Chomsky speaks.....in hallowed halls

It is perhaps fitting that the person regarded as the world's #1 intellectual, Noam Chomsky, spoke the other day at the Riverside Church in New York - the same venue and pulpit occupied by such luminaries as Martin Luther King, the Dalai Llama, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela.

His talk was entitled "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours". Chomsky examined U.S. political policies over the past few decades and encouraged the audience to challenge neoliberalism, military intervention and capitalism.

The Indypendent, of New York, reports:

"The crowd rose as Chomsky walked to the podium. The 80-year-old MIT professor explained the title of the lecture by contrasting the so-called crises of the first world countries with more pressing humanitarian concerns amongst impoverished peoples.

“Bailing out banks is not utmost in the minds of the people now facing starvation, not forgetting the tens of millions enduring hunger in the richest country in the world,” he said."

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Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives? In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t

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#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas stopped him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed behind his back into their patrol car, where they say he shot himself in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story, says in an interview that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?

Mahler's Prodigal Son

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