| Friday, June 6, 2003 |  |
| Touchscreen Voting Machines | 1 comment |
 6 Jun 2003 @ 10:39PETITION: STOP THE FLORIDA-TION OF THE 2004 ELECTION Wednesday May 28, 2003 Today, there is a new and real threat to voters, this time coming from touchscreen voting machines with no paper trails and the computerized purges of voter rolls. Join SCLC President Martin Luther King III and investigative reporter Greg Palast in a nationwide petition drive through Working Assets, to oppose the "Florida-tion" of the 2004 Presidential election. Sign this petition! Pass it on! A complete copy of the petition will be delivered by Working Assets to Attorney General John Ashcroft. Read the full petition and more information on past and potential threats to American democracy Sign the petition More > |
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 6 Jun 2003 @ 10:39"World's Other Superpower" Plots Its Next Move - Jakarta Peace Consensus forged - Five delegates arrested by Indonesian police PDF report HERE JAKARTA, INDONESIA -- Over a hundred representatives of what the New York Times calls the "world's other superpower" gathered here in Jakarta from May 18-21 to plot the next moves of the global anti-war movement after the United States' invasion of Iraq. Delegates coming from 24 countries and representing some of the biggest anti-war coalitions and groupings all over the world emerged from intense debates and discussions with a statement of unity and a specific plan of action embodied in a document called the "Jakarta Peace Consensus." The consensus calls for, among other things, an immediate end to the illegal occupation of Iraq and the withholding of recognition to any regime that will be installed by the US and the United Kingdom. The consensus then sets out a list of demands regarding such issues as the use and control of Iraq's resources, debt cancellation, the United Nations' role and other questions surrounding post-war reconstruction and administration. On the plight of Iraq, the "Jakarta Peace Consensus" articulates a commitment to hold an international war crimes tribunal for prosecuting the US and its allies, the sending of a series of peace missions and mass delegations to Iraq as well as the establishment of Occupation Watch Centers to monitor the US military and corporations in Iraq. Noting the strong links between globalization to militarism, the consensus endorses the call for a week of action against the World Trade Organization (WTO) during its coming ministerial in Cancun, Mexico this September. The Consensus also plans to launch a "World Says No to Bush" campaign that will culminate during the Republican Party's national convention in September next year. In addition, the participants have committed to revitalize the worldwide campaign for disarmament as well as to launch a global campaign against the proliferation of US bases around the world. As to the world's other wars, the consensus lists and supports a number of proposals for responding to the conflicts currently raging in Palestine, Aceh, Mindanao, Chechnya, Congo, and Kashmir among others. A TRULY GLOBAL MOVEMENT For all the death and destruction it has caused, the United States' invasion of Iraq has given birth to a truly amazing and historic global anti-war movement. The undeniable significance of this movement was at no point more forcefully demonstrated than with the massive internationally coordinated marches that swept the globe last February 14 to 16. The hurriedly organized conference in Jakarta was open to all and everyone who was interested was encouraged to attend. Those who attended come from some of the biggest national and regional anti-war coalitions and groupings all over the world. This includes representatives from the Asian Peace Alliance, a broad network of anti-war organizations from all over Asia; the UK Stop the War Coalition which organized the historic demonstrations in London; United for Peace and Justice, the biggest anti-war coalition in the United States; the Italian Social Forum, key organizers of last year's million strong anti-war march during the European Social Forum; the Istanbul No to War Coordination, which was responsible for the massive actions in Turkey; and Books not Bombs, an Australian high school student movement as well as a host of other national anti-war coalitions. Also represented were Iraqi democracy activists, some organizers of the coming World Social Forum in India, delegates from the World March of Women, Indonesian trade unions, the South Africa Anti-Privatization Forum, Greenpeace, Focus on the Global South, and Jubilee South. Also slated to attend, but not granted Indonesian visas, were delegates from Pakistan, Palestine, and an Iraqi exile from Japan. The participants came from the following countries: Afghanistan, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, East Timor, France, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. After three days of intense debates and discussions, the participants hammered together the "Jakarta Peace Consensus," a declaration of unity and a specific plan of action which they have agreed to propose to the global peace and justice movements. The Consensus will be translated to Arabic, French, Spanish, Bahasa Indonesian, Italian, etc. and will be presented to the next international anti-war meeting in Evian this May 31. A MEETING FOR PEACE AGAINST A BACKDROP OF WAR The conference was held in Indonesia and in a region that was incidentally increasingly becoming engulfed in war. The conference proceedings were regularly interrupted with updates about the intensifying conflicts in Aceh and Mindanao, where both the Indonesian and Philippine governments have recently broken peace talks with secessionist movements and have just launched fresh military offensives against them. On the first day of the conference, martial law was imposed in Aceh. In Mindanao, the government has threatened to categorize the Moro Islamic Liberation Front as a "terrorist" organization and, hence, a legitimate target of US military intervention. US Special Forces are scheduled to be deployed there in the coming weeks. More than 300,000 civilians have been rendered refugees because of a renewed wave of military assaults and bombings. The conference was held in conjunction with other meetings that have been held by the representatives of the global peace movement after the war. Last May 9, there was a Hemispheric Conference against Militarization held in Chiapas, Mexico that was attended mostly by peace activists from Latin America. Last April 25, mostly European activists gathered in Berlin, Germany. The next big meeting of the global peace movement is scheduled on May 31, during the G-8 summit to be held in France. Complete Declaration Here Read on...... More > |
| To a 26-Year-Old Mayor, Village Elders Are Many | 0 comments |
 6 Jun 2003 @ 10:39To a 26-Year-Old Mayor, Village Elders Are Many By Claudia Rowe New York Times May 25, 2003 NEW PALTZ, N.Y., May 23 In just a few days, a 26-year-old house painter and puppeteer will become the mayor here, advocating for soybean fuel in village vehicles, reed beds that filter sewage, and college students in village government. It could be a tough sell. As the first Green Party mayor in New York State, Jason West will succeed a 71-year-old Democrat and veteran of the Korean War who assumed the helm of this historic Hudson Valley community when Mr. West was still in elementary school. The grumbling around town, however, is less about the newcomer's party than his partisans. Mr. West's surprise victory on May 6 was largely attributed to support from the amply pierced and tie-dye-clad students living on the campus of the State University of New York at New Paltz. One of his running mates was a 23-year-old undergraduate who spent the weeks after Election Day studying for finals. In a college town where those with permanent homes and 9-to-5 jobs have long looked askance at neo-hippies lounging on front stoops, political power is about to shift from the old guard to a band of idealists who used a man in a chicken suit to get out the vote on campus. The old guard is not amused. Peter Savago, the Republican chairman of Ulster County, called the election "a travesty." Robert Feldman, a village trustee who also ran for mayor, is so disgusted that he resigned from the village board, though he had two more years in his term. And the current mayor, Thomas Nyquist, openly bitter about the culmination of his 20 years of public service here, has refused even to discuss the transition with his successor. Mayor Nyquist called the upset "a student takeover" and predicted that elderly residents would leave New Paltz in droves. But Mr. West, who takes office on June 1, shrugged off the attacks. "I've heard their fears of a student takeover, but I'm never quite sure what that means -- if students need money for more shots at the bar, they'll call the village clerk to cut them a check?" Though Mr. West and his two running mates now control the five-member village board, the young mayor-elect squeaked in with a margin of only 64 votes, and turnout among the population of 6,000 was low. Mr. West estimated that half of the 322 ballots cast for him were from students. In fact, a new board member, Julia Walsh, is a student, and Mr. West and his other running mate, Rebecca Rotzler, 41, are SUNY New Paltz alumni. Village elders may have seen this coming. Two years ago, they tried to move Election Day from March to June -- when most students are long gone -- though Mayor Nyquist insisted that this was merely an effort to help prospective candidates gather petition signatures in better weather. Mr. West, a regular gadfly at board meetings, fought to get the date moved to May. All the bitterness and concern leave him somewhat bemused. Mr. West said all he intended to do was to create a more forward-looking village government by controlling sprawl, using solar energy and finding alternative means to handle water treatment -- ideas that resonated with students but left Mayor Nyquist shaking his head. "I always considered myself an environmentalist, too, but what they're talking about is ridiculous," he said. "We have issues that are much more pressing than putting solar panels on Village Hall." Foremost among them, according to Mayor Nyquist, is keeping a tight grip on village spending while fixing an aging sewer system. But he is not about to share his wisdom with Mr. West. "Did you see Bill Clinton meeting with Bush during their transition period?" the mayor asked. "When you're done, you're done. You clean out the office, turn off the light, and shut the door. I paid my dues, and if people decide to run who have no experience, I don't see that it's my position to pull their chestnuts out of the fire." Actually, President Clinton did meet with President-elect Bush for two hours in the Oval Office, and Mr. West is not a newcomer to politics. He ran twice, unsuccessfully, for the State Legislature as a Green Party candidate and said he decided to enter the mayoral race -- only six weeks before Election Day -- because neither of the mainstream candidates was discussing the long-term effects of New Paltz's booming development. Mr. West's undergraduate running mate, Ms. Walsh, called the village elders "ungrateful losers." "I ran because of my belief in democracy," she said. "Students make up over half the population here, yet there's not representation on the board, so I was willing to represent the voice of youth in the village." To hear older residents tell it, students already make themselves well heard -- cruising the streets every morning at 4 when the bars close and those with more conventional schedules are trying to sleep. Mr. West's campaign pledge to create more student housing in town has only fanned the flames. "There are people who have ordinary lives who have to sleep at night and get up to go to work in the morning," said Alison Nash, a 15-year resident. "They are just very different lifestyles." The outcry has grown so vitriolic that the state deputy attorney general, Marty Mack, was moved to leave a congratulations-and-keep-your-chin-up message on Mr. West's answering machine, saying that the same thing happened to him 19 years ago when SUNY Cortland students helped make him mayor of that town at age 31. Naysayers sneered that he would run "a kiddie council," Mr. Mack recalled. "I wanted to tell Jason not to buy it," he said. "He's as legitimate as any elected mayor, and students are legitimate voters." |
| A Brief History of the Kinsey Report | 2 comments |
 6 Jun 2003 @ 10:39A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE KINSEY REPORT By Clare Rudebeck Alfred C Kinsey published Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female in 1953, as the sequel to his study into male sexuality. Kinsey spent 13 years interviewing a total of 18,000 people for his research into their sex lives. The 842-page report was an instant success, selling 270,000 copies in a month. Findings that sent the public running to their nearest bookshop included the revelation that half of all women have sexual relations before marriage, and one in four women commit adultery. Kinsey was a zoologist who had studied gall wasps for more than 20 years when he was asked to teach a course on marriage. Finding little research into human sexuality, he decided to conduct his own. The book was banned from libraries of the US Army in Europe, and South African customs officials prohibited bookshops from selling it without permission. Priests in Owensboro, Kentucky implored their parishioners not to read it or its reviews. And doubt was cast over Kinsey's research when it emerged that he had relied almost entirely on volunteers. Were those who wanted to tell the world about their sexual exploits representative of the population as a whole? Soon after publication, the Rockefeller Foundation cut off Kinsey's funding. Three years later, in 1956, he died. ------------ HOW WAS IT FOR YOU? The Independent May 34, 2003 Fifty years ago, Alfred C Kinsey published his groundbreaking report into Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. Below, five generations of Independent writers report on their experience of sexual behaviour in the human female, and ask how relevant Kinsey is to women's lives today. ............ FIFTIES: Virginia Ironside Age 59 Though Alfred Kinsey was heralded as a sexual liberator, I think that you can lay the blame for a lot of sexual misery at this old pervert's door. (And he was an old pervert. He even had sex himself with many of the white, middle-class, gay, sado-masochistic, totally unrepresentative group of Americans that he interviewed.) The trouble with him was that he approached sex like the biologist he was. He was like a man who tries to understand the thrill of a conjuror's act by revealing how each trick is performed; or convey the pleasure of a great meal with friends by recording how many times each guest masticates each mouthful. The result is that, ever since his report, sex hasn't been seen as something magical, experienced when two people learn to trust each other, and make love. No, these days, because Kinsey looked at sex in a coldly scientific way, it has now been reduced to a commodity -- something that you go out and "get": a leisure activity. And though women may have been racked with sexual guilt before Kinsey came along, boy, were we worried after the report came out. It was Kinsey who prompted the endless questions from women, such as, "How many orgasms should I have a night?". Or, if you were a man, "How many minutes, how many inches, and how often?" It was Kinsey who made us believe that if we didn't have good sex, we'd probably die of cancer; that if we didn't have a squillion orgasms a night, we were horribly repressed. He was also surprisingly liberal about underage sex. His report has spawned thousands of sexual-help clinics, sexual-dysfunction therapists, and dodgy medication. While assuaging some sexual guilt, he unleashed thousands of other demons that thrive on sexual anxiety and expectation. The creepy old doc should have stuck to his gall wasps. FORTIES: Victoria Summerley Age 46 When I was 14, Alfred Kinsey seemed indistinguishable from Alex Comfort, who had just published The Joy of Sex in 1972. They appeared to be two scientists who, incredibly, earned good money by talking about people's sex lives; they seemed to have discovered the academic equivalent of the G-spot. This, I later discovered, was pretty unfair on poor, earnest Kinsey, who died the year I was born, four years before the Swinging Sixties. Alex Comfort is said to have rather enjoyed researching his book, especially the bits on group sex, but Kinsey was dragged away from a study of gall wasps into a veritable hornet's nest of controversy over masturbation. Yet it was Kinsey's report that ensured constant female insecurity ever since. Never experienced orgasm while eating cornflakes? Studies show X out of Y women do. Never had sex while cleaning the bathroom? Hey, what are you, some kind of freak? Ironically, when I was at university, if you wanted to talk about sex, you started talking about the Kinsey Report. If the other party showed any enthusiasm for this topic, you could safely bet they were up for it. Well, it was cheap. If you want to get someone of my generation into bed these days, you have to buy dinner at The Ivy. Those of us in our forties should be forgiven the odd twinge of bitterness about the sexual revolution. We were too young to experience the Sixties, and our sexual awakening took place during the Seventies, when the rest of the nation was more preoccupied with keeping the lights on (thanks to the miners' strike) than turning them down real low. Then, just when we realised that the Seventies were over, the horror stories started. Incurable gonorrhoea, said to have been bred in Vietnam by careless GIs; genital herpes, a ghastly variation on the humble cold sore; Aids, the new killer. We were too full of social conscience to enjoy the Eighties, yet too inhibited by harsh reality to retreat into a carefree hippiedom. FORTIES: Deborah Orr Age 40 The shocking revelation of the Kinsey Report was essentially that women were just as capable of enjoying sex as men. So it's still weird that this news caused such a furore, because individual experience all over the US must have borne out its truth. Certainly, the prevailing propaganda was that "nice girls didn't". The attempts to discredit the Kinsey Report confirm that powerful forces wanted that status quo to remain. But presumably, for both women and men, privately having sex that they both liked, there must have been a suspicion that all this was more myth than reality anyway. One ghastly conclusion of this line of thought is that the vast majority of women, keen for intercourse, familiar with lust, must all have been quietly assuming that they were the exception, with their partners likewise thinking that they'd hit some kind of one-in-a-million virgin-whore jackpot. Which doesn't seem at all healthy. Whether these women felt guilty or lucky would, I suppose, depend on how much they wanted to conform to prevailing ideas of femininity. One set of social mores that they presumably did stick to, though, was that sexual relations between partners should not be discussed with others, or they might all have learned from their friends what it eventually took scientific research to unveil. It has become, through the agency of everything from David Lynch movies to daytime chat-shows, a cultural cliché to assume that the most fervid sexual activity is taking place in the most buttoned-up and respectable of suburbs. Likewise, we tend to assume that kerb-crawling in red-light areas or spending night after night in Spearmint Rhino is the preserve of the sexual incontinent. If you allow yourself to be guided by the major sexual surveys, a theory can be formed that it is the same for entire societies. Kinsey, in 1953, revealed private lives in which women were enjoying sex even though this was not expected of them. The Hite Report, in 1976, well into the sexual revolution, had a rather less upbeat message about women's sexual satisfaction. In 1999, after feminism had taught us that sexual freedom did not have to be another sort of tyranny, another monolithic study, published in the Journal of American Medicine, revealed that about 40 per cent of women were not happy with their sex lives. From this, the assumption can only be that the less we are expected to enjoy sex, the more we do. Or that sexual surveys have no bearing at all on how couples get on in bed. Read on...other age groups More > |