Dirty List of Companies doing Business with Burma

http://sopl.manycontentz.com/A-to-Zed-on-Burma-Investors/

This site says it has a "clean list" but I think the posting is truncated and goes on to other blog posts unconnected with Burma.

Burma Campaign UK is a well known activist site.

Now I start looking, there are surely many stock photos of Burmese people up for sale

Here is another one --

http://www.worldofstock.com/closeups/PCH4378.php

I bet the photos were all taken by foreign tourists or journalists.

As an exile who can't go home, can you imagine how that makes me feel?

Burmese Flower Girl

http://www.flickr.com/groups/katrina_auction/discuss/87968/

Truly a beautiful photograph and a young girl.

The site says proceeds for Katrina hurricane relief.

But how much is this young girl and her country getting?

I bet she gets zero.

Correct me if I am wrong.

Pride of Burma flower (Amhearstia Nobilis)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:AmherstiaNobilis2.jpg

There used to be a single tree of this beside the Convocation Hall near Inya Lake on Rangoon University campus. It's the only one I ever saw in Burma or have ever seen, other than the Amhearstia trees in the Singapore botanical gardens. Alas, visited before I had a digital camera.

Convocation means "commencement," as in "commencement exercises," in American English. That is, a graduation ceremony.

Kevin Sites' video gear --

which he uses in the war zones he covers.

http://hotzone.yahoo.com/gear;_ylt=Ap4P3aRDSz3QyWBCkTtMbguLFMsF

Of interest to Burmese citizen journalists and others --

Pioneer SoJo (solo journalist)

Kevin Sites -- Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Sites

New Burma representative position to co-ordinate policy on Burma --

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hMZlZY1LA6x1ktoxY-bIev-ST5aw

Good Comments on Hoped for Burmese Process --To Meaningful Dialogue and/or True Democratization.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007%5C10%5C31%5Cstory_31-10-2007_pg4_21

To the junta:

Don't give us your sham constitution "the National Convention," abandon your so-called road map to disciplined democracy (disciplined! yikes!!!) --

stop calling for new elections when the results of the 1990 elections have not been honored.

Quote of the day from a long time Burma activist -- about new elections.

"Before, in 1990, the junta did not know to steal votes."

(It thought it would win, based on a poll government officials conducted.)

"But this time it will know it has to cheat."

So -- don't play in their court. Don't allow talk of new elections.

In the article linked above, Dr. Zarni of Oxford University defines what "breakthrough" could mean: The start of Dialogue or a power-sharing arrangement.

Of course, the ideal is meaningful dialogue with benchmarks leading to a Transitional Government and to a power sharing arrangement with the NLD.

Look to the S. African case again.

Kyi May Kaung Oct 31, 2007

Human Rights Watch says there are still child soldiers in Burma. France is doing some shuttle diplomacy

"There, but for the grace of God, go I."

Refugees newly arrived at an American airport. (Acronyms are for International Organization for Migration and U.S. Refugee Program) Photo copyright Kyi May Kaung.


http://www.voanews.com/burmese/2007-10-31-voa2.cfm

Hope you can come to my book discussion on Friday 2nd -- 7.10 PM to 8.30 PM

at Kefa Cafe, 963 Bonifant St, Silver Spring, MD --

Book is Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala, written from the point of view of a child soldier in Africa.

Good overall wrapup -- Burma -- the Road to Crisis

from BBC --

http://www.freeburmacoalition.org/

Interesting that Michael Green presenting U.S. policy, has the last word.

So far this is the first and most cohesive analysis I have seen, without the presenter or interviewees getting hung up on pro and anti sanctions issues.

Over the last decade, or the last 6 years or so, some of the interviewees appear to have changed their views.

"Retired" drug warlord Khun Sa, living in Rangoon, dies --

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7069417.stm

"On certain planets, anything can happen."

Carl Sandburg.

For junta hangers on who live in Rangoon, what will you say "My children go to school with Khun Sa's children and grandchildren?"

Actually, reportedly Khun Sa's offspring are overseas. In Singapore?

A lot of money has been laundered.

Internet Censor World Championship

by Julian Pain, Reporters Sans Frontieres --

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15015

Burma (Myanmar should be added to this list.

A new Burmese blog --

http://www.mrbalance.blogspot.com/

Mr. Balance, named after his son -- some of the postings in Burmese, but contains primary material not seen in mainstream media -- such as manual of Burmese Defence Services Academy, poems from Burma, photos and news concerning the death of photo-journalist Mr Kenji Nagai, who was gunned down on a Rangoon street during the clampdowm.

Wikitravel to Burma?

http://wikitravel.org/en/Myanmar

Reporters without Borders -- Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents

http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542

Very useful -- I will also put this site on my blog roll (list of links).

How to paint a huge sacred banner laid on floor --

Korean female monk painting at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1448872329&context=set-72157602185537957&size=l

Note the respect with which she carefully sits on a white sheet of paper and uses other sheets of paper to protect the completed painting from smudging.

The eyes are painted in -- "opened" last, as in Buddha images in Burma with a special ceremony.

DC PAW Poets Against Torture Reading, at AU Nov 10

[Dcpaw] Poets Against Torture to Read at American University on November 10.

Thank you for supporting this amazing event, cosponsored by DC Poets Against the War and American University. Please forward this invitation and post it to blogs.

Huge thanks to DC PAW members Rose Berger and Joe Ross for coordinating the event and editing the spectacular accompanying book.
In peace,
Sarah Browning

D.C. Poets Against the War and the American University Museum announce the publication of
Cut Loose the Body: An anthology of poems on torture and Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings
Edited by Rose Marie Berger and Joseph Ross, with an introduction by Sister Dianna Ortiz
Saturday, November 10, 2007, from 7-8:30 p.m
at the American University Museum (at the Katzen Arts Center on Massachusetts and Nebraska Avenues, entrance just north of Ward Circle ).
A reception will begin at 6 p.m. and a booksigning will follow the reading.
Join us for a reading from Cut Loose the Body with nationally recognized “poets of witness”—including Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (Baghdad Blues), Brooklyn ’s D. Nurkse (Burnt Island), Myra Sklarew (The Witness Trees), E. Ethelbert Miller (How We Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love), Consuelo Hernández (Poemas de Escombros y Cenizas), Kyle Dargan (Bouquet of Hungers), and more. The reading will be held in the gallery where the Botero exhibit is on display.
Cut Loose the Body includes poems by Pulitzer prize winner Maxine Kumin, Guggenheim Fellow Martín Espada (The Republic of Poetry), Pushcart winner Naomi Shihab Nye, and prisoners’ poems from Guantanamo .
For more information, contact the American University Museum (202-885-1300) or Rose Berger (202-745-4619; rberger@sojo.net).
****
SAVE THE DATE: Split This Rock Poetry Festival, March 20-23, 2008, calls poets to a greater role in public life and fosters a national community of activist poets. Building the audience for poetry of provocation and witness from the nation’s capital, we celebrate poetic diversity and the transformative power of the imagination. Featured poets will include: Jimmy Santiago Baca, Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo, Martín Espada, Galway Kinnell, Mark Doty, E. Ethelbert Miller, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Alix Olson.

"Loud Mouthed Bully and Axe Handles of the West"

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/28/asia/myanmar.php

International women responded to this propaganda blitz with "panty wars" (which preceeded this) as according to traditional male chauvinist pig "culture" -- women's undergraments can cause a man to lose his "hpon" -- translated as "soul stuff" by some anthropologists.

Recently women demonstrated in the Philippines with posters of the Sr. Gen. with an odd head dress of you know what.

http://www.mizzima.com/MizzimaNews/News/2007/Oct/107-Oct-2007.html

The head is considered more noble than the feet in Thai and Burmese cultures. Women are considered less worthy than men.

The junta did it's own shaming of monks, whom it arrested, defrocked, forced to wear white prison garb, tortured and interrogated, then re-ordained and sent back (some, the minority) to their monasteries.

In this tit for tat, who do your suppose inflicts more harm and causes real deaths?

Seldom seen images of Iran -- from DC Poets Against War

Please share widely

http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html

"Entitled to free false teeth" --

Confronting the Stalin Myth

by Hamilton Walters in Dictator Watch.

http://www.dictatorwatch.org/articles/stalin.html

Anyone who says dictators are different depending on location is a fool. This article shows dictators are much the same, whether they are Burmese or Soviet.

More later on Robert Conquest and his books on the Stalinist Purges.

When Gorbachev opened the official archives, it was discovered that Robert Conquest had in fact underestimated the numbers of those killed by Stalin. In fact, more had been killed.

The next article in this stack, also by Hamilton Walters, shows how biased some "Burma experts" are in denying the severity of human rights abuses in Burma.

There is already a lot of physical evidence and one day there will be more.

In the videos by Citizen Journalists from inside Burma, the victims and the witnesses had carefully marked the blood stains for the photographer with bits of brick at a monastery that had been raided.

A month after the Burmese junta's crackdown, which still continues, we send metta (loving kindness) in our prayers for all those who died and are dying for Burma's Freedom.

Rest in Peace.