Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Spies? Russian spies in the US? Aren’t spies relics of the Cold war? Are there actually people out there trying to find information you could easily find on the internet? Apparently not. The US arrested 10 people yesterday who are accused of being spies.

Now, two of those spies lived together as a happy couple for years, doing the stuff spies do: normalising. Being as normal as possible. Being as American as possible. Their names? Richard and Cynthia Murphy.

Richard and Cynthia Murphy. That sounds almost like my neighbours. Will they still fit into the court seats after Americanizing for years? And as taking a whole range of psychiatric drugs is considered ‘normal’ nowadays we can safely assume they have been swallowing pills like crazy, just to appear normal. They must have been cheating on each other too, just to prevent standing out from the crowd.

Maybe they are not spies but the real Americans, while all the other ones are the spies. Are they on facebook? Hell yes! You cant normalise without having a facebook profile. Let’s see. Here’s Richard Murphy:

Richard Murphy

He’s kind of handsome, so Cynthia should better watch out. He looks like a young sturdy de Niro.
We also read that Richard Murphy has been renovating homes in the exclusive neighborhoods of Los Angeles for years.

Now where’s Cynthia? Well, here:

Cynthia Murphy

Hmmm. Who is the Cynthia? The left one seems rather ‘Americanized’. Or the right one, who is pretending to have studied and pretends to have an American mom?

This is definitely book material. The long romance between the girl who pretends to have an all american mom and the guy who pretends to be renovating homes in the rich areas of Los Angeles. As if we all dont know people do not renovate their homes there, they simply throw it away and buy a new one. We dont buy it, Russian Richard!

See what I mean? Facebook is the perfect tool for would-be-spies and cheap romantic novel writers.

Tashi Dhondup is a Tibetan poet and musician that has been sentenced to 10 years of hard labour by the Chinese government. His crime? Writing songs. Tashi wrote popular songs against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. In protofascist states such is considered a crime.

He is by no means the only tibetan writer or artist that has got arrested recently. Reports indicate that the last three months the chinese government has arrested more than 50 writers, poets and musicians. People who were arrested in the middle of the night and taken away, because they wrote poems, songs or made artworks the autorities disapprove of.

China has become the dark underbelly of our capitalist system. They produce almost anything we use in the western world. That makes us responsible for its policies, in a sense, because we have at many levels been economically and politically merged with their system. Slavoj Zizek once said that China proves Capitalism can very well function without democracy and that this is the biggest danger that lies ahead of us. He may very well be right: except that I believe this is already kind of ‘old news’, in the sense that most democracies in the west have become like show trials. The ‘double standards’ people complain about are actually preconditions without which the system wouldnt work.

What can we do to free Tashi Dhondup? I am afraid not a whole lot. We could send mails to the Chinese Embassy or just spread this story around. I have great symphaty for the Tibetan people, who have been the most spirited and warm people I have ever met in my travels. So yes, I am amongst those that keeps saying ‘Free Tibet Now’.

Join Free Tibet

A primeur on Loewak: we managed to get a preview of the new BP logo.
It happens to be copyright free, so feel free to post it on your own site.
It’s a funny way of protesting one of the most incompetent disasters ever.
The disaster named ‘Tony’.

A construction worker from California has been caught in the forest of Pakistan with a sword, a gun and nightvision equipment, on his alleged seventh hunt for Osama Bin Laden. He was planning to decapitate Bin Laden once he’d manage to find him.

A newsitem that makes us laugh, perhaps. This sort of local folklore always does well in the media. But think about it: if the same guy would have been captured in the forests outside of washington on a hunt for George Bush our media would have obsessed for weeks how it was possible that this ‘terrorist’ entered the country. Airports would have been shut down, security would have been on debates for weeks.

Gary Brooks Faulkner was caught wearing several christian religious regalia in a foreign muslim country. How would you feel if a pakistani was caught in the forest of Washington, hunting for someone the Pakistani governement had declared a criminal, covered in religious koran texts? Right.

As long as we apply these double standards to our media coverage there simply isnt anything ethical about our approach of the world or the news.

Its exactly as I have predicted for about 6 months: the dutch liberal party (VVD) pulls the plug out of the option of forming a coalition government with Geert Wilders 24 hours before the actual election. The argument presented is that Geert Wilders movement has no ‘presence in the Upper House (Eerste Kamer)’ and as such it would be impossible for the VVD to push the reforms it wants.

However, that fact, that Wilders Party wasn’t present in de Upper House (Eerste Kamer) was a known fact during the entire elections. Why didn’t the VVD make this clear before? Why did they wait until 24 hours before the election before they made it clear they had no intention of forming a government with Geert Wilders?

The answer is obvious: this is very clever political spindoctoring from the side of the neoliberals. It makes you wonder if it hasn’t been the plan all along: launch a rightwing party from within your ranks, make it behave as radical as possible thus drawing a wide spectrum of votes, and, right in front of the election, pull the plug out causing that:

1. The voters understand they will vote on a useless party
2. Meanwhile you have adopted your own party program in such fashion that it resembles the plans of Wilders to such extent that they can really only come to you as an alternative.

The Netherlands have about 150000 governemt informants and spindoctors and about 15000 journalists. Can you imagine what its like to live in a country where every journalist has 10 spindoctors assigned to himself? That’s the reality of the political system we have created here.

According to Turkish News sources that cite acting Mayor Michel Bezuijen of the Haarlemmermeer municipality, the turkish airliner that just crashed in Amsterdam crashed because it ran out of fuel.

9 people died and about 50 were seriously injured. Ran out of fuel? On a routine trip from Istanbul to Amsterdam? If this is true it proves that the Airline industry are taking dangerous measures just to survive the current economic conditions: just try to fly with less gas, mr pilot.

Shouldnt there be some sort of control on planes that they have enough fuel for the journey before they leave? It’s a strange story, and it effects me because I often fly with Turkish Airlines.