Against Discouragement

[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights activities. This year, he was invited back to give the commencement address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.]

I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after forty-two years. I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.

But this is your day -- the students graduating today. It's a happy day for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.

Mr. Bill Moss's Light Shines Brightly!



With Saddened Hearts, We mourn the Loss of a Christian..A Giant..A Royal Knight..A Prince..A Gentleman..A Scholar..and Warrior...Mr Bill Moss..passed away today, Tuesday, August 2, 2005. He was a Columbus School Board Member for 20 years plus a host of Achievements.

I'm sure He's standing side by side with Malcolm X, Dr Martin Luther King, Johnnie Cochran, Ossie Davis and many other Outstanding Black Men who have Stood Up with Integrity..Showed Up..and Spoke Out with Truthfulness. His Light will Always Shine Brightly...and His Family, The Children, The Parents, and The Community will Surely Miss Him.

- Jamia Shepherd

Funeral home showing and funeral information will be available at: http://www.billmoss.org

Hopping off ears

BANGKOK, Thailand -- After a dozen horrific beheadings in the Muslim-majority south, leaflets have appeared reportedly threatening to chop off the ears of any Muslim who works on weekends.

Islamist separatists are fighting to restore the south's long-lost independence from Buddhist-majority Thailand. More than 800 people have died since January 2004 amid bombings, assassinations, arson and other assaults.

In rebel-torn Yala province, along the border with Malaysia, intelligence officials were investigating leaflets "urging local residents to stop working on Saturdays and Sundays, or they would have their ears cut off," the Bangkok Post reported on Friday (Aug. 12).

Muslim fundamentalists in the south earlier demanded no one work on Fridays -- Islam's traditional weekly holy day.

For example, southern Honda motorcycle dealer Vithoon Khupanthawee said an anonymous person telephoned him and asked that he stop working on Fridays and close his showrooms.

Worried, he complied.

Peter Jennings – excuse maker for war and empire 

From what I have read in the last few days, Peter Jennings was a real saint.  He tried to help others, and he even challenged Bush on the war, it is said, even if in indirect ways.  Well, I am glad Peter Jennings tried to help others, and sometimes worked in soup kitchens and so forth.  That speaks well of him. 

But hold on for a minute.  I work installing air conditioners in Ambulances.  If I did my job as poorly as Jennings, I wouldn’t last one day.  It was Jennings job, supposedly, to report the news truthfully, and be objective.  That is what a “Journalist” is supposed to do in a “free” society.  Did Jennings?  

Open Letter to Cindy Sheehan, Crawford, Texas

August 10, 2005?

?Dear Ms. Sheehan,

?From your grief over the loss of your son, Casey, in Iraq has come the courage to spotlight nationally the cowardly character trait of a President who refuses to meet with anyone or any group critical of his illegal, fabricated, deceptive war and occupation of that ravaged country. As a messianic militarist, Mr. Bush turned aside his own father's major advisers who warned him of the terroristic, political, and diplomatic perils to the United States from an invasion of Iraq. He refused to listen.?

Rage against the killing of the light

Mid-August 2005 may be remembered as a moment in U.S. history when the president could no longer get away with the media trick of solemnly patting death on its head.

Unreality is a hallmark of media coverage for war. Yet -- most of all -- war is about death and suffering. War makers thrive on abstractions. Their media successes depend on evasion.

President Bush has tried to keep the loved ones of America’s war dead at middle distance, bathed in soft fuzzy light: close enough to exploit for media purposes, distant enough to insulate the commander in chief’s persona from the intrusion of wartime mourning in America.

What’s going on this week, outside the perimeter of the ranch-style White House in Crawford, is some reclamation of reality in public life. Cindy Sheehan has disrupted the media-scripted shadow play of falsity. And some other relatives of the ultimately sacrificed have been en route to the vigil in the dry hot Texas ditches now being subjected to enormous media attention a few miles from the vacationing president’s accommodations.

At this point, Bush’s spinners are desperate to divert the media

The "stricken" president: when down is up

If you accept the judgment of the polls this summer, George Bush is a stricken president. Leave aside his now-permanent sub-50 percent status in popular approval. Take his calling card, conduct of the "war on terror." His status on the approval charts now shows him wallowing without mast or rudder in the mid-30s. Honesty? Here Bush is bidding to join Nixon in the sub-basement of popular esteem, somewhere around the 40 percent mark.

But hold! The measure of a stricken president is surely an inability to push through the legislation he desires. Remember Bill Clinton. By midsummer in his maiden year of White House occupancy he was truly stricken. He had to send a mayday call for lifeboats, which duly arrived under the captaincy of Republican Dave Gergen, with Dickie Morris soon to follow. By July 1993, as the receptacle of liberal hopes, the Clinton presidency was over.

Look now at Bush. Stricken he may be in the popular polls, but his political agenda flourishes.

Not So "Intelligent"

You've got to hand it to President Bush. Just when you'd think our ideologically-divided country couldn't possibly be further polarized, the president this week weighed in with his opinion on teaching American schoolchildren the alternative to evolution referred to with a straight face as "intelligent design" by its Christian fundamentalist proponents.

While conceding that curriculum decisions should be made by local school districts and not the federal government, Bush told Texas newspaper reporters in a group interview at the White House on Monday that he believes that "intelligent design" should be taught alongside evolution in American schools as competing theories.

"Both sides ought to be properly taught...so people can understand what the debate is about," he said. "Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes."

George Bush Knows Why They Hate Us

Why do they hate us? President George Bush posed this question to the American public shortly after 9/11. It is a strong affirmation of the power of propaganda that some Americans still pose this as a serious question, and are legitimately dumb-founded that such antipathy exists toward the United States. Our government, media and schools start burnishing the false notion of American moral superiority into our brains at a very young age. However, beneath the thin veneer of their white-washed accounts of history and current events, abundant sources of information reveal the true malevolence of the moneyed elite who rule America. There is a great body of evidence which obliterates the inane notion that the United States is a benevolent world leader. Despite the ready availability of contrary evidence, many Americans remain blind to the truth about our despised nation, and choose to believe the fairy tale version of “truth, justice and the American Way”. The sad reality is that America is an imperialistic, avaricious war machine ruled by the wealthy. Yes, much of the world despises this nation.

Halliburton Sold Iranian Oil Company Key Nuclear Reactor Components, Sources Say

Scandal-plagued Halliburton -- the oil services company once headed by Vice President Cheney -- sold an Iranian oil development company key components for a nuclear reactor, say Halliburton sources with intimate knowledge into both companies’ business dealings.

Halliburton was secretly working at the time with one of Iran’s top nuclear program officials on natural gas related projects and sold the components in April to the official's oil development company, the sources said.

Just last week, a National Security Council report said Iran was a decade away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. That time frame could arguably have been significantly longer if Halliburton, whose miltary unit just reported a 284 percent increase in its second quarter profits due to its Iraq reconstruction contracts, was not actively providing the Iranian government with the means to build a nuclear weapon.

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