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Friday, March 11, 2016

Omnium and Gatherum: March 11 2016

People hold up photos of slain Honduran indigenous leader and environmentalist Berta Cáceres outside the coroner’s office in Tegucigalpa. (AP Photo / Fernando Antonio)


1)
The Nation
Before Her Murder, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Criticism
The presidential candidate has ignored criticism of her role in enabling the consolidation of the Honduran coup.
By Greg Grandin Yesterday 1:31 pm
http://www.thenation.com/article/chronicle-of-a-honduran-assassination-foretold/
...In a video interview, given in Buenos Aires in 2014, Cáceres says it was Clinton who helped legitimate and institutionalize the [Honduran] coup. In response to a question about the exhaustion of the opposition movement (to restore democracy), Cáceres says (around 6:10): “The same Hillary Clinton, in her book Hard Choices, practically said what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the bad legacy of North American influence in our country. The return of Mel Zelaya to the presidency (that is, to his constitutionally elected position) was turned into a secondary concern. There were going to be elections.” Clinton, in her position as secretary of state, pressured (as her emails show) other countries to agree to sideline the demands of Cáceres and others that Zelaya be returned to power. Instead, Clinton pushed for the election of what she calls in Hard Choices a “unity government.” But Cáceres says: “We warned that this would be very dangerous.… The elections took place under intense militarism, and enormous fraud.”

The Clinton-brokered election did indeed install and legitimate a militarized regime based on repression. In the interview, Cáceres says that Clinton’s coup-government, under pressure from Washington, passed terrorist and intelligence laws that criminalized political protest. Cáceres called it “counterinsurgency,” carried out on behalf of “international capital”—mostly resource extractors—that has terrorized the population, murdering political activists by the high hundreds. “Every day,” Cáceres said elsewhere, “people are killed.”

Interestingly, Hillary Clinton removed the most damning sentences regarding her role in legitimating the Honduran coup from the paperback edition of Hard Choices...

Hillary Clinton was the Mini-Dick Cheney of the Obama Administration, and had events been different, she would have turned out as baneful as Cheney. Has she learned anything? I have no idea.
And she is not going there.



Runners        Carlo Allegri/Reuters
2)
The Atlantic
Retracing Our Steps
A familiar running trail can be a time machine.
Paul Bisceglio Mar 10, 2016
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/running-and-involuntary-memories/472374/
...Many of running’s psychological benefits already are well-known. It releases dopamine and increases blood flow in the brain, which not only makes people feel better than if they’d stayed on the couch, but helps them think sharper and more creatively, too. In a study published this month in the Journal of Psychology, a group of Finnish and American researchers found that—in lab rats, at least—distance running actually generates more new brain cells in adults than other types of exercise. And earlier studies have shown that running especially increases neurons in mice’s hippocampus, the area of the brain that plays a key role in learning and memory...
I knew there had to be an explanation why I am so brainy.

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