It's May 1 2006 and the Sun is Rising

Bolivia's President Evo Morales has signed a decree placing his country's energy industry under state control. In a May Day speech, he said foreign energy firms must agree to channel all their sales through the Bolivian state, or else leave the country. He set the firms a six-month deadline, but the military and state energy officials have already started taking control of the oil fields. Bolivia has South America's second largest natural gas reserves. But the country has suffered years of political crises over how to develop and profit from the industry. The main foreign oil firms operating in Bolivia are Brazil's Petrobras, the Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF, British companies British Gas and British Petroleum and France's Total. "The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources," said Morales.

Arto Melleri: Comeback!

Arto Melleri is in the ring again, 12 rounds, stronger and faster than ever. He does not do too much rope-a-dope, but moves smoothly, throwing jabs and punches and combinations always with universally humane irony waiting for the right moment for his left hook as if it came from nowhere to determine the match.

Arto Melleri, Poems (2006)

Always I have braced
roads with no turning back,
but in the evening light strained
sorrow does not belong to anyone.
The sunset is shared: bright sword
cut the light, gust of wind
is streamer’s rest; we’ve been hide and seek
with ourselves, and now there’s
only consequences, no reasons anymore.

Aina olen ylistänyt
teitä joilta ei ole paluuta,
mutta illan valossa siivilöityvä
suru ei ole enää kenenkään omaa.
Yhteistä on auringonlasku: kirkkaat miekat
halkaisevat valon, vihuri
on viirien lepo; me olemme olleet sokkosilla
itsemme kanssa, ja nyt on jäljellä
vain seurauksia, ei enää syitä.

When will we ever learn?

The National Coalition Party’s (right wing)
image is going up tells the recent image survey.
The worst points went to The Left Alliance (left wing).
This is happening at the same time as Finland has divided into two:
the haves and the have nots.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

“Thou shall not lie, thou shall not murder”

In their polished and fine-tuned rhetoric the right wing spokesmen in Finland and perhaps elsewhere never answer the essential question concerning the relationship between the wealth produced by millions and millions of “laboring hands”, and the profits made by thousands and thousands of Executives, major share holders, and stockbrokers. Or, when asked the simplest question, where does the money go, they answer: "Of course, to finance the much too expensive and ineffective welfare structures (social security, education, pensions, health care etc.). And if you argue that “Oh no, that is not true, it goes to global corporations and international hustlers,” they use the “grandma argument”: “Don’t you know that those ‘big bad’ multinational organizations are owned by grannies living in the U.S. You want no hard for the elderly, do you?” They sort of seem to forget that a granny from Miami, Florida, might have her small share of funds in some corporation through her savings for the bad times, but who by no means belongs to the class of the super rich owning the world. So, how to reply to these demagogues who play their superficially manufactured “global competition demands that we need to cut workers'benefits and the public sector” -language games in the capitalist sandbox? What is your answer? “Thou shall not lie?” “Thou shall not murder?”

Critical Pedagogy for Free

Now you can download a book on critical pedagogy entitled "Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today" (2005) (edited by Ilan Gur-Ze'ev) for free by typing its title Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today to Google, and you'll have it as pdf.

From the book's backcover:

For the first time ever, the leading figures in today's critical education join forces. The collection offers a project in which the leading figures in critical education meet young academics who dialogically relate to each other’s work and critically reflect on their own contribution to Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy. In its nineteen chapters this book reconstructs the history of Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy and presents various and conflicting responses to the possibility of a present-day counter-education. This collection offers a milestone and a new beginning in the relations between alternative (modern and postmodern) critical theories and critical pedagogies.

Pentti's enthusiasm

These enthusiastic words of the Poet of Finland, Pentti Saarikoski, force me to think of summer and you making love and fucking at the same time:

"Minä pidän sinusta koska sinulla on kaunis suu ja neekerin nauru ja
iloiset silmät ja sinä olet epätoivoinen ja riehakas ja sinun tukkasi
menee sekaisin tuulessa ja sinun karvasi uivat vedenpinnalla kuin
vesiheinät ja sinun häpyluusi on silta jolta nuoret miehet hyppäävät
vaahtoavaan koskeen ja niiden äidit ja siskot huutavat rannalla sormet
levällään ja sinä naurat vain ja pappi ja psykiatri kiertävät sinua
kuin harmaat kissat ja sinun rintasi nauravat kuin orgaaniset vuoret
ja koko sinun ruumiisi nauraa ja kapakat tanssivat sinun ympärilläsi
ja minä putoan kuin taivas joka on täynnä jumalia ja enkeleitä ja
piruja ja minä putoan sinun päällesi ja me kierimme rullalta ja
peitämme maan ja kaiken mitä maan päällä on
Minä tulen villiksi kun minä ajattelen sinua kun minä ajattelen kun
minä ajattelen maailmaa ja sinua ja maailmaa maailmaa taivasta maata
ja ihanaa enkeliä joka vie minua kotiin maan korvessa kulkevi lapsosen
tie hänen vitullaan on seitsemän kertaa seitsemänkymmentä nimeä
Cuba! Cuba! Cuba! Cuba! La revolucion!!!!!!!"

"I like you for you have a beautiful mouth and the laughter of an African-American and bright eyes and you are desperate and cheerful and your hair gets tangled in the wind and swims in the surface of the lake and your pussy is a bridge from which young men jump into the foaming rapids and their mothers and sisters scream at the shore their fingers wide and you only laugh and a priest and a psychiatrist circumscribe you like grey cats and your tits laugh like organic mountains and your whole body laughs and pubs dance around you and I fall like the sky that is full of gods and angels and devils and I fall upon you and we roll and cover the ground and all there is..."
I become wild just thinking of you when I think when I think about the world the world and you and the world heaven earth and the lovely angel that takes me home in the forest is the path of the child her cunt has seven times seventy names Cuba! Cuba! Cuba! Cuba! La revolucion!!!!!!!"

This is not California

«This is not America. We're not in California. We're not interested in self-expression! Make your statements short and substantial!» - Zizek

Bush is determined

New Yorker magazine's journalist Seymour M. Hersh writes as follows: "The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium."

New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact

Once she asked

Once she asked about her own honest view of these things. 'What do you think of these matters. What is to be done to get rid of the poverties and social injustices?' And after tens of conferences, and tens of articles in the most prestigious journals, she didn't have a clue of an answer. Then she decided to go on in her own, and leave the academy, which seemed to be a mere facade, a world of its own without any connection whatsoever to the weight of the world.