Re: HERO staring Jet LI - The Hero In U - A Review from the gutter

"Hero"

Staring Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Zhang and Tony Leung. Directed by Vimou Zhang.

 

Comment

Well, the wife and I sat down earlier today to view our rental copy of
"Hero." For reasons no longer remembered, we did not view it several months ago when it made its theater run, nor sought out bootleg copies or copies available on the Internet. 

Both of us enjoy Jet Li . . . "my moves are guided by heaven." We enjoy Jet Li for the same reason that hundreds of millions of people enjoy his moves: he shows what is possible with will and determination and the attributes of inner strength.

 

Jet Li do not stop at McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken as a way of life and portrays a man that lives a principled and simple life. Here is a persona that is ideologically opposed to privilege and gluttony because it is injurious to the human constitution.

 

Now . . . we enjoy actions movies as they are called, with my wife having a peculiar fondness for Steven Seagal, who can never seems to detach himself from the intelligence agencies of our imperialists, although for a big man Seagal got some moves. Although he runs like a girl . . . ya'll notice that?

"Hero" was available nationwide today and using our Block Buster monthly pass, we decided to get an early copy along with "Spiderman 2" and something called "Earthquake in New York."

We expected an action movie from "Hero" and got much more. "Hero" is one of the best political movies I have seen this year. "Hero" is the story of
insurrection based on toppling the big man by working oneself through the various party organizations - or rather social structures, to gain entrance and personal proximity to Stalin, or rather the Emperor, for purposes of slaying him.

The big man is to be slain because of his pragmatic political program aimed
at uniting provinces into a new political structure called "our country" - but
at last, imperial consolidation always entails the dismantling, crushing and transformation of all the economic and social structures of the lesser people.  This sets the individual into hostile collision with the Emperor.

"Hero" has action on a historic scale personified in the individual.

How can such an intensely political movie be talked about without talking about it?

"Only he who is willing to suffer the death of a thousand cuts, dare unseat the Emperor" is brought to life in a most vivid manner, only our Hero has suffered the thousand cuts inflicted on his people. 

Having gained entrain to the Great Palace, the Hero must describe to the
Emperor - the Big Man, his exploits that lead him to the inner chamber.  Both agree that the inner chambers are heavily guarded to prevent assassination attempts and assassination can only take play on the basis of one gaining entrance to the inner chambers of the party or rather political center of the Emperor.

 

"Why are you here?"

The Hero - Jet Li, must explain to the Emperor his route to power and what powers his personal striving and/or path that allowed him to penetrate the inner chamber.  Here begins the story, which the Emperor listen to closely and then disputes and then . . . then . . . unravels what actually happened based on the Hero story and entrance into the inner chamber.

 

The Emperor is not "Joe Willie Knucklehead" that got lucky at the Tuesday poker game . . . but a leader of the multitude.

 

One version of the Hero's story gives way to another and then another and the movie feels like an old murder mystery or a simple but crafty "whodunit."

 

Now I am thinking that this reminds me of the famous Japanese director who made a movie about seven people that see the same thing seven different ways, but then this movie is not really about this Japanese director's movie . . . but deeper, because the layers start being unfolded and one story gives away to the same story that becomes different because political and sectarian interest makes everyone tell the story different.

 

You know how you are going to Wal-Mart for the eighth time in a week and stop and get a beer on the way home and when the wife ask "why did it take you so long," you answer because traffic was heavy and I had to stop at all the lights? This is not a lie because traffic was heavy and you stooped at the light on the street before the local tavern. After you drank the beer and left the tavern, the same traffic light caught you again.

I was like . . . "damn, its a lot of politics in this movie."

"Hero" got more moves than Usher and more surprise turn of events than Texas Hold Em and the World Poker Tournament. I could not wait until Jet Li got to "the river" - fifth street. That last card can be a killer.

At the end of the movie the wife says, "That was to political and I thought
it would be more action, a little more sex and bravado."

I'm thinking to myself, "'Hero' can easily do 50-100 million copies in
China."

"Hero" is the journey of the individual caught up in a historical process of
consolidation of states and peoples only to discover not the "Big Picture" -
but the meaning of the picture that makes it big in the first place.

 

It's all propaganda. It depends on who you enjoy preaching to you.

Anyone interested in understanding the inner party conflict in the Soviet
Union needs to see this one because everything is in here. The interactivity between art, literature, history as culture and style becomes the framework for the individual's individuality, motives, personal growth and behavior.

"Hero's" subtlety is verbalized so that the audience can grasp the subtlety of being verbal. The colors are there to be scene and it is Red but everyone eye see Red different.

Now, I wanted to see the movie after seeing a preview of 30,000 front line soldiers shooting arrows all at one time. I thought to myself, "I would hate to be on the receiving end of that shit."

 

Then I tend towards the mundane, standardization and commonality of purpose and goal, with perhaps an unhealthy tendency to vote in favor of knocking the nail sticking up, back into place.

This is very unhealthy for the nail sticking up.

Jet Li is the nail that sticks up because he was located on a plank of history that was uprooted by events. One can inadvertently become the nail sticking up when ones plank is lifted up against ones will.

"Hero" asks the question of all questions: "Who dare unseat the Emperor?"

 

"Can you answer the call of history and accept the fate of the individual?"

The journey is the lesson.

 

Wait a minute . . . the lesson is the journey.

 

Anyhow . . . "Hero takes you there."

Melvin P.

Re: The US Casualty Rate in Iraq: 9%

Jim wrote:

>how does this compare to other US wars, with the casualty rate
>calculated in a similar way?

Statistical Summary: America's Major Wars
<http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm>
--
Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
* Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/>
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>

Phila. welfare group, homeless families occupy army recruiting center

job announcement

http://marymount.mmm.edu/learn/administrative/hr/ftfacultypositions.html

SOCIAL SCIENCES
Dr. Kent Worcester, Chair
Assistant Professor
International Studies
A social scientist with specialty in Latin American or African studies.
Candidates must have field experience and teaching expertise in Latin
America or sub-Saharan Africa. Candidates should also demonstrate
substantive interest in one or more of the following areas: human
rights, security, economic geography, migration, refugees, criminal
justice, urban issues, foreign policy. A Ph.D. in one of the following
disciplines: Economics, Geography, History, Political Science, or
Sociology, is required. Complete applications must be received by
December 15, 2004.

Teacher Education: Math, Science and Technology
Assistant Professor
Candidates must have training and teaching experience in mathematics
with a liberal arts major or concentration in mathematics. Experience
and some training in science and technology are also required. Courses
in math, science and technology, other childhood education courses, will
be part of the candidate's course load. Certification in Childhood
Education is required. Ph.D. or Ed.D. in Teacher Ed preferred, ABD
considered. Candidates must demonstrate teaching excellence. Review of
complete applications will begin December 15, 2004, and continue until
position is filled.

<http://www.uml.edu/Dept/RESD>

--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901

The economics of coal mining disasters in China

LA Times, December 1, 2004 	
THE WORLD
China Mine Explosion Death Toll Rises to 166
By Mark Magnier, Times Staff Writer

MIAOWANZHEN, China — Zhao Yanmei, 24, sobbed uncontrollably. Gasping for 
air, the baby-faced mother tried to make sense of it all: Why did it 
have to be her husband? Why was he on the night shift again? Why was she 
faced with raising their 3-year-old son without a father?

On Sunday, a gas explosion swept through Chenjiashan mine here in 
Shaanxi province, about 450 miles southwest of Beijing. This morning, 
the official New China News Agency confirmed that 103 miners who were 
trapped as deep as five miles underground were dead, including Zhao's 
32-year-old husband, Ding Aituan.

With 63 confirmed dead earlier, the toll of 166 made this China's worst 
mining disaster in four years.

Since the blast, Zhao regularly had gone to the area in front of the 
state-owned mine complex where hundreds of people gathered in clusters 
to talk quietly, comfort one another and wait for word about missing 
relatives.

She kept hope as long as she could. But she was also realistic. 
Ambulances that raced by Sunday and Monday sat idly by the dusty 
roadside Tuesday. China's record on rescuing trapped miners didn't leave 
much room for optimism.

The country's economy is booming. But much of that prosperity is being 
built on the backs of millions like Ding. Behind the seemingly endless 
supply of consumer goods arriving on Western shelves at two-for-one 
prices are people struggling on survival wages under bleak conditions to 
produce the cheap energy Chinese factories need.

China, which produces 35% of the world's coal, accounts for 80% of coal 
mining fatalities, according to government figures — 4,153 deaths were 
reported in the first nine months of 2004. Experts say corruption, poor 
oversight and the fact that it's often cheaper to pay off a death claim 
than invest in safety equipment contribute to the country's dubious record.

"China needs to do a better job reflecting the real value of life," said 
Hu Xingdou, economics professor with Beijing Science and Technology 
University.

full: 
<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mine1dec01,0,1319052.story?coll=la-home-headlines>

--

-- 

The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

Nostalgia for Ceausescu

Dispatches From Romania
        	
From: Sarah E. Richards
Subject: The Dictator's Groupie
Monday, Nov. 29, 2004, at 3:45 AM PT

BUCHAREST—Once a month, at 6:30 in the morning, Angela Boteza arrives at 
the Ghencea Civil Cemetery in western Bucharest. She walks down a gravel 
path to a nondescript grave, where she clears away dead leaves and 
candle wax and leaves yellow gladiolas in a wine bottle with a 
handwritten note: "May God forgive your evil deeds. Rest in peace. May 
the earth not be heavy upon your soul." A modest granite cross bearing a 
red star reveals the grave's occupant: Nicolae Ceausescu, 1918-1989. She 
then she goes to the other side of the cemetery to do the same at the 
graves of his wife Elena and son Nicu.

(clip)

After a quick tour of her three-room apartment, Boteza ushered us to the 
living room. She perched at the edge of her sofa, lit up a cigarette, 
and began: Ceausescu made a good life for Romanians, but he was judged 
rashly by people who wanted power and denied his rightful honor of a 
proper burial in a military cemetery. So, she has appointed herself the 
keeper of his legacy. She monitors the family's graves and throws out 
items she feels are insulting. Recently, she's tossed a dirty flag, a 
frayed Bible, and papier mache flowers.

Life was better under communism, she continued, parroting the refrain: 
"There was nothing to buy, but we had money. Now, there's everything to 
buy but no money." At age 52, Boteza is an unemployed accountant who 
gets a temporary pension of about $50 a month, through April 2005. Her 
son, who, she boasts, is a military officer, helps her out some. She 
owns her own apartment, which she bought shortly after the revolution. 
"I don't eat so much. I have a few cigarettes and coffee, but it's OK," 
she said, staring at me intently with big somber eyes. She was confident 
that she would find another job but admitted that she's having sleep 
problems.

During the 10th anniversary of the fall of communism five years ago, 
much was made of Romania's lack of celebration. Polls showed that four 
out of five Romanians were unhappy with the way they lived, and 61 
percent said they would be better off under Ceausescu. Such amnesiac 
musings ignored the nightmares of the Stalinist dictator: the rations, 
the torture of anyone who opposed the regime, the deadly winters when 
the energy sector collapsed, the razing of villages and historical 
Bucharest to make way for his projects, including the so-called House of 
the People. His megalomaniacal monument, which is the second-largest 
building in the world after the Pentagon, was built while the people 
suffered austerity measures to pay off a $10 billion foreign debt at one 
point.

Now the nostalgia is tempered. "Yes, it was better under communism. You 
had a job, a house, a car," said 20-year-old university student George 
Pascaru. "But you could not have your own thoughts."

But such talk makes few feel better about the giant elephant making its 
way east. Romania, a country of 23 million, is lumbering toward entry 
into the European Union in 2007. Despite robust economic growth and low 
inflation, corruption is rampant, and the average Romanian makes 
slightly more than $2,100 a year, or just 30 percent of the EU average 
in purchasing power.

The shiny Bucharest Mall, which opened five years ago and includes a 
Marks & Spencer department store, a Ruby Tuesday restaurant, and a 
10-screen movie theater, is eerily empty. New cars occasionally zip down 
the highways, but diesel-spewing Dacias still dominate. For every new 
building, there are miles of crumbling, Soviet-era apartment blocks. Add 
some bitter, chain-smoking locals; street children; and packs of mangy 
stray dogs that seem to roam every city, and you get the feeling the 
country isn't going anywhere soon.

The mention of the European Union is met with cynical laughs. People 
tell how Hungarians have been forced to raid Romanian grocery stores 
because they were priced out of their own when their country joined the 
union this spring. There are rumors that EU regulations will force 
polluting old cars off the road, and drivers won't be able to buy new 
ones. And how will people buy houses?

"[President Ion] Iliescu said he will make Romania a rich country, but I 
just don't see it happening," Boteza said, lighting another cigarette.

full: http://slate.msn.com/id/2109971/entry/2109975/

--

-- 

The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

Amazon rainforest civilization

Chronicle of Higher Education, December 3, 2004
	
Earth Movers
Archaeologists say Brazil's rain forest, once thought to be inhospitable 
to humans, fostered huge ancient civilizations. The proof is in the dirt.
By MARION LLOYD

Iranduba, Brazil

High along bluffs overlooking the confluence of the mighty Negro and 
Solimões Rivers here, supersize eggplants, papayas, and cassava spring 
from the ground.

Their exuberance defies a long-held belief about the Amazon. For much of 
the last half century, archaeologists viewed the South American rain 
forest as a "counterfeit paradise," a region whose inhospitable 
environment precluded the development of complex societies. But new 
research suggests that prehistoric man found ways to overcome the 
jungle's natural limitations -- and to thrive in this environment in 
large numbers.

The secret, says James B. Petersen, an archaeologist at the University 
of Vermont who has spent the past decade working in the Brazilian 
Amazon, is found in the ground beneath his feet. It is a highly fertile 
soil called terra preta do indio, which is Portuguese for "Indian black 
earth." By some estimates, this specially modified soil covers as much 
as 10 percent of Amazonia, the immense jungle region that straddles the 
Amazon River. And much of that area is packed with potsherds and other 
signs of human habitation.

"This was one of the last archaeological frontiers on the planet. It's 
as if we know nothing about it," says Mr. Petersen, as he analyzes the 
discovery of the day, a series of circular carbon deposits that might 
indicate the outline of a prehistoric house.

Scientists are now working to determine whether terra preta, which 
contains high levels of organic matter and carbon, was deliberately 
created by pre-Columbian civilizations to improve upon the notoriously 
poor rain-forest soil, or whether the modified earth was an accidental 
byproduct of sustained habitation by large groups of people.

Either way, Mr. Petersen believes it likely that pre-Columbian societies 
in the Amazon were not the primitive tribal societies they were once 
thought to be, but highly complex chiefdoms.

"We're providing the proof," he says during a several-week-long dig in 
August near the Brazilian jungle city of Manaus. His team of American 
and Brazilian archaeologists, who call themselves the Central Amazon 
Project, have excavated more than 60 sites rich in terra preta near 
where the Negro and Solimões Rivers merge to form the Amazon River proper.

One of the group's founders, Michael J. Heckenberger of the University 
of Florida, is bolstering the new findings with research on large 
prehistoric earthworks farther east along the upper Xingu River. 
Studying this area, which now is inhabited by the Kuikuru Indians, has 
allowed him to compare data of prehistoric land management with modern 
ethnographic studies.

On some pre-Columbian sites explored by Mr. Petersen and his team, 
several miles of earth are packed with millions of potsherds. The 
archaeologists have also found evidence that they say points to the 
existence of giant plazas, bridges, and roads, complete with curbs, and 
defensive ditches that would have taken armies of workers to construct.

Intriguingly, the earliest evidence of large, sedentary populations 
appears to coincide with the beginnings of terra preta.

"Something happened 2,500 years ago, and we don't know what," says 
Eduardo Góes Neves, a Brazilian archaeologist at the Federal University 
of São Paulo, who is co-director of the Central Amazon Project. He dusts 
off the flanged edge of a bowl from around 400 BC that one of his 
Brazilian graduate students pulled from a layer of terra preta eight 
feet down. The team got lucky when the landowner at Açutuba, the largest 
of their excavation sites, bulldozed a huge pit in one of his fields. 
The "swimming pool," as the team jokingly calls the 15-yard-wide hole, 
is giving them a rare chance to compare levels of terra preta over a 
large area.

The research has implications not only for history, but also for the 
future of the Amazon rain forest. If scientists could discover how the 
Amerindians transformed the soil, farmers could use the technology to 
maximize smaller plots of land, rather than cutting down ever larger 
swaths of jungle. The benefits of what Mr. Petersen calls this "gift 
from the past" are already well known to farmers in the area, who plant 
their crops wherever they find terra preta.

Rich in Controversy

The claims made for terra preta extend far beyond a legacy passed down 
from farmer to farmer. The archaeologists now reject the idea that 
pre-contact Amerindians were -- as one team member says, ironically -- 
"Stone Age primitives frozen at the dawn of time."

"It's made by pre-Columbian Indians and it's still fertile," says Bruno 
Glaser, a soil chemist from the University of Bayreuth, in Germany, who 
was taking samples of terra preta from another site discovered by Mr. 
Petersen's team. "If we knew how to do this, it would be a model for 
agriculture in the whole region."

Ideally what researchers dub "slash and char" agriculture, the 
indigenous technique that returns nutrients to the soil by mixing in 
organic waste and carbon, could replace slash-and-burn, a contemporary 
technique that consumes tens of thousands of acres of rain forest every 
year. Mr. Glaser is part of an international team of scientists studying 
the chemical composition of terra preta in an effort to recreate it.

The research into terra preta fuels a revisionist school of scientists 
who argue that pre-Columbian Amazonia was not a pristine wilderness, but 
rather a heavily managed forest teeming with human beings. They believe 
that advanced societies existed in the Amazon from before the time of 
Christ until a century after the European conquest in the 1500s 
decimated Amerindian populations through exploitation and disease. The 
theory is also supported by the accounts of the first Europeans to 
travel the length of the Amazon in 1542. They reported human settlements 
with tens of thousands of people stretching for many miles along the 
river banks.

But not everyone working in the field of Amazonian research buys the new 
theory.

"The idea that the indigenous population has secrets that we don't know 
about is not supported by anything except wishful thinking and the myth 
of El Dorado," says the archaeologist Betty J. Meggers, who is the main 
defender of the idea that only small, tribal societies ever inhabited 
the Amazon. "This myth just keeps going on and on and on. It's amazing."

Ms. Meggers, director of the Latin American Archaeology Program at the 
Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History, in Washington, has 
spent her life trying to prove that Amazonia is a uniquely untrammeled 
and hostile wilderness. Now 82, Ms. Meggers has been working in the 
field since the late 1940s, when she and her late husband, Clifford 
Evans, began pioneering fieldwork on Marajó Island at the mouth of the 
Amazon. They summarized their findings in their seminal 1954 article, 
"Environmental Limitation on the Development of Culture," which was 
published in American Anthropologist.

Ms. Meggers's 1971 book, Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit 
Paradise (Aldine-Atherton), converted her views into gospel for a 
generation of Amazonian archaeologists. In it, she argued that modern 
Amerindian groups, generally composed of a few hundred people, follow 
ancient practices of infanticide and other population-control measures 
to exist in a hostile environment.

"It had a huge impact," says Susanna B. Hecht, a geographer at the 
University of California at Los Angeles who has spent three decades 
studying traditional farming practices in Amazonia. "Virtually every 
Anthropology I class read that book." Ms. Hecht's most recent research 
is with the Kayapó Indians in the upper Xingu River, the same region 
where Mr. Heckenberger is working. To her surprise, she discovered the 
Indians were creating a version of terra preta by burning excess 
vegetation and weeds and mixing the charcoal into the soil.

"One of the things we found rather unusual was how much burning was 
going on all the time," she says. "It wasn't catastrophic burning. It 
was that the whole landscape was smoldering all the time."

Ms. Hecht says the technique was probably more widespread before Indian 
societies were devastated by the arrival of the Europeans, who 
introduced measles, typhoid, and other diseases to which the Indians had 
no resistance. By some estimates, 95 percent of the Amerindians died 
within the first 130 years of contact. While their numbers were once 
estimated in the millions, there are now roughly 250,000 Amerindians 
living in Brazil.

"I think you could have had very dense populations, and what you had was 
a real holocaust in various forms," she says. However, Ms. Hecht notes, 
little was known about the impact of those epidemics when Ms. Meggers 
was first writing, and her persuasive arguments against large 
civilizations discouraged archaeologists from probing deeper into the 
Amazon. "Everyone said, 'Nobody was there anyway. Why bother?'" says Ms. 
Hecht.

The difficulty and dangers of conducting research in the Amazon also 
played a part. The region was largely impassible until the 1960s, when 
the Brazilian government began encouraging settlement in the jungle's 
interior.

A few researchers did challenge Ms. Meggers's theories early on. The 
most outspoken figure was Donald Lathrup, a University of Illinois 
archaeologist who worked in the Peruvian Amazon in the 1950s. He argued 
that Amazonia could and did support complex societies with advanced 
technology, and that the cradle of those civilizations was very likely 
in the central Amazon, where Mr. Petersen is working.

Another pioneer was William M. Denevan, a geographer emeritus at the 
University of Wisconsin, whose discovery of huge earthworks in lowland 
Bolivia in the early 1960s suggested that pre-Columbian peoples modified 
their environment for large-scale agriculture. In a 1992 article, "The 
Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492," he argued that 
the modern Amazon rain forest was the result of human management over 
millennia, not a virgin wilderness.

"The key issue here can be summed up in two words: environmental 
determinism," he says, referring to the once-popular school of thought, 
favored by Ms. Meggers, that says environment dictates man's ability to 
progress. "We are saying people always have options," he says. "We can 
farm in outer space. And we can farm in the Antarctic. Or we can crop in 
the driest part of the Sahara Desert. It may be very expensive, but 
that's a different issue."

Building a Mystery

Other researchers working in Amazonia go even further. They suggest that 
prehistoric man may have created cities that rivaled those of the Aztecs 
and Maya. Again, they say, the proof is in the dirt.

William I. Woods, a geographer at Southern Illinois University at 
Edwardsville, has been studying terra preta deposits extending over 
100,000 acres around the Brazilian jungle city of Santarém, where the 
Tapajós River meets the Amazon. He believes as many as 500,000 people 
might once have inhabited the area, implying a civilization larger than 
the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, once the largest city in the Americas.

"There is some fussing about the magnitude, from tens of thousands, or 
hundreds of thousands, or millions," he says. "But I don't think there 
are too many scholars who have any problems with chiefdoms existing and 
lots of people being supported for long times in various places in the 
Amazon."

Ms. Meggers has not taken challenges to her life's work lying down. In a 
2001 article in Latin American Antiquity, she accuses the revisionist 
camp of endangering the rain forest by suggesting that large-scale 
farming was feasible in the region. Her view is shared by some 
biologists and environmentalists.

"Adherence to 'the lingering myth of Amazonian empires' not only 
prevents archaeologists from reconstructing the prehistory of Amazonia, 
but makes us accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental 
degradation," she writes.

Mr. Neves, the Brazilian archaeologist, disagrees. "It's not like 
loggers are revving up the chainsaws after reading our articles," he 
says as he walks along a winding dirt road littered with pre-Columbian 
potsherds on his way to the dig site at Açutuba, a jungle-shrouded 
stretch of farmland overlooking the Negro River. "Deforestation through 
ranching isn't how the Amerindian interacted with the landscape," he 
says. "The Amerindians weren't destroying the environment. They were 
enriching it."

The rain forest is not inherently hostile to man, says Mr. Neves. He 
argues that pre-Columbian peoples knew how to use the huge diversity of 
species to their advantage, through a combination of farming, fishing, 
and managed tree harvesting. Cassava, a starchy root that grows well in 
the acidic rain-forest soil, was probably the Amerindians' main food 
source, which the Indians could have supplemented with corn and other 
vegetables grown on terra preta. But they also relied heavily on fish 
and turtles for protein, he says.

Blowing Dust From the Pages

Terra preta proponents also argue that historical accounts support their 
theories. The Rev. Gaspar de Carvajal, a Spanish priest who accompanied 
the first exploratory expedition down the Amazon in 1542, reported 
seeing hundreds of tortoises kept in corrals and "an abundance of meat 
and fish ... that would have fed 1,000 men for a year." The friar also 
recounts an ambush by more than 10,000 Indians at a point in the river 
just west of modern-day Manaus, suggesting that the area was heavily 
populated as recently as the 16th century. He also describes armies of 
Indians who repelled attempts by the Spaniards to come ashore near 
modern-day Santarém.

Ms. Meggers is skeptical. "How could these people, when they're fleeing, 
count 10,000 warriors?" she says. "It's silly." She notes that other 
portions of Father Carvajal's account, in particular his description of 
female Amazon warriors, which gave the river its name, have since been 
dismissed by historians as inventions to impress the Spanish crown.

She also challenges estimates by the Central Amazon Project that between 
5,000 and 10,000 people may have once inhabited Açutuba, possibly the 
largest site under excavation in the Brazilian Amazon. "They have not 
done enough work to establish whether it was a single large settlement 
or a result of intermittent occupation over longer periods of time," she 
says. She also accuses the group of ignoring the results of surveys in 
the region backed by the Smithsonian Institution over several decades.

Mr. Petersen shrugs off the criticism. "We're not here to fight Betty 
Meggers," he says, while taking a break from digging under the broiling 
jungle sun. "We're here to build on her work and refine it." He says 
that Ms. Meggers made a major contribution to the field by highlighting 
the enormous challenges involved in inhabiting the Amazon rain forest, 
even if he argues that later research shows that pre-Columbian peoples 
found ways of overcoming those natural limitations.

His team has several dozen radiocarbon dates from potsherds and carbon 
deposits collected throughout Açutuba, which they say show that the 
entire site was continuously inhabited during two waves from about 360 
BC to as late as 1440 AD. The evidence also supports the existence of 
stratified societies, says Mr. Petersen. He picks up an ornate, white- 
and black-painted potsherd from the terra preta under a field of 
glistening eggplants. "This is probably from about AD 800, and look how 
sophisticated it is. It's like fine dinnerware," he says, comparing the 
sherd with that from a coarser vessel from about the same period, which 
he calls "everyday china." His team has unearthed more than 100,000 
potsherds dating from 500 BC to about AD 1500 at the three-square-mile 
site, including roughly a dozen burial urns.

Digging through earth packed with tons of pottery is slow going. 
Particularly when you only have about eight pairs of hands.

"We've been working here nine years, and we've barely scratched the 
surface," says Mr. Neves, who has raised the bulk of the money from his 
university and the São Paulo state government. He estimates that there 
are at least 100 unexcavated sites within their research area, which 
extends over 40 square miles around the town of Iranduba. Some of the 
sites might be even larger than Açutuba.

Ecological Edge

Unlike the Maya in northern Central America, the inhabitants of the 
Amazon lacked stone for building. So they had to resort to organic and 
man-made materials. As a result there are few permanent markers of 
earlier civilizations, forcing archaeologists to extrapolate from small 
scraps of evidence.

"The only reason that everyone accepts large, socially complex societies 
in Maya land is that they have surviving pyramids and stelae," says Mr. 
Petersen. "If the Maya and others had used mostly organic perishables in 
their architecture, like the Amazon people, then I would bet there would 
be much more mystery and debate about the nature of pre-Columbian 
Amerindians in Central America, too."

At a nearby site, called Hatahara, the team recently excavated 11 human 
skeletons dating to about AD 800 from one nine-yard trench dug into a 
large burial mound. Believing it unlikely that they would have stumbled 
upon the only evidence in the mound, they estimate there may be hundreds 
more bodies buried there, suggesting a population of at least a few 
thousand people.

The skeletons provided the team with other insights into the previous 
inhabitants. "These were not famine-stricken people," Mr. Neves says, 
noting that the skeletons measured about 5-foot-7. In contrast, modern 
indigenous inhabitants often do not grow taller than five feet, a fact 
used by earlier archaeologists to argue that the jungle was unsuited for 
human habitation. "I don't think there were ever severe limitations 
here," says Mr. Neves.

He points at the acres of glistening vegetables that seem to grow 
effortlessly throughout the Açutuba site. Settlers throughout the 
Iranduba area take advantage of the abundant terra preta deposits to 
grow vegetables and fruit for the nearby city of Manaus, supplying much 
of the produce consumed by its 1.4 million people.

"I know terra preta is very good and that it was made by the Indians," 
says Edson Azevedo Santos, a 48-year-old farmer drenched in sweat from 
weeding his zucchini patch. Unlike the acidic soil found in most of the 
rain forest, which can only sustain crops for a three-year period, terra 
preta plots can withstand constant farming for decades, if properly managed.

Even more striking, terra preta may have the capacity to regenerate 
itself, says Mr. Woods, the Southern Illinois geographer. He recently 
tested that possibility by removing a large section of terra preta on a 
plot near Santarem. To his amazement, the soil grew back within three 
years. "I suggested that the soil should be treated as living organism 
and that microorganisms are the secret," he says, adding that more 
research is needed to allow scientists to repeat the process. "This is 
very sophisticated stuff."
--

-- 

The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

Don Imus controversy

(Radio shock-jock Don Imus was ranked as one of the USA's 50 most
influential people a few years ago by Time Magazine. He supported John
Kerry for President, who is a frequent guest on the show.)

Published Tuesday, November 30, 2004 by the Toronto Star
Probe Here Over Aired Arab Slurs
Arafat Mourners Derided on MSNBC
by Antonia Zerbisias

The all-news MSNBC, which recently got the go-ahead for unrestricted
access to Canada's digital dial, may have run afoul of our hate laws
when its Imus In The Morning advocated dropping a bomb on Palestinians
to "kill 'em all."

Both the RCMP and the federal broadcast watchdog are on the case,
investigating complaints from some two dozen Canadians.

They include Paul Jay, best known as the independent producer behind CBC
Newsworld's recently cancelled counterSpin.

"I watched (Imus) and immediately I was outraged," he told me yesterday.

Morning jock Don Imus, whose syndicated shock-talk radio show is
simulcast on MSNBC, was probably just joking when he and his crew made
racist, derogatory remarks during coverage of Yasser Arafat's funeral on
Nov. 12.

But many Americans, and obviously a few Canadians, weren't laughing when
they caught this exchange between Imus, his sports anchor Sid Rosenberg
and their producer Bernard McGuirk over images of the crowds mourning
the death of the Palestinian leader.

IMUS: They're (Palestinians) eating dirt and that fat pig wife (Suha
Arafat) of his is living in Paris.

ROSENBERG: They're all brainwashed, though. That's what it is. And
they're stupid to begin with, but they're brainwashed now. Stinking
animals. They ought to drop the bomb right there, kill 'em all right now.

McGUIRK: You can just imagine standing there.

ROSENBERG: Oh, the stench.

IMUS: Well, the problem is that we have Andrea (Mitchell, NBC foreign
correspondent) there. We don't want anything to happen to her.

ROSENBERG: Oh, she's got to get out. Just warn Andrea, get out, and then
drop the bomb, kill everybody.

McGUIRK: It's like the worst Woodstock.

ROSENBERG: Look at this. Look at these animals. Animals!

"We have commenced an investigation," confirmed RCMP constable Howard
Adams.

full: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1130-28.htm

--

The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

The stakes in the Ukraine

Village Voice, November 30th, 2004 10:45 AM

Mondo Washington
by James Ridgeway
Black Sea Intrigue
Ukraine takes everyone's eyes off Iraq, keeps Russkies off-balance

WASHINGTON, D.C.—While George W. Bush may view the Ukraine election 
crisis as a helpful revival of Cold War animosities, pushing aside the 
eroding situation in Iraq, the underlying situation is hair-raising.

Running beneath the talk of nationalism and Western-style economics, 
there are hard facts strongly suggesting that Russia is not about to 
give up Ukraine, which it had controlled, until the Soviet empire 
collapsed, since the 17th century.

Russian interests include the eastern industrial regions but, perhaps 
most importantly, are focused on the Black Sea Fleet, an armada mostly 
under Russian control that is a key factor in Moscow's future abilities 
to project power into the former Soviet satellite states in Central 
Asia, with their big oil and gas fields.

According to a helpful report on ocnus. net, the Black Sea Fleet's 
existence depends on Ukraine's acquiescence to Russian naval vessels in 
its key ports of Simferopol and Odessa. The fleet is based on Ukraine's 
Crimean peninsula, which Catherine the Great had annexed in 1783. 
Without these bases, Russia would lose its southern ports. And that 
would lead to a major shift in political power.

After the Soviet Union broke up, Russia negotiated a deal with Ukraine 
to berth 250 ships that make up the fleet in Sevastopol. If Ukrainian 
nationalists, revved up by anti-Russian fervor, led by the U.S. and 
Western European countries, tell the Russians to remove the fleet, war 
is a serious possibility. According to one survey, this fleet, in 1995, 
had 48,000 military personnel, 14 subs, 31 surface ships, 43 patrol 
craft, 125 combat aircraft, and 85 helicopters. The Russians also have 
one coastal defense division, with 175 tanks, 450 armored infantry 
fighting vehicles, and 72 artillery pieces. In addition, Russia has 
major construction facilities along the Black Sea and runs research 
stations for all sorts of new ship and aircraft development.

Under terms of the '90s fleet deal, the Ukrainians got a fair number of 
ships, but no real capacity to build a competitive navy.

If the neocons here want to start a war over Ukraine that will spread 
through Central Asia, they've got a ready-made opportunity.

--

-- 

The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

war over MIGs in Venezuela?

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-migs1dec01,1,3826698
.story 

THE WORLD
Venezuela Plan to Buy MIGS Irks U.S.
>From Times Wire Services

December 1, 2004/L.A. TIMES

OTTAWA - The Bush administration on Tuesday expressed displeasure over
Venezuela's reported plans to purchase sophisticated MIG fighter jets
from Russia.

"Let me put it this way: We shoot down MIGs," a senior administration
official said at a White House briefing as President Bush paid an
official visit to Canada. The official, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, did not elaborate, and the White House moved quickly to
downplay the provocative statement.

Sean McCormack, a National Security Council spokesman, said the official
"did not mean that literally."

The official meant to say that the purchase "would be an issue we would
watch closely," McCormack said.

Venezuela is evaluating MIG-29s as possible replacements for U.S.-made
F-16s. President Hugo Chavez said after talks with Russian President
Vladimir V. Putin last week that Venezuela planned to buy large amounts
of arms from Russia, though he did not mention jets.

The U.S. official said the reported purchase should concern Venezuelans
because "millions of dollars are going to be spent ... for ill-defined
purposes."

Jim Devine, e-mail: jdevine@...  
web: http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/