The editors recommend checking out Ahniwanika’s site Intercontinental Cry regularly!

In the month’s Underreported Struggles: 20,000 Lepchas Vow to Die for Their Community; Nicaragua Recognizes Indigenous Land Rights; Dam workers attack the Enawene Nawe; and 18 other stories about the ongoing, world-side struggle for land, rights, and life.

December 29 – Indonesia Police Destroy Indigenous Village – Indonesian police forces have violently evicted 400 indigenous people from their land in the province of Riau on the eastern coast of Sumatra. According to Amnesty International, approximately 700 local security forces entered the village of Suluk Bongka, firing bullets and tear gas. As the villagers fled into the forest, two helicopters dropped what was thought to be a fire accelerant on the village, burning it to the ground.

December 26 – We shall give up our lives but not our land – “We shall give up our lives but not land.” The slogan is overwhelming across the state of Jharkhand against displacement induced by the development projects. It is not only a slogan for the Adivasis but it is also their determination, pledge and hope to ensure their ownership rights over the natural resources i.e. land, forest and water.

December 24 – Uprising against Barrick Gold in Tanzania – Earlier this month, thousands of villagers raided a gold mine in Northern Tanzania, setting fire to $7 million worth of mine equipment. Most reports claim the action was performed by “gold-seekers”, however, local reports say the uprising was the result of a murder by a Barrick Security Guard.

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By Charles Mostoller

Supreme Court case pits exploitation of the Amazon against Indigenous rights in Brazil

On August 27th, the Brazilian Supreme Court will decide a case that could have far reaching effects on the Amazon and the half-million indigenous people who live there. The case questions the legality of a process that created an Indigenous Territory in northern Brazil, and threatens to reverse decades of progress on indigenous and social rights throughout the country.

In 2005, after more than two decades of struggle for recognition, five indigenous groups in Brazil’s northern Roraima state won official recognition of their rights to their ancestral lands. Their efforts culminated in the creation of a new Indigenous Territory, Raposa Serra do Sol, covering a large swath of the Amazon Rainforest on the border with Guyana.

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TIBET: CUSTODIAN OF KAILASH

In the first article of this series, Tibet: Beyond Geopolitics, it is argued that the Chinese occupation of Tibet was a karmic message to a social and religious system that had grown weak and complacent. This view, while in line with Buddhist philosophy, nevertheless begs one fundamental question: why was this message driven home so harshly on the peaceful nation of Tibet, instead of on the belligerent and corrupt countries of the world? The answer lies in the complex interaction between a lofty, snow-covered Himalayan mountain, the collective karma of Tibet and the spiritual fate of the entire planet. Are we ready?

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And?  Most people probably are unfamiliar with this ground breaking proposal, made by two New York high school students in the 1980s.  They suggested that Einstein did not get the whole, nuanced picture, one nuance of which is the speed of light.  No constant, they suggested, in the speed of light and other charged particles, only a constant maximum waveform speed.  Apparently, they could not come to terms with the dual status of light in any other way, logic leaving them with particles traveling 1.6 times faster, then visible light, to many times faster depending of the type and frequency of the wave form, temperature, and the medium.

When this paper asked the teachers who made the famous second place judgement how they felt in retrospect, they had some regret yet felt they had been quite good for not entirely dismissing two kids who said they knew better than Einstein.  What follows is the original encyclopedia entry which has gone largely ignored until now by the relevant associations:

Not using the term quantum tunneling, but predicting the speeds that are achieved by different frequencies of light to a high degree of precision, was the work of Jeremy S. Sloan and Gavin McKee.

Being taught in high school that light was both a particle and an energetic wave-form, they asked the obvious question, “Then is the particle not ‘driving’ down the wave?”  As a car may only travel thirty miles within an hour on a curving road, its actual speed may be fifty miles-per-hour.

A need to specifically increase the potential speed of light particles was first suggested by them in 1988 with the McKee-Sloan Hypothesis, (MSH) which suggested that the actual speed of photons should be judged by the total distance travelled within the wave-form.  They stated the top speed of visible light was 1.6 times 299,792,458 m/s, with increases or decreases in that speed dependent on varying wave-form frequencies, (i.e. red or blue light and other radiation) temperature, or medium.

Their theory was proved by many subsequent quantum tunneling experiments.  Introduced at  New York’s Dwight High School science fair, and judged by the school’s Headmaster, physics, biology, and chemistry teachers, Jeremy Sloan and Gavin McKee’s efforts were awarded second place after a young woman displaying a potato powered clock.

When asked about the incident Gavin McKee said, “I think the potentials of time dilation, faster than light processing, and the control of photons, remain an exciting field of discovery, rich in unknowns.  The many other unknowns of these realities skew potential certitude, leaving us with Turing’s original deduction that our answers will be found in partnership with a mechanical quantum computing device to give scientific rigor to the perceptions of our biological quantum computing brains and the potential ability to act mechanically in the revealed conditionality.”

Jeremy S. Sloan, who declined to be interviewed for this reflection, is a senior managing director at Goldman Sachs.  Gavin McKee is a writer published under many nom-de-plumes.  He also does personal change work through NRV Hypnosis.  Neither pursued further studies in science.

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