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YESTERYEAR

[So Passes the Glory of Baghdad]

Horses of the mist gallop through a mountain pass,
Desert legions straggle home through shafts of phantom suns.
Chieftains lie in tents of silk on rugs woven in dreams
Of curling domes and jinns. Stories tell themselves in thread.

*Stain the page with lines of blood.
March in time to finger drums.
Conjure paradise out of paint
Chipped in lost futurity.*

A bowed head, born of busts sitting on shelves of dust,
Reads and pores on its fateful past, a dim glory
Of incipience, a marble thought enshrined in hope.
The feather of progress flies on wings of arching stone.

*Trace the routes of brave vanity
Through dugout graves and leather books.
Search for the heart of man and wife
Twined on love-beds like twisted twigs.*

A throat made loose on wine will sing with night-charmed bards
A chant that dies forever on the lips of verse,

Does Sarah Palin remind you a bit of Diana Prince, Wonder Woman, in her dress and mannerisms? She does me.. except that she only fights for right, the extreme rightwing of the low-information zealots that wish to keep women pregnant and barefoot, so to speak; real men armed and ready to kill at will; and children uninformed and innocent of any knowledge about the realities of sex, protection, contraception, evolution, and human-caused global warming.

So welcome to the bizarre comic book world of Palin and the crazed limbaughtomized lunatics who believe that they have found their Wonder Woman in this pitbull hockey mom wearing lipstick. It sure comforts me to think that W squared is on the side of right and the new American way of keeping targeted groups ignorant and oppressed, while paving the way for big oil, huge corporate profits at the expense of everyone else, and well.. just more of the same ol same ol.

<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUM5WfO60AA&amp;feature=related">Anarchist Anthropologist</a></p><p>Sort of surreal to watch this on a PBS video, but still a wonderful interview. Graeber is a magnificent anarchist intellectual, and here gives brief accounts into current insight about radical history and the role of anarchism in the world pre-WWI.</p><p>(Incidentally, for a more literary presentation, check out Pynchon's latest book <b>Against the Day</b>.)</p>

On appeal now, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has authorized Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County to become the next national nuclear waste dump - which opens the doors for eight proposed nuclear reactors for the state.

<p>The big issue in Austin is the cost of housing, and the fact that as Austin has become a hot spot recognized around the country, folks have been flooding in and driving up rental and purchasing costs of homes, much to the chagrin of natives, low-income groups, civil rights organizations, environmentalists- well basically everyone besides developers.</p>
<p>We talk and talk this issue to death, and I can't count the number of times I've heard people bash the Californians and their McMansions, but apart from some dynamic organizations like PODER or the Texas Affordable Housing Project, people don't seem to fight gentrification. It causes enormous anger, but people don't seem to know what to do about it, what tools they can use to fight it.</p>
<p><b>Austin Affordable Housing Crisis General Assembly</b></p>

<p><a href="http://www.monkeywrenchbooks.org/node/251">read more</a></p>

by David Morris

A coalition of Haitian unions has announced a series of activities to mobilize the people to resist the privatization of government operations in Haiti.