Category: fear
The Chinese government should immediately release the artist and outspoken critic Ai Weiwei and end its arbitrary crackdown on dissent, Human Rights Watch said today.
Ai was arrested at Beijing airport on the morning of April 2, 2011, as he was about to board a flight for Hong Kong. Despite considerable domestic and international attention, the Chinese government has refused to disclose where he is detained or the reasons for his arrest.
Update (April 7): A government spokesperson admitted on April 7 that Ai was under investigation for suspected economic crimes but no legal notification has yet been issued. Incommunicado arrests are often the prelude to criminal prosecutions, Human Rights Watch said.
“The arrest of Ai Weiwei reflects a new escalation in the current and already severe crackdown,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “Only sustained international pressure can help Ai Weiwei now.”
On April 6, in what can be read as the first official acknowledgment of Ai’s arrest, a newspaper article in the state-run Global Times announced that Ai would “pay a price” for being an activist and that “the law would not concede” to his criticisms of the government.
The government’s detention of Ai Weiwei appears to have been carefully planned. On the day he was arrested, Beijing public security officers raided his art studio in the suburbs of Beijing and took eight members of his staff, his wife Lu Qing, and a lawyer friend of Ai’s, Liu Xiaoyuan, in for questioning; they were all released later that day. The police seized computers, hard-drives, and other items. State media were instructed not to report on the case, and all references to Ai Weiwei’s arrest were censored on internet and popular micro-blogging services such as Weibo, a Twitter clone.
Under Chinese law, the police can hold an individual for up to three days before deciding whether to release him or apply to the prosecutors for an arrest warrant. But invariably the police manipulate exception clauses that allow for up to seven days’ and, in limited circumstances, up to 30 days’ detention. Police also routinely prevent lawyers from meeting their clients in detention despite legal provisions guaranteeing such access.
Ai’s lawyer, the prominent Beijing lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, has so far been unable to see his client, or even to get formal notification of his arrest. Approval of arrest by the prosecutors, a matter of routine in most cases, usually guarantees later indictment, conviction, and punishment, which typically includes a prison sentence. The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo, was detained for a year before he was sentenced in December 2009 to an 11-year term of imprisonment for a series of articles published overseas.
“The Chinese authorities appear to be laying the ground for Ai Weiwei’s formal arrest,” said Richardson. “This is an ominous sign because there are no fair trials of government critics in China.”
Since mid-February, the Chinese government has arrested, detained, disappeared, put under house arrest, summoned for interrogation, or threatened with arrest over two hundred people for dissent or peaceful social activism. Six of the country’s most prominent human rights lawyers – Teng Biao, Tang Jitian, Jiang Tianyong, Liu Shihui, Tang Jingling, and Li Tiantian – have been “disappeared” by the police and remain at serious risk of torture and ill-treatment.
Four prominent activists, Ran Yunfei, Cheng Wei, Ding Mao, and Li Shuangde, have been formally arrested on state security charges. On March 25, the veteran dissident Liu Xianbin was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for “incitement to subvert state power.” The government has also significantly increased its censorship of internet, forced several liberal newspaper editors to step down, and imposed new restrictions on foreign media reporting in Beijing.
The arrest of Ai, one of the most celebrated Chinese artists, who is currently exhibiting at Tate Modern in London, has prompted a reaction from several foreign governments, with German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle calling on China for an “urgent explanation” of his fate. British Foreign Secretary William Hague has called on the government to “urgently clarify Ai’s situation and well being.” The European Union delegation in Beijing, members of the European Parliament, and the Australian government have also expressed concern. US State Department spokesperson Mark Toner said on April 4 that the government was “deeply concerned.”
“Ai Weiwei is a test case for the international community,” said Richardson. “The past few years have shown that appeasement and âquiet diplomacy’ do nothing to dissuade Beijing from cracking down even harder on dissent.” (Human Rights Watch)
- Labels: censorship, china, fascism, fear, liberation, prejudice
Ai Weiwei (born 1957) is a Chinese artist, activist, and philosopher, who is also active in architecture, curating, photography, film, and social and cultural criticism.
Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics. Besides showing his art he has been investigating in the corruption and cover-ups under the power of the government.
He was particularly focused at exposing an alleged corruption scandal in the construction of Sichuan schools that collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. He intensively uses the internet to communicate with people all over China, especially the young generation. (read more)
“You’re insane !…
no…
insanity is wasting your life with the nothing…
when you have the blood of a killer in your veins…
insanity is being shit on, beat down, coasting through life…
in a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside…
and the key to release it…”
“Civil disobedience
becomes a sacred duty
when the state has become
lawless and corrupt”
- Labels: fascism, fear, mahatma gandhi, now, revolution
“You have to be crazy…
to live in an insane world.
sexism…the oldest form of de-humanization.
racism…came next adding to de-humanization.
war…made the civilian populations combatants.
i’m a number…not a person, indexed, filed, controlled.
bill moyers…..culture of corruption…follow the money.
economic slavery…people are consumers, commodities.
germ warfare…antithesis of humanity…they will kill us all.
citizens united vs F.E.C….corporations get more influence.
indoctrinated…programmed, surveilled, brainwashed, used.
pharma guinea pigs…they don’t need rats…they have us now.
engineered terrorism…culture of fear…they instill fear and hate.
they want to give a zygote…full human rights…a cell is not human.
human testing…Operation Whitecoat…Tuskegee…mental patients.
…”I think we should let those gays get married…
they have every right to be as miserable as the rest of us”…
…anonymous…
“bunk” n :insincere or foolish talk…nonsense.
“debunk” vb :to expose the sham or falseness.
…..
the use of these words…
is a perfect example of the
level of finesse employed
in the art of propaganda…
loaded words are an attempt at deception.
…..
In rhetoric, loaded language (also known as emotive language or high-inference language) is wording that attempts to influence the listener or reader by appealing to emotion.
Loaded words and phrases have strong emotional overtones or connotations, and evoke strongly positive or negative reactions beyond their literal meaning.
The appeal to emotion is often seen as being in contrast to an appeal to logic and reason.
Emotive arguments and loaded language are particularly persuasive because they prey on the human weakness for acting immediately based upon an emotional response, without such further considered judgment. They are thus suspect, and many people recommend their avoidance in argument and in speech when fairness and impartiality is one of the goals. Weston, for example, admonishes students and writers: “In general, avoid language whose only function is to sway the emotions”.
One aspect of loaded language is that loaded words and phrases occur in pairs.
Loaded language is often used by news broadcasters as a propaganda technique.
Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton considers loaded language to be a brainwashing technique: “New words and language are created to explain the new and profound meanings that have been discovered. Existing words are also hijacked and given new and different meaning.” (read more) (propaganda)
OSLO â Imprisoned and incommunicado in China, the Chinese writer and dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, his absence marked at the prize ceremony here by an empty chair.
For the first time since the 1935 prize, when the laureate, Carl von Ossietzky, languished in a concentration camp and Hitler forbade any sympathizers to attend the ceremony, no relative or representative of the winner was present to accept the award or the $1.5 million check it comes with. Nor was Mr. Liu able to provide a speech, even in absentia.
Guests at the ceremony in Osloâs City Hall listened instead to a recitation of his defiant yet gentle statement to a Chinese court before his incarceration last year. âI have no enemies and no hatred,â Mr. Liu said in âI Have No Enemies: My Final Statement to the Court,â read aloud by the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann. âHatred can rot away at a personâs intelligence and conscience.â
Through his wife, Liu Xia, Mr. Liu sent word that he wanted to dedicate the award to the âlost soulsâ massacred in 1989 in Tiananmen Square.
Mr. Liu, 54, a professor, poet, essayist and campaigner for human rights, has been an irritant to the Chinese authorities since helping resolve confrontations between the police and students in Tiananmen Square. Mr. Liu was detained in December 2008, after co-writing the Charter 08 call for human rights and reform, and is currently serving an 11-year sentence for the crime of âincitement to the overthrow of the state power and socialist system and the peopleâs democratic dictatorship.â
He was named this yearâs laureate because of his heroic and nonviolent struggles on behalf of democracy and human rights, said Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, adding that China needed to learn that with economic power came social and political responsibility.
âWe can to a certain degree say that China with its 1.3 billion people is carrying mankindâs fate on its shoulders,â Mr. Jagland said in a speech at the ceremony. âIf the country proves capable of developing a social market economy with full civil rights, this will have a huge favorable impact on the world.â
He added, âMany will ask whether Chinaâs weakness â for all the strength the country is currently showing â is not manifested in the need to imprison a man for 11 years merely for expressing his opinions on how his country should be governed.â
Mr. Jagland, a former prime minister, became chairman of the Nobel committee last year and seems unafraid to use the position to make strong political statements. Last yearâs selection of President Obama as the peace laureate was interpreted by many as a thinly veiled rebuke to the politics of former President George W. Bush, and this yearâs award has had broad political implications.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Jagland said that on several occasions this fall, he and the Norwegian foreign minister were specifically warned by top Chinese officials not to give the award to Mr. Liu. But even though the committee disregarded their threats, Mr. Jagland said, its choice should not be interpreted as an insult to China.
Rather, Mr. Jagland said, its reasoning should be seen as similar to that of 1964, when the prize went to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was defying the authorities to fight for civil rights in America. The prize helped nudge the United States to change, Mr. Jagland said, and he hoped that it would have the same effect on China. (read more)
During times of universal deceit,
telling the truth
becomes a revolutionary act.
…George Orwell…
The Plan is Simple
1.If you absolutely, positively must fly, opt out of the scanners. Do it to protect your health and privacy.
2.If you can avoid flying, donât fly. Hit the airlines in the pocketbook until the scanners and gropers are gone. Make the airlines work for us.
3.Raise holy hell. Register your disapproval of the scanners and gropers to your airline, your hotel and all government officials who claim to work for you. Educate your community.
For your Health
Backscatter X-ray uses ionizing radiation, a known cumulative health hazard, to produce images of passengersâ bodies. Children, pregnant women, the elderly, and those with defective DNA repair mechanisms are considered to be especially susceptible to the type of DNA damage caused by ionizing radiation. Also at high risk are those who have had, or currently have, skin cancer. Ionizing radiationâs effects are cumulative, meaning that each time you are exposed you are adding to your risk of developing cancer. Since the dosage of radiation from the backscatter X-ray machines is absorbed almost entirely by the skin and tissue directly under the skin, averaging the dose over the whole body gives an inaccurate picture of the actual harm. In their letter of concern, the UCSF faculty members noted that “the dose to the skin could be dangerously high”. The eyes are particularly susceptible to the effects of radiation, and as one study found allowing the eyes to be exposed to radiation can lead to an increased incidence of cataracts.
For your Privacy
Aside from the health risks of these devices, the fact remains that they allow strip searches to be conducted on a wide-scale level. That they are automated and mechanical in no way changes the fact that when a government agent looks beneath your clothing you are being strip searched. These strip searches are being performed without any probable cause or reasonable suspicion, as primary screening. A recent article in the San Diego Entertainer on August 31, 2010 stated that “the scans are detailed enough to identify a personâs gender⦠to identify a passengerâs surgery scars, or to discern whether a woman is on her menstrual cycle or not.” Although the TSA purports to be staffed by highly trained professionals who respect the privacy and dignity of travelers, TSA Screener Rolando Negrin was ridiculed by other TSA screeners for having a small penis after being imaged by an AIT device (AKA porno-scanner). (wewontfly.com)
Conspiracy theory?…
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it’s not a theory
- Labels: above top secret, big brother, fascism, fear, now, power
A Native American grandfather talking to his young grandson tells the boy he has two wolves inside of him struggling with each other.
In 1984, there is a perpetual war between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, the super-states which emerged from the atomic global war. “The book”, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, explains that each state is so strong it cannot be defeated, even with the combined forces of two super-statesâdespite changing alliances. To hide such contradictions, history is re-written to explain that the (new) alliance always was so; the populaces accustomed to doublethink accept it. The war is not fought in Oceanian, Eurasian or Eastasian territory but in a disputed zone comprising the sea and land from Tangiers (northern Africa) to Darwin (Australia) to the Arctic. At the start, Oceania and Eastasia are allies combatting Eurasia in northern Africa.
That alliance ends and Oceania allied with Eurasia fights Eastasia, a change which occurred during the Hate Week dedicated to creating patriotic fervour for the Party’s perpetual war. The public are blind to the change; in mid-sentence an orator changes the name of the enemy from “Eurasia” to “Eastasia” without pause. When the public are enraged at noticing that the wrong flags and posters are displayed they tear them downâthus the origin of the idiom “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”; later the Party claims to have captured Africa.
“The book” explains that the purpose of the unwinnable, perpetual war is to consume human labour and commodities, hence the economy of a super-state cannot support economic equality (a high standard of life) for every citizen. Goldstein also details an Oceanian strategy of attacking enemy cities with atomic rockets before invasion, yet dismisses it as unfeasible and contrary to the war’s purpose; despite the atomic bombing of cities in the 1950s the super-states stopped such warfare lest it imbalance the powers.
(read more)
- Labels: big brother, fear, lies, propaganda, slavery, torture
I knew a man who once said…
Death smiles at us all…
all a man can do is smile back.
Founded on March 16, 2002, LEAP is made up of current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities who are speaking out about the failures of our existing drug policies. Those policies have failed, and continue to fail, to effectively address the problems of drug abuse, especially the problems of juvenile drug use, the problems of addiction, and the problems of crime caused by the existence of a criminal black market in drugs.
Although those who speak publicly for LEAP are people from the law enforcement and criminal justice communities, a large number of our supporting members do not have such experience. You don’t have to have law enforcement experience to join us.
By continuing to fight the so-called “War on Drugs”, the US government has worsened these problems of society instead of alleviating them. A system of regulation and control of these substances (by the government, replacing the current system of control by the black market) would be a less harmful, less costly, more ethical and more effective public policy.
Please consider joining us and helping us to achieve our goals: 1) to educate the public, the media and policy makers about the failure of current policies, and 2) to restore the public’s respect for police, which respect has been greatly diminished by law enforcement’s involvement in enforcing drug prohibition. (read more)
This years Nobel Peace Prize winner is Liu Xiaobo,
he is currently sitting in a Chinese prison.
Freedom of Speech in China
Among the many people campaigning for human rights in China, Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, has become the most visible symbol of the struggle. A long-term exponent of non-violent protest, he is currently serving an 11-year prison term. (read more)
Liu Xiaobo; born 28 December 1955, is a Chinese intellectual, writer, and human rights activist and a political prisoner in China.
He has served as President of the Independent Chinese PEN Center since 2003. On 8 December 2008, Liu was detained in response to his participation with Charter 08. He was formally arrested on 23 June 2009, on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power.” He was tried on the same charges on 23 December 2009, and sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment and two years’ deprivation of political rights on 25 December 2009.
During his 4th prison term from 2009 to 2020, he won the Nobel Peace Prize on 8 October 2010, for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” (read more)
The “Rev.” Terry Jones displays the height of “Christian Hypocricy”.
The “Reverend”, head of the Dove World Outreach Church in Gainesville, Fla., plans to burn copies of the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book, on September 11.
Having forgotten, or never known of, the admonitions contained within the Bible against violence, hate and revenge perhaps the “Reverend” can recall the nazi book burnings that led inevitably to the burning of humans, or the cautionary tale from “Fahrenheit 451”. But that would require reading.
Heinrich Heine, a German poet in the 19th Century said this now infamous quote, “Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people”.
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450â1516)
The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych painted by the early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450â1516), housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid since 1939. Dating from between 1490 and 1510, when Bosch was about 40 or 50 years old, it is his best-known and most ambitious work. The masterpiece reveals the artist at the height of his powers; in no other painting does he achieve such complexity of meaning or such vivid imagery.
The triptych is painted in oil and comprises a square middle panel flanked by two rectangular wings that can close over the center as shutters. These outer wings, when folded shut, display a grisaille painting of the earth during the Creation. The three scenes of the inner triptych are probably (but not necessarily) intended to be read chronologically from left to right. The left panel depicts God presenting Adam to Eve, while the central panel is a broad panorama of sexually engaged nude figures, fantastical animals, oversized fruit and hybrid stone formations. The right panel is a hellscape and portrays the torments of damnation.
Art historians and critics frequently interpret the painting as a didactic warning on the perils of life’s temptations. However the intricacy of its symbolism, particularly that of the central panel, has led to a wide range of scholarly interpretations over the centuries. 20th-century art historians are divided as to whether the triptych’s central panel is a moral warning or a panorama of paradise lost. American writer Peter S. Beagle describes it as an “erotic derangement that turns us all into voyeurs, a place filled with the intoxicating air of perfect liberty”. (read more)
