« 08.29.06 Hermaphrodite Frogs; Biotech Goes Retro; "Story of O" Author Speaks | Main | 09.21.06 Monsters and Capitalism; Sharks vs. Marriage; Vaccines Against Narcotics »
September 13, 2006
09.13.06 Monsanto Buys Terminator Seed Company; Mos Def Arrested; My Lover, Osama bin Laden
 |
September 13, 2006 Edition |
| "The Best of the Rest of the Web" |
SIGN A FRIEND UP FOR MEDIA PICKS: They'll be given the option to confirm their addition to the list, and may decline with one click. Click here.
Got something you want to see in next week's Media Picks? Send it along to our editors!
THiS WEEK: A look back at the roots of the real tragedy in New Orleans: the faulty levees constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers; feminist academic Germaine Greer has some bitterly poignant words on the life of the former Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin; Sudanese writer Kola Boof reminisces on her ex-lover, Osama bin Laden; rapper Mos Def arrested for performing his song "Katrina Klap" outside Radio City Music Hall; a review of several new books on African-American conceptions of Africa; Monsanto buys "terminator seed" company, giving it the power to control the food seed of entire regions; an interesting look at obsolete jobs in North America; Black youth in San Francisco talk about why they need a gun to survive; strikes shut down the controversial Phulbari open-pit coal project in Bangladesh, but with some losses along the way; how sex workers' rights are related to stopping police brutality and supporting reproductive rights; and many other points of interest and amusement in this "only a week late" version of Media Picks.
This Week's Picks:
- Rotten to the Corps
If an unsafe building collapsed and killed 1,000 people, we wouldn't blame the building's manager, we'd blame the architects and engineers. Apparently it's different with unsafe levees. Otherwise, the fingers of an outraged nation would point directly at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that drowned New Orleans a year ago.Michael Grunwald | Grist Magazine
http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2006/08/29/grunwald/index.html - Crocodile Hunter Gets His
There was no habitat, no matter how fragile or finely balanced, that Steve Irwin hesitated to barge into, trumpeting his wonder and amazement to the skies. There was not an animal he was not prepared to manhandle. Every creature he brandished at the camera was in distress. Those of us who live with snakes, as I do with no fewer than 12 front-fanged venomous snake species in my bit of Queensland rainforest, know that they will get out of our way if we leave them a choice. Some snakes are described as aggressive, but, if you're a snake, unprovoked aggression doesn't make sense. Snakes on a plane only want to get off. But Irwin was an entertainer, a 21st-century version of a lion-tamer, with crocodiles instead of lions.Germaine Greer | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/australia/story/0,,1865124,00.html - INFOGRAPHIC | Airport Security Oversights
July 28, Portland, OR to Topeka, KS: 16 pounds of science textbooks.
Sept. 3, London to New York: A few Muslim people may have slipped through with their dignity. - His Prerogative
People are animals. They fuck, pray, and make bombs. The Dinka women of Sudan say the devil is the most beautiful man you will ever lay your eyes on. I never took these words seriously until I encountered my now infamous ex-lover, Osama bin Laden.Kola Boof | Harper's
http://harpers.org/HisPrerogative.html - VIDEO | Mos Def Arrested for Rapping (the Wrong Song) in Public
Rapper Mos Def was taken into custody and charged with disorderly conduct Thursday night after an unauthorized performance outside Radio City Music Hall of "Katrina Klap," a freestyle indictment of the Bush administration's slow response to last year's hurricane victims in New Orleans.Chronic Magazine
http://chronicmagazine.com/public.php?page_id=1554&level=1
VIDEO OF THE ARREST: http://youtube.com/watch?v=qNKnoIV6BT4
MUSIC VIDEO OF "KATRINA KLAP": http://youtube.com/watch?v=E2FlcRVTuCA
- REVIEW | A Sort of Homecoming
At least 12 million people from Africa were loaded into slave ships and transported to the Americas. How do people of African descent, scattered around the world, see their relationship to their ancestral home? Do they consider themselves "the African diaspora"? If their African heritage dates back several generations, is it "nebulous atavistic yearnings," as the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen once said, to search for their roots, to want some kind of bond with their ancestral homeland? Or is it important, in a neocolonial and still-racist world, that Africans and people of African descent see themselves as part of a transnational community? After all, the ancestors in question did not choose to leave their homeland; they arrived in the Americas in chains, and from the time they landed they were divided and dispersed, as a strategy of domination. Given the black collective memory of slavery, it is easy to understand the emotional tug of the ancestral land, the longing for Pan-African brotherhood and the desire for a community that is not racist.Hazel Rowley | The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060911&s=rowley - Monsanto Buys "Terminator" Seeds Company
While most of us don’t bother to reflect on where the corn in the box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or the rice in a box of Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice come from, when we grab it from the supermarket shelf, they all must originate with seeds. Seeds can either be taken by a farmer from the previous season’ seeds, and planted to produce the next harvest. Or, seeds can be bought new each harvest season, from the companies which sell their seeds. The United States Government has been financing research on a genetic engineering technology which, when commercialized, will give its owners the power to control the food seed of entire nations or regions. Now, the little-known company that has been working in this genetic research with the Government’s US Department of Agriculture—Delta & Pine Land—is about to become part of the world’s largest supplier of patented genetically-modified seeds, the Monsanto Corporation.F. William Engdahl | Global Research
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ENG20060827&articleId=3082 - Lost Labour
The decline of North American manufacturing is well documented. And when people speak of lost jobs, they usually mean the same job moving somewhere else. But in many cases, actual types of work have disappeared from North America. From steel mill foremen to grunts in the block ice plants, jobs that were common 60 years ago have either vanished or changed so much as to be unrecognizable.Richard Warnica | The Tyee
Text: http://thetyee.ca/Photo/2006/09/04/LostLabour/
Photos: http://thetyee.ca/gallery/2006/09/04/LostLabour/ - VIDEO | Straight Pistol Play
Black youth in San Francisco talk about why they need a gun to survive.Conscious Youth Media Crew
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=b1eb02280b981f5c7e14a1ea8ddd41d3
(This feature is part of a four part multimedia series, "Got Shot," documenting the effect gun violence is having on Bay Area teenagers. Check out the rest of the series here: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=107e77e24743888ba9abaff5e32edca6) - Anti-Arab Racism, Islam, and the Left
Anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism is an indispensable part of the so-called "war on terror" or "the long war," as it is now referred to, and US plans to dominate the Middle East. By dehumanizing those that the US is waging war against, this racism makes their death and the destruction of their countries more palatable to the US public and quells domestic resistance to the war. Today it helps numb people to the deaths of dozens of Iraqis per day and the mass murder of Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel.Rami El-Amine | Monthly Review
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/elamine030906.html - Surveillance Society
The Mass-Observation movement and the meaning of everyday life.Caleb Crain | The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/060911crat_atlarge - No Blood for Coal
Last week the Bangladesh government announced cancellation of the vastly controversial Phulbari open-pit coal project, owned by UK-listed Asia Energy plc. According to the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Natural Resources and Ports, this marks a resounding victory for those who demonstrated against the project on Saturday August 26th, only to be met by the bloody firepower of the state's paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles force. The official death toll has risen to six, with at at least fifty wounded.Mines and Communities
http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Action/press1203.htm - VIDEO | Block the Vote
Across the nation, states have enacted new laws supposedly designed to prevent voter fraud and avoid election-day debacles. But qualified voters may also be left out in the cold, especially minorities, the poor, the elderly and the disabled. - AUDIO | Labor of Love
For decades now, from Brazil to India, from Canada to Thailand, across the planet women, men and transgender workers have been organizing for recognition of their provision of sexual services as labor. The sex workers rights movement is contributing to other social justice struggles like stopping HIV and police brutality - and defending reproductive and labor rights.Darby Hickey | Free Speech Radio News
http://www.fsrn.org/news/20060904_news.html - How the Amazon's Indigenous People are Holding Back the 'Arc of Destruction'
Across the so-called "arc of destruction," the logging, ranching and farming operations that are deforesting the Amazon basin, it is indigenous groups fighting for their own lives who offer the best resistance.Daniel Howden | The Independent (via Truthout and Mostly Water)
http://mostlywater.org/node/9885
- Media Picks Contributing Editors: Adam Barker, Justin Park
- Media Picks compiled and edited by Erin
Wiegand and Brian Awehali
Posted by erin at September 13, 2006 10:26 AM