I would engage the world as my ally
I would engage the world
Against jealous fear and bitter ambition
That only aspires to the done and the dead
I went down to the sea
I don't care if you don't believe me
It spoke to me about my life
It spoke with the voice of reason
It told me to risk it all with the chance of nothing returned
Isn't that the task of love?
Isn't that the challenge of love today?
I went down to the sea
I don't care if you don't believe me
It spoke to me about my life
It spoke with the voice of reason
It told me to risk it all with the chance of nothing returned
Why do we make it so hard?
Why live our lives in distance?
Why do we make it so hard?
I thought life should be a chance to defeat statistics
I thought life should be a chance
And if sometimes I dont pursue it
The sea speaks my better half...

http://arts.columbia.edu/panel-discussion-udi-aloni-alain-badiou-and-slavoj-i-ek

Columbia University School of the Arts

PANEL DISCUSSION WITH

UDI ALONI, ALAIN BADIOU,

AND SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

DATE: October 12, 2011 at 7:00 pm

LOCATION: Miller Theatre: 2960 Broadway at 116th Street

What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters by Udi Aloni (Columbia University Press, 2011)

Panel Discussion with the author Udi Aloni, moderated by Film Program Professor James Schamus, with contributors Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek and Associate Professor, Columbia Journalism School Alisa Solomon. Followed by book signing with author and contributors.

Miller Theatre: 2960 Broadway at 116th Street
First come, first served.

Fukushima Desolation

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-26/fukushima-desolation-worst-since-nagasaki-as-population-flees.html

Fukushima Desolation Worst Since Nagasaki as Residents Flee

By Yuriy Humber, Yuji Okada and Stuart Biggs - Sep 27, 2011

Beyond the police roadblocks that mark the no-go zone around Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, six-foot tall weeds invade rice paddies and vines gone wild strangle road signs along empty streets.

Takako Harada, 80, returned to an evacuated area of Iitate village to retrieve her car. Beside her house is an empty cattle pen, the 100 cows slaughtered on government order after radiation from the March 11 atomic disaster saturated the area, forcing 160,000 people to move away and leaving some places uninhabitable for two decades or more.

“Older folks want to return, but the young worry about radiation,” said Harada, whose family ran the farm for 40 years. “I want to farm, but will we be able to sell anything?”

What’s emerging in Japan six months since the nuclear meltdown at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. plant is a radioactive zone bigger than that left by the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While nature reclaims the 20 kilometer (12 mile) no-go zone, Fukushima’s $3.2 billion-a-year farm industry is being devastated and tourists that hiked the prefecture’s mountains and surfed off its beaches have all but vanished.

The March earthquake and tsunami that caused the nuclear crisis and left almost 20,000 people dead or missing may cost 17 trillion yen ($223 billion), hindering recovery of the world’s third-largest economy from two decades of stagnation.

Compensation Costs

A government panel investigating Tokyo Electric’s finances estimated the cost of compensation to people affected by the nuclear disaster will exceed 4 trillion yen, Kyodo News reported today, without saying how it got the information. The stock fell 6.2 percent to 243 yen, the lowest since June 13.

The bulk of radioactive contamination cuts a 5 kilometer to 10 kilometer-wide swath of land running as far as 30 kilometers northwest of the nuclear plant, surveys of radiation hotspots by Japan’s science ministry show. The government extended evacuations beyond the 20-kilometer zone in April to cover this corridor, which includes parts of Iitate village.

No formal evacuation zone was set up in Hiroshima after an atomic bomb was dropped on the city on Aug. 6, 1945, though as the city rebuilt relatively few people lived within 1 kilometer of the blast epicenter, according to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Museum. Food shortages forced a partial evacuation of the city in the summer of 1946.

Chernobyl Explosion

On April 26, 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl reactor hurled 180 metric tons of nuclear fuel into the atmosphere, creating the world’s first exclusion zone of 30 kilometers around a nuclear plant. A quarter of a century later, the zone is still classed as uninhabitable. About 300 residents have returned despite government restrictions.

[....]

http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution/share?utm_source=lsplayer&utm_medium=ui-share&utm_campaign=globalrevolution&utm_content=globalrevolution

Once again, Žižek said it first

In his remarks during the FRONTLINE CLUB SPECIAL (July 2, 2011 4:00 PM), Žižek suggested that Bradley Manning should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The podcast is available at:

http://www.frontlineclub.com/events/2011/07/announcing-frontline-club-exclusive-julian-assange-in-conversation-with-slavoj-zizek.html

Also see the article by D.J. Pangburn at:

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/145977/bradley-manning-and-julian-assange-both-nominated-for-nobel-peace-prize/#1

Here are some brief excerpts from the article:

The Nobel Peace Prize nominees for 2011 recognize a number of activists, among them Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Wael Ghonim, Tunisian blogger Lina Ben Mhenni, and Egyptian Israa Abdel Fattah together with the April 6 Youth Movement.

[....]

Manning allegedly leaked diplomatic cables and video (of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack) to WikiLeaks. Manning had access to SIPRNet and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System from his workstation in Iraq. His reason for leaking the documents? Manning wrote to former hacker Adrian Lamo, “I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

[....]

If it had not been for WikiLeaks publishing the leaked diplomatic cables, the Arab Spring might not have been possible. The leaks were the catalyst, as Amnesty International stated, supplying the momentum in Tunisia and Egypt, for example. Even Retired U.S. Army Reserve Colonel Ann Wright, in a recent Stars & Stripes editorial, has called Wikileaks “a critically important tool for those who seek to uphold basic human-rights standards and the professional conduct of U.S. military forces.”

[....]