Welcome Digest

Intercontinental Cry is a welcome digest of news and analysis essential to understanding the World Indigenous Peoples’ Movement. The collection of videos alone is worth a visit.

Working with Words

The four modes of social organization — tribes, institutions, markets, and networks — all intentionally utilize words to communicate their unique perspectives and preferences. Words are chosen for their effect in creation stories, in mythologies, in advertising, and in propaganda.

Words themselves are invented for a purpose. They serve as tools of social organization, as weapons of war, as means of manipulation, and as medicine for the maligned.

Depending on how they are used, words can cause horrendous harm or great good. Meanings can be distorted or clarified.

Working with words can gain one respect, renown, and reward, but it can also generate resentment. Not all messages are appreciated.

Learning to use words effectively requires an understanding of the principles of communication, especially in what is termed netwar, which assumes that all communication in all its dimensions is contested, no matter the stated intent of the participants. Words are meant to achieve, and as propositions in the arena of human consciousness, they will be confronted; as such, working with words is serious business.

The Gift of Humanity

Our featured site for the holiday season is Human Trafficking Project, an international consortium of volunteers exposing the modern slave trade. As this trade often involves young women and children used for prostitution in American cities, we thought showcasing this well-informed and organized blog was a way to give the greatest gift of all—humanity. Check out their videos, articles and reports, and decide if and how you might want to get involved or support those who are.

Talk to Action

Our feature site for Fall 2008 is Talk to Action, a learning house of the religious left in America focused on challenging the religious right. We encourage readers concerned about mounting bigotry — indeed, alarmed about religious fascism in the United States — to take a look at the thoughtful discussions and horrifying videos produced about this threatening political phenomenon. With a vice presidential candidate rooted in violent religious intolerance on the ballot, it’s none too soon to become informed–and engaged.

Public Good History

Public Good Project is a volunteer network of researchers, analysts and activists engaged in defending democracy in the United States.

Public Good’s former Research Director, Paul de Armond, is an internationally recognized authority on American right-wing terrorism. He first gained international attention on April 19, 1995, when he correctly identified the Oklahoma City bombing as the work of “Christian Patriot” terrorists associated with white supremacist militias, two days before the FBI abandoned their fruitless case theory that the bombing was the work of Arabs. Paul retired in 2007.

Mr. de Armond has provided consulting research and analysis on domestic terrorism to the United Nations, the Department of Defense, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, local and state law enforcement agencies, as well as congressional committees. He has contributed chapters to two ground-breaking books: Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy, RAND Corporation, and Hype or Reality?: The “New Terrorism” and Mass Casualty Attacks, Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute.

Public Good briefings include: Racist Origins of Border Militias, Research as Organizing Tool, and Deadly Secrets—the first profiling of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Public Good’s 2001 white paper, Coming To Grips With Terrorism, was foreshadowed by the Public Good presentation made at the 1999 international New Terrorism conference in Washington, D.C.

In 2002, Public Good co-sponsored the Confronting War Without End conference, and in 2005 co-hosted the national human rights conference On the Border. Throughout 2003 and 2004, Public Good’s Paul de Armond produced key reports on comprehending terrorism for national media.

In 2005 and 2006, Public Good’s Jay Taber collaborated with the Center for World Indigenous Studies in producing analysis of the world indigenous movement. In 2007, Mr. Taber was called on to advise faculty and students at New College of California in exposing massive corruption and fraud by the school’s board of trustees. In 2008 he published Fighting for Our Lives, an analysis of communication strategy in social conflict.

Since 1993, Public Good articles and reports have been cited extensively, and are frequently used as assigned readings in university classes.

Fourth World

Center for World Indigenous Studies, the premier think tank serving the Fourth World, publishes papers and archives documents for scholars and activists worldwide. In the sidebar are selected samples from four CWIS projects: Forum for Global Exchange (articles, news and essays), Fourth World Documentation (collected treatises and occasional papers), Fourth World Eye (a daily ezine), and Fourth World Journal (an annual peer-reviewed academic publication).

Feature Page

If you’re looking for broadcast news on world events, we suggest you scroll down to the Real News TV page in the sidebar.

Creme de la Creme

If you’re new here, the Pages in the sidebar are not links to websites, but rather to selected articles we’ve collected from these publications over the years. In essence, they constitute our treasure trove, the cream of the crop, the best of the best. So do browse at your leisure, and let us know what you think.

New Stuff

We’ve added several items and pages over the summer, so if you haven’t browsed them in a while, it might be worth your time. Of particular note, we perused the recently refurbished Public Good Project website for classics and posted some here.

We also want to encourage our readers to pass along their own discoveries; we learn by sharing.

Negotiating Dominion

Negotiating with the farce and force of White Christian Dominion today—as it has for five centuries—requires navigating many dimensions simultaneously. Steeped in American mythology, we may just be too close to the megaphonic monster to tell heads from tails.

In an effort to provide some useful perspectives in charting a less destructive and dangerous course, we’ve selected the best articles we could find by our esteemed colleagues and organized them by source in the sidebar.

Since these points of view often surmount artificial barriers of categorizing, we’ve decided it wouldn’t behoove us to attempt to do so. We assume if you’ve made it this far, you can probably figure that out for yourself.