Twitter Tidbits 4/2

This morning's catches by John Ballard

?Reader advisory: This first link may be spam bait.
It was taking up too much of my time, so I blocked it.
It won't go away.
About the same time I started getting a bunch of "@" hits for coupons or something. Tried blocking that, but it won't go awy either.
I'm ready for Twitter to tighten up the system.
?The Overt Dictionary (Caveat emptor -- Link at your own risk)
Dunno who is behind it but this is clever. New, too, I think. Only 47 tweets thus far.
Reminds me of the now famous shitmydadsays.
Both are derivative of older literary forms. My favorite has always been Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary:

CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

From the Overt Dictionary...

The Mainstream: a generated flow of information which moves people in a highly profitable direction.

Political Suicide: the act of saying something honest which goes again mainstream expectations.

The Media: a big churning machine, which reduces the masses to consumers of highly doctored information.

The Commodity: any entity which can be turned into something which the people can consume, including media stars.

Culture: a wide array of consumer products, dancing together, Starbucks, prepackaged music stars, film sequels, all on loop.

The Search: an idea which has been reduced from a spiritual search to a search to find new ways of making money.

Prozac: a drug which takes people out of depression, after they realize that their life has become but a lifeless machine.

The Pharmaceutical Industry: an industry which makes its money in selling people the idea that they can live forever.

Drug Dealers: they come in many forms and shapes, some deal false dreams, other deal pharmaceutical fantasies of immortality.

The Shopping Mall: the place where the act of consumption finally rests in peace, until you find something new to buy.

 

?Cote d'Ivoire: The forgotten war?
Al Jazeera feature. Overview of the ongoing struggle for political power in Ivory Coast, another place where civilians are being killed by the hundreds as a tyrant in power refuses to relinquish control.The Ivory Coast conflict has been carelessly tossed around in the Libya intervention debate as a comparison, despite few similarities. (Two that come immediately to mind:  the UN is already there and there and the man in control is not using air power.)

The forgotten crisis

Oxfam reported in early March that Cote d'Ivoire threatened to become 'the forgotten crisis' as world attention lingered on other stories.

"With over 45,000 Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in the west of Cote d'Ivoire, up to 300,000 in Abidjan, and over 70,000 refugees in Liberia, the Cote d'Ivoire crisis is extremely serious and requires the international community to respond to this emergency. There is a risk that without action now - especially in advance of the rainy season - the international community will not be able to deal with current and future refugee flows," says Tariq Roland Riebl, Oxfam's humanitarian programme manager in Liberia.

"Every human is of equal value, and the international community must be able to deal with more than one crisis at a time. Whilst current important global events in Libya, North Africa and Japan are attracting the bulk of the media attention at the moment, with serious political and humanitarian dimensions, the international community cannot afford to ignore the deteriorating situation in Cote d'Ivoire and resulting influx of refugees into neighbouring countries."

Bernadette Kouame, an officer with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), concurs. She says the situation is already desperate. "It's alarming! People are going in haste ... most of them with bundles on their heads .... But most people are simply trying to save their lives."

She paints a desperate picture of people fleeing their homes, of women walking great distances to neighbouring towns and villages with their babies on their backs. "Families are complaining of food shortages ... most banks and businesses have closed and the few stores still operating are competing," Kouame says. "We can see despair on the faces of heads of households who have mostly become unemployed as a result of the chaos."

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Where is the African Union?

While the African Union (AU) has sent delegations to the country, its role has largely been limited to polite attempts at negotiating the stalemate. The inability or unwillingness of the body to act decisively or intervene has raised the usual critiques of its effectiveness.

The AU - through its regional hand, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) - set an ultimatum in December, warning of a military intervention if Gbagbo did not cede power. But, Johnson argues: "The AU � don't say what they mean and don't mean what they say; they threaten force but don't act, they have the mandate but don't enforce."

Collier, however, maintains that, contrary to popular belief, the AU has managed to set the agenda in Cote d'Ivoire. "It has acted with caution, and probably been too slow, but it has actually set very important precedents. It has recognised President Ouattara and it has refused to go down the road of 'powersharing' which has not worked well in either Zimbabwe or Kenya and which the AU has now recognised is a bad model.

"I think that the AU position augurs rather well for the forthcoming 19 African elections. It has been strongly reinforced by the events in North Africa which have hopefully ended the incipient trend [of] sons inheriting the presidential throne from their fathers," Collier adds.

Is the reader paying attention? Is not the African Union a regional analogue to the Arab League? Was that not the missing ingredient for which the Administration was waiting before moving, ever so cautiously, in the direction of a Libyan intervention?

Two more related links are another Al Jazeera piece (with video) and Hashtag #CIV2010 (a gusher of tweets, mostly in French, but some in English are gut-wrenching).

?Confessions of a minion of the military-industrial complex
Jonathan Farley is a professor of mathematics, and member of the Warren Group, campaign advisers of Alvin Greene, the Democratic party's nominee for US Senate in South Carolina. Born in Rochester, New York, Jonathan obtained his doctorate in maths at Oxford University in 1995, and was, during 2001-2002, a Fulbright distinguished scholar in the UK. After various visiting scholarships, fellowships and professorships at numerous academic institutions, including Caltech, Stanford, Harvard and MIT, Jonathan gained tenure at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee in 2003; however, after receiving death threats from Ku Klux Klan-supporting terrorists, Jonathan was obliged to flee his home and job in Tennessee

If you don't take time to read this short piece your are missing a great piece of reality served up with plenty of biting sarcasm, all justified, hitting the bullseye every time.

People used to invite me to speak at events opposing the military-industrial complex, like a demonstration in 2001 that British former cabinet minister Tony Benn discusses in his memoirs, mentioning my name. My fall began when, in the late 1990s, a colleague organised a conference at America's National Security Agency. Mathematician Lee Lorch, a victim of America's blacklist in the 1950s for refusing to testify to HUAC, refused to attend; but I felt I would be insulting my colleague if I declined the invitation.

Years later, I found myself facing the same forces that Lorch had fought 50 years before. All other doors closed, I made a compromise: I became a science fellow at Stanford University's centre for international security and cooperation. I would do counterterrorism research, just not for the Pentagon.

?The Power of Ruins by Morgan Meis
The writer is an editor and long time contributor at 3 Quarks Daily, one of my most reliable sources of information.
By all means, take a few quiet minutes to read the whole thing.

The human comfort level with nuclear energy has, arguably, increased in the last few decades. But radiation will always be scary. Perhaps our fear is in inverse proportion to our ability to feel or understand the effects of radiation with any immediacy. It is the silence of radiation that is troubling, the invisibility. It is disturbing to think that you could have received a lethal dose of radiation and never know until it is too late, until the body has been corrupted from the inside out. The fear in Japan right now, as the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant continues, is one driven by not-knowing, by the impossibility of knowing exactly what is going on. This ignorance mingles with the realization that silent powers are reshaping the landscape. A nuclear ruin is being born.

This has happened to us before. Chernobyl is a strangely beautiful place now, 25 years after its nuclear disaster. It is a horrible beauty. Pripyat, the town that housed the workers for the nuclear reactor, has a lyrical quality. It was abandoned quickly and with the haste that makes for uncanny scenes of seeming occupation with no one there. Nature has crept back into the empty spaces. Discarded objects of daily life take on the quality of archeological artifacts. Dolls dropped and left at the local kindergarten look as if they have been there for a thousand years, or were just dropped yesterday. That is exactly what is compelling about all true ruins. They are present and absent at the same time. And yet, the era that gave the ruins context and meaning has faded away. Ruins give a fleeting sense of tangibility to what is lost forever: the time that is utterly irretrievable.

 

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?The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Poetry lovers will like this Langston Hughes classic.
Mona Eltahawy linked Omar Offendum - The Arab Speaks of Rivers, a lovely You Tube piece of the same poem being read in Arabic. The lines take on new life these days.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

by Langston Hughes

I�ve known rivers:
I�ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I�ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I�ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.