martyrs, Coxey's Army, Pullman Strike, & was an
organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

1872 - Bertrand Russell lives (1872-1970), Wales.
Philosopher, mathematician & social critic, one of the most
widely read philosophers of the 20th century. Awarded a Nobel
in 1950. Outspoken pacifist, imprisoned during WWI. Abandoned
pacifism during WWII, but was a leading figure in the antinuclear
movement. Imprisoned in 1961 for taking part in a demonstration
in Whitehall. A pioneer of logical positivism.

1889 - Gunnar Gunnarsson lives (1889-1975). Prolific Icelandic
writer, who published in Danish to gain a wider audience. With
Guðmundsson & Laxness, among the first internationally known
Icelandic authors.

1895 - Birth of Augusto Sandino, hero of Nicaraguan independence.

Nace en Niquinohomo, Augusto C. Sandino: The magical kings do
not come from distant places to greet his birth, but leave gifts for
the farmer, carpenter, & vivandera passing to market. The midwife
buries the placenta, like a root, in a corner of the orchard. She
buries it in good place, where it will get the full strength of
the sun.

1917 - US: WWI draft enacted. That's how popular the war is,
not enough patriots ready to voluntarily die for flag & pie.

On the same day that the Selective Service Act is passed
authorizing federal conscription for the armed forces &
requiring the registration of all men between the ages of
21 & 30, Emma Goldman addresses an anti-conscription
gathering of close to 10,000 people...

1917 -- Eric Satie ballet "Parade" premiers, Paris, with art
work by Picasso (also a book by Jean Cocteau & choreography
by Leonide Massine). Apollinaire describes Picasso's sets &
costumes as "surrealist" — the first use of the term.

1919 -- Novelist Vladimir Nabokov learns to fox-trot.

1925 - Downhill Races?: First celebration of International
Goodwill Day.

1928 - Big Bill Haywood, IWW & labor activist, dies in lonely
exile, Moscow, USSR.

Radical militant labor leader & a founder of the "Wobblies,"
aiming to organize all workers into "one big union."

1952 -- US / Canada: Which Side Are You on?

Paul Robeson, in dramatic defiance of government's ban on
his leaving US soil, standing on a flatbed truck parked one foot
inside the US border at the Peace Arch, in Blaine, Washington,
speaks & sings to a crowd of 40,000 Canadians & Americans
gathered on both sides of the border.

1965 - Gene Roddenberry suggests 16 names — including Kirk —
for Star Trek Captain. It will never fly say some.

1968 - France '68: The Wild Days of May continues.

Such was the power of this upswell that tumultuous mass meetings
were called by people in almost every conceivable walk of life. A
mania for organization swept the people. Housing estate (project)
housewives, office employees & highly paid professionals,
astronomers & museum curators, hospital staff members &
people in the most varied workplaces & neighborhoods set up
"action committees" to organize the practical needs of the
struggle as well as the details of daily life, since official
seemed paralyzed.

By the end of May, 450 such committees had sprung up, in Paris
alone, in loose coordination with the Sorbonne General Assembly.

1968 -- Italy: Protests flare up in Rome during the May Days.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/05ref.htm#11/1968

1979 - US: Silkwood vs. Kerr-McGee case establishes corporations
are responsible for the people they irradiate.

1980 - US: McDuffie Riots, Liberty City section of Miami, when
four cops are acquitted after killing an innocent black man in
his home. 14 killed, 200 injured.

1984 -- "Under the Volcano" (based on the novel by Malcolm Lowry)
receives a great ovation at Cannes Film Festival.

1989 - China: Demonstrations in Tiananmen Square during USSR-
China talks.

1993 -- Mexico: Greenpeace protesters place a gas mask on
statue of Diana, Mexico City.

1995 - Henri Laborit (1914-1995) dies. French libertarian writer
& researcher. Laborit was, in turn, surgeon, biologist,
philosopher, theorist of behavior.

His work revolutionized modern psychiatry, & his studies of
human behavior were adapted to cinema by Alain Resnais in
film "Mon oncle d'Amérique".

Laborit was a familiar figure to anarchiste listeners of Radio
Libertaire Paris, where he made numerous broadcasts.

2002 -- Poland: Anarchist Press & Literature Fair, today & tomorrow,
Rozbrat squat, Poznan. Along with publications for sale, display &
trade, the Fair includes lectures, discussions, exhibitions & film
presentations.

Be There & Be Hexed?!

Includes International football game for three teams —
a situationist version of football (devised by the Danish
artist Asger Jorn, meant to disrupt one's everyday idea of football)
in which three teams play together on one hexagonal field.

In an emblematic fashion this [a goal in the team's orifice] perpetuates
the anal-retentive homophobic techniques of conventional football whereby
homo-erotic tension is built up, only to be sublimated & repressed.

Damn anarchists!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_sided_football
See also "The Radical History of Football", from "Do or Die" Issue 9
http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no9/football.htm
http://recollectionbooks.com/anow/world/eu/poland/

2011 -- Canada: Montreal’s 6th International Anarchist Theatre Festival,
featuring Pol Pelletier & artists from Germany & Quebec.

___________________

"Living never wore one out so much as the
effort not to live."

— Anais Nin
___________________


— Anti-Copyrite 1997-2013 more or less extant

Linn Washington, Jr.: "FBI Twists History: 'Terror' War Goes More Stupid, Assata Shakur Added to List' @ This Can't Be Happening!

Federal authorities publicly plot encouraging bounty hunters to kidnap a fugitive black radical from a foreign country for return to prison in the U.S. to achieve long-delayed justice.

This sounds like the FBI action on May 2, 2013 in placing former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur on its “Most Wanted Terrorists” list – the first female to have that dubious distinction.

Shakur was convicted of killing a New Jersey State Trooper during a May 1973 incident on the NJ turnpike, where one of her companions was killed and another captured. Once known as JoAnne Chesimard, she escaped from a NJ prison in 1979 and was granted political asylum in Cuba in 1984 where she lives today.

While Shakur,65, occasionally criticizes racist inequities in the U.S. – comparable to that of many politicians including Barack Obama prior to this election of U.S. President – she does not actively advocate or engage in terrorism.

Yet many contend she is a ‘terrorist’ because of her armed resistance decades ago to American racism that included police brutality – a deadly offense Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decried twice in his seminal 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech. A May 10 editorial in the conservative Washington Times declared Shakur had to “pay for her crimes” suggesting Cuba send her to a cell in Guantanamo Bay – the U.S. torture prison located on land the U.S. illegally occupies in Cuba.

Although federal authorities did double the NJ state reward for the capture of Shakur to $2-million when placing her on their “Most Wanted” terrorist list exactly forty-years after that 1973 incident, the bounty hunter incident referenced above occurred before the widely condemned listing of Shakur.

In July 2012, almost a year before the Shakur listing, federal authorities discussed snatching a former Black Panther “off the street” in Portugal during a public hearing chaired by a Republican Congressman from New Jersey.

That ex-BPP member, George Wright, now 70, had escaped from a New Jersey prison in 1970 while he was serving a 15-30-year sentence for a death during a gas station robbery eight years earlier. The odyssey of Wright, who joined the BPP after fleeing prison, included escape to Algeria on a hijacked airliner, life in France, Guinea-Bissau in West Africa (where he received asylum) and then to Portugal where he married a Portuguese woman, raised a family and spent much of his life there doing charitable and humanitarian work.

In September 2011, an FBI cold-case investigation resulted in Portuguese police arresting Wright. Courts in that country, including its highest court, twice rejected U.S. extradition requests ruling that Wright (who changed his name to Jose Luis Jorge Dos Santos) was a Portuguese citizen and under Portuguese law the statute of limitation for his crime in the U.S. had expired...


For the rest of this article by LINN WASHINGTON, JR. in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1752

John Celock: "Sam Brownback's Sales Tax Plan Faces Opposition From Conservative Kansas Republicans" @ Huffington Post

Say what?

Ray McGovern: "Boston Suspect’s Writing on the Wall" @ Consortium News

Exclusive: Hiding and near death, Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reportedly scrawled on the inside of a boat that he did what he did to avenge innocent Muslims killed by U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a rare look at the why behind “terrorism,” writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

Read his latest at Consortium News.

Hear him talk about today's media during an April 30 edition of Tom Klammer's "Tell Somebody" from KKFI 90.1FM Kansas City community radio.

Keep track of Ray McGovern's busy schedule and media appearances at RayMcGovern.com

michael --
To get a better perspective, it's often necessary to take a step back. Whether it's the history of mobile data caps, Fox News take on Tesla, the failure of austerity, or diversity in the news, perspective matters.
John Whitehouse
Twitter: @existentialfish

Diversity And The News

According to a new Media Matters analysis, cable news guests are overwhelmingly white and male. We crunched the numbers from April on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC and put the results into 13 charts. http://mm4a.org/10tH5KD

ESPN Tries To Cash In

ESPN is reportedly in discussions to pay a wireless carrier to get around customer access limitations that the carrier put in place - even though the carriers said the caps were put there because of stress on their network. Simon Maloy explains how the data caps are really there to boost profits for mobile providers. http://mm4a.org/13oV1aG

Jonathan Karl's Increasingly Bad Week

"At best, it's extremely sloppy." "Inaccurate." "Highly problematic ethically." That's how journalism veterans and media ethicists described ABC's Jonathan Karl's reporting on Benghazi to Media Matters' investigative reporter Joe Strupp. Karl claimed he was reporting on emails from the Obama administration on Benghazi - but as it turns out when the emails later leaked and his story collapsed, he was just reporting summaries. http://mm4a.org/12E6STy

"The Beginning of Something Very Big" Prosecuting The Elite's War Criminals "From Below."

Guatemala's Mayan People Win One For a Change

by John Grant, This Can't Be Happening

I saw the masked men
throwing truth into a well.
When I began to weep for it
I found it everywhere. - Claudia Lars (El Salvador)
Those of us who have struggled for peace and justice over the past decades don’t have much to celebrate these days. But the news from Guatemala that a female judge -- Yasmin Barrios -- was able to successfully manage a trial in that benighted nation and convict former President Efrain Rios Montt of genocide is something to rejoice about.

It suggests it’s no longer business as usual in Latin America -- especially vis-à-vis the United States. The big stick of North American imperialism from Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan appears to be dwindling in size. The sentencing of a Guatemalan president to 80 years in prison for employing scorched earth tactics against native Mayan Indians is an amazing milestone -- and an incredible story to boot.

Following a 1954 US-directed coup that overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz for his efforts at agrarian reform, the tiny Central American nation descended into a condition that can only be characterized, for the native Mayan people, as a state of Hell-on-Earth.

The fact that President Rios Montt undertook his systematic slaughter of many thousands of Mayan peasants with the endorsement of Ronald Reagan only makes the conviction that much sweeter. In the photograph, at left, Ronald Reagan, “the Great Communicator,” meets with Rios Montt, who is holding a document titled “This government has the commitment to change.” 

At the time, Reagan said Rios Montt was "a man of great personal integrity and commitment" who wanted to "promote social justice." At right, is a line of bodies from one of the Guatemalan army's massacres of people who, no doubt, were deemed "communists" and, therefore, inhuman and justifiably slaughtered like vermin.

Army General Efrain Rios Montt became president of Guatemala thanks to a coup in March 1982. He was, then, deposed by another coup in August 1983. This was a time when Mr. Reagan was hypnotizing the American people with his aw-shucks, soothing Hollywood narcotic speech tones. Previous to the supportive Reagan administration, the Carter administration had cut off military aid to the Guatemalan military. But, then, our representatives in Washington cut a deal with Israel to arm the Guatemalan army and, thanks to lots of experience with Palestinians, to teach them how to monitor and keep track of the Mayans utilizing computerized records and other hi-tech tricks.

Rios Montt reportedly once told ABC News that his success was due to the fact that “our soldiers were trained by Israelis"...

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1747

Please, IF YOU VALUE THIS PUBLICATION, PLEASE SUPPORT US! (AND CHECK OUT OUR NEW T-SHIRTS BY SCROLLING DOWN THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE HOME PAGE. BE THE FIRST ON YOUR BLOCK TO BECOME “A MAJOR DESTABILIZING INFLUENCE”!) Hard to believe it, but this publication is, rather improbably, approaching the end of its third year of publication! We did this all with almost no financial support--only what you, our readers, provided. Can you help us begin our fourth year, a whole lot better, by giving use more financial support, so that we can devote more time to being reporters? If you believe as we do that we need more independent journalism, please put your money where your convictions are, and back ThisCantBeHappening! Use the Paypal button at the bottom of the home page, or send us a check at the address listed on the “Support Us” page.

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What damn near every Kansan should watch!