Papal Visit Scuppered by Scholars

Pope Benedict XVI has cancelled a visit to a prestigious university in Rome where lecturers and students have protested against his views on Galileo.

The Pope had been set to make a speech at La Sapienza University on Thursday.

Sixty-seven academics had said the Pope condoned the 1633 trial and conviction of the astronomer Galileo for heresy.

The Vatican insists the Pope is not "anti-science" - but in light of the protests they have decided it would be better for him not to attend.

Galileo had argued that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

The Vatican says the Pope will now send his speech to La Sapienza, instead of delivering it in person.

Landmark controversy

Pope Benedict was in charge of Roman Catholic doctrine in 1990 when, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he commented on the 17th-Century Galileo trial.

In the speech, he quoted Austrian-born philosopher Paul Feyerabend as saying the Church's verdict against Galileo had been "rational and just".

Galileo's inquisitors maintained the scriptures indicated the Earth was stationary.
Galileo, a devout Catholic, was forced to renounce his findings publicly.

Fifteen years ago Pope John Paul II officially conceded that in fact the Earth was not stationary.

The academics at La Sapienza signed a letter saying the Pope's views on Galileo "offend and humiliate us".

They said it would be inappropriate for the Pope to open their academic year on Thursday.

"In the name of the secular nature of science we hope this incongruous event can be cancelled," said the letter addressed to the university's rector, Renato Guarini.

In a separate initiative, students at La Sapienza organised four days of protest this week. The first revolved around an anti-clerical meal of bread, pork and wine, the BBC's Christian Fraser reports from Rome.

The banner at their lunch read: "Knowledge needs neither fathers nor priests".

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7188860.stm
Published: 2008/01/15 18:42:11 GMT
© BBC MMVIII Read more!

what do you all think?

A Nobel Laureate's Primary

By Sebastian Mallaby

Monday, January 14, 2008; Page A21

The presidential primaries are terrific fun, but they are also absurd -- far more absurd than even most critics recognize. It is not just that atypical, early states have disproportionate influence, or that outcomes can be swayed by floods of rain or money. The basic problem is one that's common to nearly all electoral contests: Whenever there are three or more contenders, it makes no sense to ask voters to select a single candidate.

To see why this is so, consider last year's Nobel Prize in economics, which went to three founders of a field known as mechanism design theory. Mechanism designers study the rules by which people with varying preferences can reconcile their interests. The first step is often to induce people to reveal preferences fully, so that a compromise that's best for everyone can be arrived at.

A good example comes from radio spectrum auctions. Once upon a time, a company that wanted the right to use spectrum simply went to the government and asked to buy it; there was no mechanism to discover whether some other company might have used the same spectrum better. So the government invited all potential users to reveal their preferences by bidding in an auction. The firm with the smartest plan to use the airwaves would be able to bid the highest price. In this way, a scarce public resource would be allocated wisely.

So far, so familiar; but consider the next twist. In a standard auction, companies will bid strategically: They will name a price that won't necessarily reflect what the spectrum is worth to them, because they may reckon that they can bag it with a lower bid. A company with a brilliant new cellphone technology that represents the best possible use of the spectrum may be able to pay $10 billion for it. But it might bid $8 billion and win, in which case the taxpayers would be short $2 billion. Or it might bid $8 billion and lose, in which case the radio spectrum would go to a rival that would use it less productively.

The mechanism designers solved this problem deftly. The highest bidder, they proposed, should win the auction, but the price he pays should be the one set by the runner-up. This ends the incentive to bid strategically. Each bidder will reveal what the spectrum is really worth to him, since he knows he won't pay the price he is naming. The spectrum will end up in the most productive hands, and at a fair price for taxpayers.

Now apply this logic to primary elections. We have progressed beyond the no-auction phase, for which the analogy is monarchy. But we are stuck with the equivalent of flawed, high-bid auctions.

When voters express a preference for a single candidate, they reveal remarkably little. Unless one candidate gets more than half the votes, unlikely in a multi-candidate field, it's impossible to know which candidate is the real preference of a majority of the voters. For example, Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire with 39 percent of the vote, but we can't tell if she would have beaten Barack Obama in a two-person contest. We can't even be sure she would have beaten John Edwards.

Just like badly designed auctions, the primaries encourage "strategic" behavior that conceals true preferences. Some Democratic voters who preferred Bill Richardson may have chosen not to reveal that, figuring that a vote for him would be wasted. Some independent voters may have preferred Obama yet voted instead in the Republican contest for John McCain, believing that Obama would win the Democratic contest without their assistance. If voters don't reveal their true preferences, it's hard to reconcile them successfully.

What elections ought to do is discover which candidate would beat each of the other candidates in head-to-head matchups. Eric Maskin, one of last year's Nobel laureates for mechanism design, will suggest how a better system could do that in a lecture Thursday at Georgetown University. Maskin's argument is that voters should list candidates in order of preference, so we wouldn't have to guess whether Clinton would have beaten Obama in a two-person contest. If a majority of voters for Edwards, Richardson and the other also-rans put Clinton higher on their lists than Obama, she would win the contest under Maskin's system. But if Obama ranked higher than Clinton on a majority of voters' lists, then he would win. After all, most people would have preferred him.

Instead of this common-sensical system, we have a farce: On the basis of a three-point margin over Obama that tells us little about which of the two candidates voters actually preferred, Clinton has transformed her prospects. Maskin and other election theorists have patiently explained this absurdity for years. Surely the recognition of the Nobel Prize should now persuade the world to listen.

smallaby@cfr.org

Read more!

The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See

High-school teacher Greg Craven offers a simple and logical argument for the need to address the possibility of climate change.



Visit his YouTube channel to watch numerous videos that thoroughly address any objections to his argument. Read more!

!!!!!KUCINICH FOR PRESIDENT!!!!

ON IRAQ:

ON HEALTHCARE:

ON IMMIGRATION:

EDUCATION:

THE ENVIRONMENT:

WORKER'S RIGHTS:

ENERGY:

ECONOMY:



GO KUCINICH GO KUCINICH GO! Read more!

Words of God

If you're ever in an argument or debate about illegal immigration with any person whose testament of faith begins with the Old Testament...

"You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt."
(Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 22:21)

SMMMACK Read more!

Muslim Woman Convicted of a Thought-Crime in the UK

At Mother's, they put out this newspaper at the restaurant called "Epoch Times," I think they're based in the UK, though I'm not certain. This article was in the edition I read today.



By Stephen Jones
Epoch Times UK Staff
Civil Rights groups have welcomed a court's decision to free a Muslim woman convicted of what they say amounts to a 'thought crime'.

Samina Malik, who called herself the "lyrical terrorist" after writing poetry praising suicide bombers, walked free of the Old Bailey last Thursday after gaining a nine month suspended sentence for possessing extremist literature.

While working as a shop assistant in stationer WHSmith, the 23-year-old of Southall, London, scribbled on the back of till rolls poems such as "Kafirs your time will come soon, and no one will save you from your doom".

Malik was the first woman to be convicted under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act, which states that: "A person commits an offence if he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism."

Although she was found guilty of the offence last Wednesday, she was said to be not guilty of the more serious offence of possessing articles for terrorist purposes.

In her defence, Malik said: "This does not mean I wanted to convert my words into actions. This is a meaningless poem and that is all it ever was. To partake in something and to write about something are two different things."

Deputy President of writers' group, English PEN, Lisa Appignanesi, said: "A prison sentence for Samina Malik would have a chilling effect on every British citizen's right to express themselves fully and freely.

"This in turn would have a knock-on effect for citizens of other countries, whose governments look to the UK for leadership on such issues.

"To make a felon of a girl dreaming and writing behind a bookshop counter would have Byron and Shelley turning in their graves."

Director of the libertarian group, Jonathan Heawood, added: "Her worst crimes are against prosody and a fitting response would be to send her on a creative writing workshop."

As well as the extremist poems, police also found in Malik's house documents on a computer relating to terrorism, including: the al-Qaeda Manual, the Terrorists Handbook, the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, a manual for a Dragunov Sniper Rifle, the Firearms and RPG handbook, and a document called "How to win hand to hand fighting".

Defending her in court, John Burton said Malik's offences showed "a significant degree of immaturity" and she had behaved more like a rebellious teenager than a young woman in her 20s.

Although she faced up to 10 years in jail, she was given a suspended sentence, meaning she does not need to serve time in prison unless found guilty of another offence.

Assistant Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala, welcomed the judge's decision.

He said: "If the police believed that Samina may have constituted a threat to society then they could surely have placed her under surveillance and waited until they had uncovered some actual terror-related activity as opposed to just downloading stuff from the internet.

"Instead, given the wide-ranging powers they now enjoy under section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 they were able to prosecute Samina for a thought crime." Read more!

A Friendly Reminder

The United States' embargo against Cuba has been in place for 46 years. After the Soviet Union's fall in '89-'92, The United Nations has ANNUALLY condemned the embargo. It stands only now as the means by which Cuba is made an example of economic collapse for any vulnerable nation that actively stands against U.S. foreign policy and oligarchical capitalism.

In the U.N.'s World Food Program, it costs 19 cents to feed a child for a day.

Nineteen cents.

20,000 children die of hunger every day. 20 will have died by the time you're done reading this.

One minute of war in Iraq would feed 2,000,000 children for a day.
One day of war in Iraq would feed 8,000,000 children for a year.

There are an estimated 800 million hungry human beings in the world. Three to four months of war in Iraq would feed them all.



(The following are the views and opinions of this author and not necessarily those of others associated with this blog...though I do hope so)

Let's count the number of wars that the United States has engaged itself in in the last half-century. How many people--LIVES! THESE ARE HUMAN BEINGS. THEY SMILE AND CRY LIKE YOU. THEY HAVE THEIR OWN LIVES. THEIR OWN LIVES!--how many of them could the wealthiest and most prosperous nation in history have fed, clothed, sheltered, and educated? And why in God's name would that nation want to do that in the first place?...

...MAYBE BECAUSE A LIFE IS ETERNALLY HOLY, BEAUTIFUL, PRECIOUS, AND FRAGILE...
...AND MAYBE BECAUSE WE ALL SHARE THE SAME RESPONSIBILITY FOR ONE ANOTHER,
we are, after all, our brothers' keepers, are we not? The oligarchy that controls this nation politically, economically, and militarily claim it to be so through their professed beliefs in Judeo-Christian theology. Wolves in sheep's clothing. This nation claims vague ideals of 'democracy,' 'freedom,' and 'JUSTICE' only for the benefit of wealthy families and multinational corporations who have been protected by a military-industrial complex since the end of World War II; and that military-industrial complex is protected and ensured by a voting population of apathetic and feebleminded consumers, forced into fear by their government, with attention-spans long enough to hate this or that candidate or this or that policy based soley on unfounded and ethically and socially illogical premises propagated by this same oligarchical elite. It's not about dominating one group of people or another, it's about a few groups of people grabbing as much money as they can from the dead bodies of their own brothers and sisters. And granted, there are people who do their part to help through complex and simple means alike, but it sickens me to think that all the people, myself included, who recognize this and have yet to leave or take themselves off of the grid are tacitly complying with this hatred and greed. But how in the name of Peace is anyone going to solve anything by leaving??? Look at us, Ulysses between a rock and a hard place.


Jesus must be gouging his eyes out on his crown of thorns.

End Post. Read more!

Something Shiny Amidst The Muck and Mire?

I've heard more good than bad about Edwards.
But that is just me...

Behind the Edwards Surge: Right Message at the Right Time
By John Nichols
The Nation

Wednesday 26 December 2007

Much was made of Illinois Senator Barack Obama's superb speech to a huge crowd of Iowa Democrats at the mid-November Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines. Without a doubt, it helped to propel Obama ahead of New York Senator Hillary Clinton in polls conducted in the weeks after the event.

But Obama's speech in November may not turn out to be the definitional statement of the fight for Iowa.

What could turn out to be the most critical comment of the campaign came from John Edwards in the last debate between the Democratic contenders - and the former senator from North Carolina may well claim the caucus-night victory that is the reward for delivering the right message at the right time.

It wasn't a great rhetorical flourish. It wasn't even a new statement. Rather, it was a particularly pointed and effective restatement of the core anti-corporate message of his campaign.
But it came precisely when Iowa Democrats were getting serious about the caucuses. And it gave Edwards the boost he needed to get back in the competition - and, he is, very much in the competition now.

Please!


No serious observer of the December 13 debate in Des Moines doubted that the standout performance, and the standout message, was that of Edwards.

Indeed, undecided voters assembled in focus groups that watched the debate for the major television networks rated Edwards off the charts. That's going to help the 2004 Democratic nominee for vice president as the Iowa caucuses approach. Despite the intense focus on the campaigns of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, most polls suggest that Edwards is very much in the running in Iowa. And rightly so.

To a far greater extent than Obama or Clinton, Edwards has struck at the heart of issues that should matter most in the race to replace not just George W. Bush, but the Bush agenda of corporate giveaways, job-crushing free trade deals, war profiteering in Iraq, and subprime mortgage profiteering in Indiana, Idaho, Illinois and, yes, Iowa.

Edwards summed up his increasingly aggressive and powerful anti-corporate themes with a declaration: "What makes America America is at stake: jobs, the middle class, health care, preserving the environment in the world for future generations.

"But all those things are at risk. And why are they at risk? Because of corporate power and corporate greed in Washington, D.C. And we have to take them on. You can't make a deal with them. You can't hope that they're going to go away. You have to actually be willing to fight. And I want every caucus-goer to know I've been fighting these people and winning my entire life. And if we do this together, rise up together, we can actually make absolutely certain, starting here in Iowa, that we make this country better than we left it."

But the former senator's most effective statement at the Des Moines Register debate on Thursday was one that reflected his deep level of engagement with working people in the upper Midwest, an engagement born of long months spent in Iowa and neighboring states - at a time when Clinton and Obama were spending considerably more time fighting over who had better relations with the media moguls on Hollywood's A-list and in the suites of Manhattan's mortgage manipulators.

Edwards got to know workers in Iowa. He stood with them in their struggles.

Turning a broad question about human rights toward the specific issue of trade policy, the former senator said that human rights, human needs and human values "should be central to our trade policy."

"But," he added, "if you look at what's happened with American trade policy, look at what America got: Big corporations made a lot of money, are continuing to make a lot of money in China. But what did America get in return? We got millions of dangerous Chinese toys. We lost millions of jobs.

"And right here in Iowa, the Maytag plant in Newton closed. A guy named Doug Bishop, who I got to know very well, had worked in that plant, and his family had worked in that plant literally for generations. And his job is now gone. The same thing, by the way, happened in the plant that my father worked in when I was growing up. It is so important that we stop allowing these corporate powers and corporate profits to run America's policy, whether it's trade policy, how we engage with China. This is not good for America. It's not good for American jobs. And it's not good for working people in this country."

That's an issue Edwards has taken far, far more seriously than his opponents in what is now a three-way race in Iowa. And that seriousness has benefitted the former senator.

Remembering the workers who have been battered by the failed trade policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations matters. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both supporters of recent trade agreements, have never connected on the same level. Edwards, who once had a shaky record on these issues but has come to be a passionate proponent of fair trade, comes across as the candidate who gets it. That's why he won the debate in Des Moines. That's why every serious survey that has been conducted in recent days shows him within striking distance of the Iowa win that once was assumed to be Clinton's for the taking and that was then supposed to be Obama's.

No one who is watching the rapid evolution of this race is any longer counting Edwards out in Iowa - or in the rest of a yet-to-be-defined race for the Democratic nomination.
Read more!

Blood Pressure Elevation

All I really wanted for Christmas was for O'Reilly to be banished from planet Earth. But a new camera will do.

Read more!

200th Post!

"Something of the sort has already been described for the self-actualizing person. Everything now comes of its own accord, pouring out, without will, effortlessly, purposelessly. He acts now totally and without deficiency, not homeostatically or need-reductively, not to avoid pain or displeasure or death, not for the sake of a goal further on in the future, not for any end other than itself. His behavior and experience becomes per se, and self-validating, end-behavior and end-experience, rather than means-behavior or means-experience. At this level, I have called the person godlike because most gods have been considered to have no needs or wants, no deficiencies, nothing lacking, to be gratified in all things. The characteristics and especially actions of the “highest,” “best” gods have then been deduced as based upon not-wanting."
--Abraham H. Maslow
"Toward a Psychology of Being", 3rd Edition, Page 121 Read more!

A Meditation on Solidarity

Read more!

Chomsky's Pill

Read more!

It's Always E=mc^2/sqrt(1 - v2/c2) In Philadelphia

The liberty bell crack, self-titled cheese steaks, the statue of Rocky Balboa, now this....

The Philadelphia Experiment



We should have known Philadelphia was hiding something.
Read more!

The Power of Nightmares

Watch the rest of this series at http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares Read more!

Bush Says Iran Still a Danger Despite Report on Weapons

By STEVEN LEE MYERS and HELENE COOPER
New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — President Bush warned today that Iran remained a threat despite an intelligence assessment that it had halted a covert program to develop nuclear weapons four years ago, as the administration struggled to salvage a diplomatic process now in disarray.

Once again facing criticism over the handling — and meaning — of intelligence reports, Mr. Bush said the new assessment underscored the need to intensify international efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

He said Iran could not be entrusted with acquiring even the scientific knowledge to enrich uranium for peaceful civilian use, explicitly declaring for the first time what has been an underlying premise of the Bush administration’s policy. He also appeared to rule out any new diplomatic initiative with the current president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous, if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Bush said, sounding defensive at times, during a news conference dominated by questions about the assessment, known as a National Intelligence Estimate. “What’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?”

The assessment reversed one in 2005 that asserted that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons,” with American intelligence agencies now saying that they do not know whether Iran intends to take that step.

Mr. Bush said that the reversal was based on “a great discovery” by American intelligence agencies, but neither he nor other officials would elaborate. Current and former American and foreign officials said the new findings were based on intercepted communications and accounts provided by individuals with access to information about Iran’s nuclear program.

Representative Jane Harman, a Democrat of California, said that she read the classified version of the report today and described the intelligence agencies’ work “a sea change” from the 2005 assessment in the quality of its analysis and presentation of facts. Asked about the basis for the new findings, she said: “I think we have some better sourcing. That’s all I can say.”

Mr. Bush’s remarks did little to silence critics, who have accused him of hyping the case for confronting Iran. Nor did it ease they concerns of some allies. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, said he was perplexed by the new assessment and suspicious of the new evidence. “We should all look under the hood of these intelligence reports,” he said.

Mr. Bush and his senior aides spent the day trying to hold together the already-fragile coalition of world powers seeking to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Mr. Bush telephoned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has voiced skepticism about an aggressive American effort to punish and isolate Iran.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also telephoned her counterparts from the five other countries that have been pursuing United Nations sanctions against Iran to urge that they continue work on a new round of increasingly tighter sanctions.

“This report is not an ‘O.K., everybody needs to relax and quit’ report,” Mr. Bush said. “This is a report that says what has happened in the past could be repeated and that the policies used to cause the regime to halt are effective policies. And let’s keep them up. Let’s continue to work together.”

There were already signs that this effort had been complicated by the new report. R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, held a conference call this morning with his counterparts from the five countries — France, Germany, China, Britain and Russia.

One European diplomat described the conference call as “listless.”

“We’re all flabbergasted,” the diplomat said of the report generally. “You get such a surprise, and then you sit together and consider how to move forward. To be on safe ground, we decided to keep moving forward” with the effort to press for further sanctions.

A senior Bush administration official said the intelligence assessment on Iran was a setback in the effort to persuade China to endorse a new round of sanctions at the United Nations Security Council. While there had been indications over the weekend that the Chinese might drop their opposition to such a move, it appeared today that they were reconsidering again, the official said.

The new intelligence assessment, the official said, “gives the Chinese an opportunity to get off the hook.”

Mr. Bush opened himself to new criticism over his credibility when he said that the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, alerted him about new intelligence about Iran’s weapons program in August but did not explain what it was in detail.

As recently as October, Mr. Bush continued to warn darkly of Iran’s nuclear weapons threat, invoking World War III, despite the new information. He responded to a question about that today by saying he had received the final assessment, with its drastically altered findings, only last week.

“That’s not believable,” said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a candidate for president. “I refuse to believe that. If that’s true, he has the most incompetent staff in American, modern American history and he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.”

While many officials, lawmakers and diplomats focused on the halting of Iran’s weapons program, Mr. Bush emphasized the report’s finding that “a growing amount of intelligence indicates Iran was engaged in covert uranium conversion and uranium enrichment activity” from the late 1980’s until the freezing of that effort in 2003. Mr. Bush’s senior aides describe that as the first evidence of what many officials had only suspected.

“And so I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program,” Mr. Bush said. “They halted the program. And the reason why it’s a warning signal is that they could restart it.”

Critics, though, blamed the Bush administration’s hard line and harsh language for compounding Iran’s determination and undermining diplomatic efforts. They called on the administration to make a more concerted diplomatic effort to persuade Iran’s government to abide by its commitments to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“Their actions have been totally self-defeating,” Mr. Biden said of the Bush administration. “Every time they rattle the saber, what happens is the security premium for oil goes up. It raises the price of oil. It puts more money in the pocket of Ahmadinejad and the very people we think are the bad guys.”

Mr. Bush maintained that the administration had made offers to Iran as part of the European Union’s diplomatic efforts as long ago as 2003, including promising American support for membership in the World Trade Organization and an easing of sanctions to allow the sale of spare airplane parts.

“What changed was the change of leadership in Iran,” he said, referring to the elections in Iran in 2005. “We had a diplomatic track going, and Ahmadinejad came along and took a different tone. And the Iranian people must understand that the tone and actions of their government are that which is isolating them.

Flynt Leverett, a Middle East expert at the New America Foundation who once served on the National Security Council under Mr. Bush, said the president had consistently ruled out any real entreaty to Iran that could resolve the international deadlock over its nuclear ambitions.

“The really uncomfortable part for the administration, aside from the embarrassment, is the policy implication,” Mr. Leverett said of the new intelligence assessment. “The dirty secret is the administration has never put on the table an offer to negotiate with Iran the issues that would really matter: their own security, the legitimacy of the Islamic republic and Iran’s place in the regional order.” Read more!

Promises

Promises- The Film

PROMISES follows the journey of one of the filmmakers, Israeli-American B.Z. Goldberg. B.Z. travels to a Palestinian refugee camp and to an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and to the more familiar neighborhoods of Jerusalem where he meets seven Palestinian and Israeli children.

Though the children live only 20 minutes apart, they exist in completely separate worlds; the physical, historical and emotional obstacles between them run deep.

PROMISES explores the nature of these boundaries and tells the story of a few children who dared to cross the lines to meet their neighbors. Rather than focusing on political events, the seven children featured in PROMISES offer a refreshing, human and sometimes humorous portrait of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Check it out!
http://www.promisesproject.org/# Read more!

Revolutionary Showdown in Bolivia

Yesterday -- Nov. 24, 2007-- the representatives
of Evo Morales' MAS party in the Constituent
Assembly finally broke with the oligarchy and
approved, with a simple majority vote, a new
draft Constitution for Bolivia.
See article: http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKN2434404320071125

Revolutionary Mobilizations Shake Bolivia Yet Again

By Eric Blanc

In response to a deepening right-wing offensive against the unity of Bolivia and the government of Evo Morales, new mass revolutionary mobilizations are shaking the entire country.

In the second week of January 2007, workers and peasants from the Cochabamba department of central Bolivia poured into the streets to demand the resignation of the governor, Manfred Reyes Villa, for supporting the reactionary "autonomies" promoted by the U.S. Embassy and the oligarchy of the oil-rich Santa Cruz region.

Despite the fact that 64% of Cochabamba voted against the reactionary "autonomies" in the national referendum in July 2006, the governor declared his support for "the independence of Santa Cruz" and a new autonomic referendum.

Tensions on this question have been escalating for months. Beginning on January 8, tens of thousands of coca growers, indigenous peasants, students, and workers from the countryside and city occupied the department's capital, in response to the call of the Departmental Workers Federation (COD). On January 11, a right-wing fascist youth group - made up of racist upper-class white students linked to the oligarchy and Governor Reyes Villa - broke through the police lines and brutally attacked the peaceful demonstrators with baseball bats and lead pipes.

Street fighting ensued, leaving hundreds of protestors wounded and two dead. The repression only radicalized the demonstrators. On Jan. 16, a popular assembly (cabildo) of over 30,000 peasants, workers, and youth denounced Reyes Villa for attacking the unity of the nation. The assembly refused to recognize the authority of the departmental government and proceeded to set up a "Departmental Revolutionary Committee," made up of 21 popular and labor organizations to act as the sole legitimate government in the region. Reyes Villa fled to Santa Cruz.

With Cochabamba as an example, the workers' and their organizations (particularly, the COR and the FEJUVE) in the cities of El Alto and La Paz in Western Bolivia took to the streets to demand the resignation of their right-wing governor who supports the autonomies, Pepelucho Paredes. Declaring a "war to death" in defense of the unity of the country, the demonstrators gave Paredes 48 hours to resign - or be forced out.

It was at this point that the national government of Evo Morales stepped in to put water on the fire by proposing a future referendum to decide whether Villa Reyes should stay or go. Vice President Alvaro Garcia declared: "Legitimate protests must be legally channeled. The government respects the legally existing authorities. ... We will give the governor police and military protection to return to Cochabamba."

For the time being the government's intervention has demobilized the protestors - but none of the underlying conflicts have been resolved.

In the year since Evo Morales took power, he has taken various important anti-imperialist steps forward, most important nationalization of oil decree, the call for a vote against autonomies in the national referendum, the refounding of the state mining company, and steps toward land reform. These actions, taken under pressure from the organized and mobilized workers and peasants, have been an inspiration for the whole continent.

Unfortunately, the Evo government has also ceded on various occasions to the intense pressure of the right wing and imperialism. For example, recently Evo declared that he supported regional autonomies and the members of Congress of his party, the MAS, caved in on Jan. 24 to the right wing by approving the proposal for making the (still paralyzed) Constituent Assembly based on a 2/3 majority principle.

In today's explosive context, the key is the independent mobilization of the masses and their organizations. For its part, La Chispa (The Spark) has directly participated in all these struggles, around the following political axis:

"The Bolivian people do not want autonomies. They want bread, land, and jobs. To win this, the labor, indigenous, and popular sectors must build an anti-imperialist united front with the government of Evo Morales! Nothing is more urgent in the current situation! The struggle against the pillage and division promoted by imperialism through the oligarchies unites us all. To defeat the right-wing, it is necessary to continue and deepen the structural changes. It is time to mobilize!" Read more!

N O W = forever

"The outer purpose belongs to the horizontal dimension of space and time; the inner purpose concerns a deepening of your Being in the vertical dimension of the timeless Now." --Eckhart Tolle
The Power of Now : A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Page: 88 Read more!

"...a circle whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere..."

"Circles"
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms... There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid... Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall. Read more!

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