I never saw him in person, only on TV. Maybe one day i will. Now that i’m living out of the country, it’s probably easier…
He’s one of several interesting accordion players. Another one is Sivuca.
There is a lot of great instrumental avant-garde music in Brazil, that doesn’t sell much (or at all). But a lot of cool stuff. Another group i like a lot is Uakti. And electric guitar player Olmir Stocker, to mention a few.
One of the “new age” labels did a great compilation of Brazilian jazz, but i can’t recall right now who it was. I think i have it at home.
The UK went into the war because Blair is demented.
Bush seems to have gone into it to prove his valour to his Daddy, whose nose had been put out of joint by Hussein. And because that is what Presidents do- Go to War ! And because in his post alcoholic haze he has been persuaded that he has to lead a great Crusade by those whose motives may be less honourable.
I have read analyses by psychiatrists who say that Blair has a personality disorder ( I forget the name ) which has eight defining symptoms any four of which establish the existence of the syndrome. He has seven.
But we never know what is true.
Parliament when it debated the matter gave Blair the benefit of the doubt when he said "Trust me - I know things you don’t, and promise that this secret information proves beyond doubt that Saddam Hussein has WMD which are an immediate threat to the UK ".
Of course it was all nonsense.
Since then he has used regime change, however illegal, as an excuse for invasion, though a fortnight before the war he had announced that Hussein could stay where he was if he gave up his WMD.
It doesn’t require hindsight. I wrote in the Times before the war that “The excuse for this outrage is a very thin one.” I have had no reason to change my mind.
As regards the threat from Islamic extremists - I can’t see that it is very clever to make it worse.
It could have been mitigated by implementing the recommendations of the Gore commission for a start, instead of saying that the improvements in airport security could not be afforded.
As I have said before I think that education must be given one way or another to all the benighted Islamic youths who are been led astray by ingnorant and probably malicious Mullas.
The main thing which could be done to correct and defuse the situation would be for the US to recognise the awful plight of the Palastinians and
the nazi like treatment they have received with the connivance of successive US administrations.
Finally, bugger the French!
God, i’m so tired of this war and of feeling dirty because of it.
Some CIA guy name “Mike” - fake name of course - wrote a book “Imperial Hubris” ($18.70 on amazon.com) about why the US is doing this all wrong. It’s the American foreign policies that cause the rest of the world to hate this country. But the only solution is – listen to this – use more force to destroy the enemies, because the policies won’t change anyway. So now you have the CIA doing politics too, and sending agents on book publishing tours. Wonderful.
If only – as Maxwell Smart might have said – this great country would use its power for good and not evil…
There’s a show on local public access cable television, Bel Ahdan, aired by members of the local Islamic community (in English), and I watch it occasionally. One time they spent the whole program discussing the very important question of education in the Islamic world, that it was of prime importance especially in these times, and acknowledged that the idea that education solely in the Qur’an is adequate poses real problems. Much got said, little got solved, but at least they’re talking within the educated circles…
You take kids . . . now the term for those schools escapes me, is the school a mullah, or are the teachers mullahs? . . . in their early teens and it’s real easy to fire them up about, well, anything. Anyone who reads this board and was ever a teenage boy knows what I mean. Teenage girls generally have too much sense for that kind of thing. I digress. I never have, and never will, understand completely my government’s position (which seems to be shared by Bush and Kerry) on Israel and the Palestinians.
As for the French . . . well, bugger the French government. I like the folks, generally.
Perhaps we need to remember that many of these malleable youths are almost totally uneducated, and have been brought up in great privation looking at the wealthy West which may well seem to treat their people with contempt.Certainly not with any respect for such beliefs and customs as they may have.They do see the horrors visited on their fellows the Palestinians with US approval.
It is a common observation that the US forces of occupation in Iraq have treated the native population with contempt, and often brutality.
I well remember seeing an American captain saying casually of a protesting crowd " They threw stones at us so we shot them ".
A bit of respect for different cultures around the world and not an assumption that " if it isn’t like what we are used to in Texas it is bad and suitable for jackboot treatment " would help.
Much as I regret the participation of British troops in the invasion and occupation of Iraq their behaviour towards the locals has been hugely better than that of the still inward looking US troops.
The worst thing about the Iraqi condition now is that the very civilised and well educated middle classes on whom the recovery depends are living in fear of going out of their houses for fear of bandits, rapists and especially kidnappers who were virtually unknown under the previous ( Awful ) regime.
I was only joking about the French. Since I started thinking of them as Cheese and Wine makers I haven’t found them so bad.
Of course Bretons are not French.
Are you kidding? The US wages all its dirty politics via the CIA. Its only when things get too big for the CIA that the military is called in and the American public becomes aware that something is going on “somewhere” outside their borders. No-one has mentioned the Shah of Iran, the CIA-trained Nazi storm troopers in Egypt, or the biggest black-eye of all - Viet Nam (which was initially about US commercial interests in plantations, not Communism at all).
When the US was smarting from 9/11, they picked the most central country in the geographical middle of the hotbed of fanatical Islam - Iraq. Who cares what Hussein was up to at home? Having a military presence right in the centre of all these Arab countries puts a none-too-subtle threat right on the doorstep of several Islamic countries who foment anti-US sentiment. Whether the war in Iraq had been led by the US/English faction or by the UN, the fact is that the US has no intentions of pulling out of the Middle East.
But why pick on the US? They learned everything they know from the established experts in international subterfuge and political blackmail - England. None of this is new. None of it is unheard of. It is far older than the US is.
An interesting item on the Iraqi prisoner stuff - a bunch of US psychiatrists did a study once that showed that these sorts of things always happen in prisons. They happen anywhere, and always have. (God help you if you land in any Middle Eastern prison, whether the war in Iraq had ever occurred or not.) The upshot of the study was that anybody - anybody - even you and me - ordinary, sane people - when given absolute power over others and the opportunity to do whatever they like to those people without any fear of retribution, will abuse those prisoners, just like what happend in Iraq. This is classical. The US didn’t invent it, and they are not any different from anyone else in history for abusing prisoners. In other words, it is normal.
Pretty terrible to think about it, but everything the US and England and Iraq and Osslama the Bin Lid have done is entirely normal.
Yes, but i mean internal politics. Not murdering inconveniently ellected Marxists, but doing book signings and talk shows. Amazing stuff to me, and i did grow up watching Get Smart.
You are right, djm.
The funny thing about all the torture and the indignation it has produced in the West is that it is not considered abnormal or particularly reprehensible in the Middle East, and especially in Iraq.
Doesn’t mean that the rest of us should approve.
The most complete episode of Government killing in recent times before Falluja was the murder of the Davidian sect in Waco under the go-ahead of Janet Reno ( when the Government agents filled the place with tear gas and set it on fire producing the cyanide which killed the sect members, including 27 children ).
I must admit that I don’t have the knowledge or verbal skills to debate any of the things being discussed. My degree and skill lies in oil painting and music. It seems to me none of the bashing really has done any good. Maybe another forum more suitable to a political discussion would be appropriate. Let’s leave the Flute and Whistle Forums to a more peaceful topic, flutes and whistles. Although I’m very impressed with the knowledge and writing skills everyone has demonstrated.
While I agree with much of what Henke has said, and Andrew, too, tear gas doesn’t to the best of my knowledge produce cyanide - if it did, there would be many, many more dead folks across the globe due to use of the stuff.
The Davidian thing was sad, but they were also armed to the teeth with (feel free to correct me, it’s been years since then) a lot of illegal weapons and they were also being accused of child abuse. It was horrible what happened, but what happened I truly believe to be an accident…I can’t say the same about planes being flown into office buildings and all passengers, women and children, also all being killed - that’s something on a totally different level. So it driving a truck up to a federal building and blowing up the workers and kids in the daycare in the building. Isn’t it great that terrorist nuts come in all flavors and nationalities?
I understand why a lot of people in the world are mad at the US, but a lot of US citizens are mad at our own goverment now and many have been for years. Yet even there, there are many goverment workers in positions that help the poor, needy and disabled.
This thread is brilliant. Having a thread for people to blab their political ideas and not being distracted by flutes (or vice versa) has provided some very articulate discussion.
Even Andrew, whom I had previously believed was just an internet pugilist, has made a lot of statements I can actually agree with.
Who said open and frank discussion never accomplished anything?
I’m too scattered to compile arguments but I do have to say that Bush is a tool. I don’t mean that in a juvenile “Bush is such a tool, dude” but in that he is a tool used by the corporations, the GOP and others. That’s about the extent of argument I can compile. Call me an escapist or, heck, even a tool but I’d rather play my flute than research evidence to support my statement.
Ofcourse we are no saints in Europe. England, France, Spain, Portugal and others have been real bums historically as well. Afterall USA is an independent Europeean colony (can you say that? Well hope you get my point). I’m just saying that right now, and the last few decades, USA have been in a class by itself.
Ofcourse what happened 9/11 was a terrible thing and the terrorists who were behind it are madmen. I find it silly tough, the extreme propotions this has been given in media, not surprising, but silly. The thing that happened wasn’t so big. How many was it? 5000 civilians, just because they were Americans it’s been considered one of the greatest tragedies in history. Ofcourse it’s terrible when even one innocent civilian loses his life this way. None of us whiched for this to happen, and it was terrible. But what about 80’000 children killed in Bosnia during the war there. USA are pretty much responsible for all those deaths. These things happen every single day. Did anyone of you morn the loss of innocent civilians in Afghanistan during USA’s war there?
Alot of regimes does evil things all around the world. But no one has been able to convince me that George W Bush is any better that all the other evil madmen out there.
It’s funny when we talk about education as well. I heard some time ago of a study being conducted during the later part of the cold war. A large number of American school kids was asked to point out USA on a world map. About 70% of them pointed at Sovjet because it was the largest country they saw.
The prevailing ego and nationalism in USA strikes me as funny, but scary .
Yeah, you’r right, Henke. You want us to be the world policeman, but not the world policeman. So, Bosnia was our fault? The neighboring countries of Europe were powerless to prevent any of the “ethnic cleansing”? And it’s sad that no one mourned the children. You’re right. Everyone here in the US considers what happened in the Balkans to be some kind of huge success. Oh, yes, Afghanistan too. I’m sure that US interests killed many more civilians than Soviet shells. Chechens too; that’s because of us.
And, um, did you realize that not all of the people who died in the 9/11 massacre were Americans? Sure, the majority were. I bet there were some Swedes in those buildings too. And muslims.
As for education. Yes, you can quote all of those statistics all you want. Sure, our education system has problems. But this is turning into some kind of personal potshot. We became the most powerful nation in the world because we’re all stupid and don’t realize where our country is? Probably. I guess that makes us all more scary.
Sometime, when you have learned more yourself, you’ll realize that there’s another side to the whole issue. Actually, more than a single other side. It’s really quaint and convenient, and bloody easy, to sit around on some European high-horse and blame the US for absolutely everything. It’s not all true, of course. You need not to fall for the trap that most Europeans fall into, and that’s if your media seems anti-US, then what they tell you must be true. In the UK, it seems that if their media is critical of their government, and of our government, then they believe what it says.
I find it really offensive that you’d say that the deaths of 80,000 children in Bosnia is the fault of the US. Pony up the statistics, Henke, and tell me exactly how we’re responsible for that. And what do you think we do, sit around sipping champagne while innocent people die around the world? Does that make it easier for you to decide that we’re the great evil?
Perhaps, then, you should be concerned that Sweden has been called “the most Americanized country in the world, with the possible exception of the United States.” Perhaps the US should divest itself from Sweden, so that you yourself can’t benefit from anything that comes out of the US? Or, wait, do you depend on US money to keep your little socialist utopia running?
I never said that my own country doesn’t make mistakes. Great power, great responsibility, and the ability to screw up on a royal scale. Blame us for what we’ve actually done, don’t just throw out world problems and say they’re our fault because you’d like us to be the bad guys.
The funny thing is that I’m really very moderate. Liberal, I guess, in the US sense of things, but anywhere else I’d be a moderate.
And I SUCK at being an apologist. But gosh, I do get sick of sanctimonious drivel that floats west from Europe.
It was nice to argue politics with Canadians, since they tend to be well-informed for one thing, and they do realize that the world situation is rather complicated.
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