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December 29, 2005
12.29.05 | How to Sell a Stereotype; The Fake Drug Trade; TV Terrorists
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December 29, 2005
Edition |
| "The Best of the Rest of the Web" |
THiS WEEK: Big Pharma's dirty little secret—the fake drug trade; Mexicans on death row, in the United States; damali ayo talks about the origins of her satirical website Rent-A-Negro.com; a look at the latest batch of TV terrorists; Tim Wise considers hate speech codes; how vanguard agriculture might save rural Montana's land and farmers; the great taboo of the philosopher physicist; England sets out to monitor the movements of every vehicle in the country; gold mining companies in Guatemala—and elsewhere—accused of exploiting indigenous land; and several other unexpected and potentially interesting bits of information in this week's batch of Media Picks.
This Week's Picks:
- Death By Dilution
When fakes of a GlaxoSmithKline anti-malarial drug turned up in Africa, authorities assumed the drug giant would want to know. Instead, they learned about a huge, evil trade in fake drugs—and about an industry that doesn't want the truth to get out.Robert Cockburn | American Prospect
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10650 - The Corrido of Death Row
On December 9th, President Vicente Fox signed off on constitutional amendments that abolished capital punishment in both civil courts and military codes. Executions in Mexico have been suspended for decades—the last Mexican to be executed went before a military firing squad in 1961. But despite the long-awaited demise of the death penalty here, Mexico still has 46 citizens awaiting imminent execution on Death Row. In the United States.John Ross | Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross12232005.html - CARTOON | Decoding Cheney's Mysterious Smile
Is he happy? Is he sad? Is he insane?Don Asmussen | Bad Reporter
http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/pictures/2005/12/23/122305-950x316-badreporter.gif - INTERVIEW | How To Sell a Stereotype
The creator of the satirical website Rent-A-Negro.com, explains why, when it comes to race, many white people still just don't get it.damali ayo interviewed by Lisa Katayama | AlterNet / Bitch Magazine
http://www.alternet.org/story/29900/
Check out the Winter 2006 issue of LiP to read damali ayo's new "12 white Steps" program. - Sleeper Cell
They're your friends! Your neighbors! Your husbands! Yes, the terrorists are living among you: teaching science to your children, handing you ugly shoes at the bowling alley, and reverse-engineering your home security systems. Now where have we heard this plotline before? Oh that's right, everywhere. So you can't be faulted if Showtime's latest ten-part miniseries, Sleeper Cell, escaped your attention. Sometimes it's hard to keep all those TV terrorists straight.Laura Fokkena | Muslim WakeUp!
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2005/12/sleepless_in_lo.php#more - Racism, Free Speech and the College
Campus
Tim Wise takes on the case of Bellarmine University student Andrei Chira, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist whose armband for "Blood and Honour" (a British-based white supremacist movement) has led to a renewed debate on First Amendment issues on college campuses. But as Wise points out, reducing the debate to an issue of free speech ignores the larger point: "by focusing on the overt and obvious forms of racism, hate speech codes distract us from the structural and institutional changes necessary to truly address racism and white supremacy as larger social phenomena. And while we could, in theory, both limit racist speech and respond to institutional racism, doing the former almost by definition takes so much energy (if for no other reason than the time it takes to defend the effort from Constitutional challenges), that getting around to the latter never seems to follow in practice."Tim Wise | LiP Magazine
http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/freespeech.html - A New Green Revolution
In the rolling wheat country of central and eastern Montana, individualism pits farmer against farmer. The winners unfurl endless fields of wheat across many thousands of acres. The losers, in ever-growing numbers, simply go belly-up. But a growing number of people, refusing to accept the demise of rural Montana, are beginning to pracice what might be called vanguard agriculture—dryland farmers who are finding new ways to grow and market their produce. Organic or alternative producers have built grain mills, bakeries and packing operations; they're building co-ops and making plans for a biodiesel plant. Perhaps most importantly, vanguard agriculture is bucking, acre-by-acre, the dark side of the Last Best Place mythos—and including people in its solutions.Sam Western | High Country News / Headwaters News
http://www.headwatersnews.org/hcn.mtfarm122705.html - Albert Einstein as a Philosopher of
Science
Nowadays, explicit engagement with the philosophy of science plays almost no role in the training of physicists or in physics research. What little the student learns about philosophical issues is typically learned casually, by a kind of intellectual osmosis. One picks up ideas and opinions in the lecture hall, in the laboratory, and in collaboration with one's supervisor. Careful reflection on philosophical ideas is rare. Even rarer is systematic instruction. Worse still, publicly indulging an interest in philosophy of science is often treated as a social blunder. Things were not always so.Don A. Howard | Physics Today
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-12/p34.html - AUDIO | The Forgotten History of Oakland
Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, "there is no there there." Scholar Chris Rhomberg would beg to differ; he's written a history of social movements in the East Bay metropolis that encompasses the rise of the Klan in the 1920s, the Oakland general strike of 1946, and the explosion of the Black Panthers in the 1960s. (Encore performance)Sasha Lilley | Against the Grain
http://www.againstthegrain.org/audio12.19.05.mp3 - England to Monitor and Record Every Car
Trip
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, Britain is planning to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years. From 2006, Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored.Steve Connor | Autonomy & Solidarity / The Independent
http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/1677?PHPSESSID=dcd5e41601d83e93ec3a1b808cb78a5b - Have Gun Will Travel
Up to 20,000 private security contractors were estimated to be working in Iraq in April, making them the second-largest force in the country after the U.S. Army. The following notices were submitted to the Security section of tacticaljobs.com, a job board for private-sector security companies. - AUDIO | Unplugging a Media Giant
A look at how Clear Channel came to be the largest owner of radio stations in North America and the many people fighting against it.Tena Rubio and Emily Polk | National Radio Project
http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2005/5205.html - Mining Gold, and Outrage, in
Guatemala
Rolando Lopez Crisostomo is a long way from his village in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. Sipping coffee in a cramped kitchen in East Vancouver, he explains the purpose of his journey—to let us know that a Canadian gold company is digging an unwanted open-pit mine on Mayan land. And Guatemala isn't the only country where gold mining is facing controversy.Jared Ferrie | The Tyee
http://thetyee.ca/News/2005/12/21/GuatamalaOutrage
- Media Picks Contributing Editor: Adam Barker
- Media Picks compiled and edited by Erin
Wiegand and Brian Awehali
Posted by erin at December 29, 2005 04:10 PM