God, there is all kinds of crap being said about Will on Facebook. I don't think any of these people know the extent to which he was part of the Blacksburg community.

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/79309

Within hours of learning that a prisoner suspected of killing a security guard and a police officer was on the loose near Virginia Tech, students fled to their dorm rooms and turned to one of the most popular Web sites around: Facebook.On Monday, students logged in and created 17 separate Facebook groups about the pursuit of escaped inmate William Morva.

will morva
bollo's coffee shop
blacksburg
virginia tech
facebook

This is a pretty good piece on Will Morva and how people thought of him. Interesting to see how he is being remembered by the folks at Bollo's - I think I have pretty much the same view. I wouldn't say I thought Will was 'weird'. I mean, lets face it, those of you who know Bollo's know that it is always full of idiosyncratic people.

Will was not the oddest character I ever saw frequenting the place, over the years. Breadman, maybe! The last quote from Felicia is interesting. My question is this: did anyone know him well enough to know if he really wanted something like this to happen? I think Tim Kaine yesterday said he wanted to avoid standing trial and take people out with him. But that seems so unlike the Will I knew for so many years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/22/AR2006082201118.html

And at Bollo's, where Morva used to sit for hours pontificating about a variety of subjects, the tables were filled and the line for coffee was long. At a slow moment, Jackson stopped to wonder how Morva ended up the suspect in a jailbreak and double murder."Maybe in his own mind, he was training himself for this," she said. "I never thought he'd do anything."

http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/breaking/wb/79269

Blacksburg returns to normal as details of court appearances, funerals and memorial funds are sorted out in the wake of a prisoner escape that left two dead, closed Virginia Tech's campus and threw a town into turmoil.

On a personal note, I know its easy right now to be hard on William Morva. And there are folks on facebook making a lot of jokes about this. However, I've known him for a long time and I think its important to note that while he was always a bit of a character - a bit eccentric - there was a time when he was well-liked around town.

He used to hang out at Bollo's coffee shop with me and some other grad students. He loved to get involved in intellectual arguements and was passionate about the cause of native americans. Back then, he was hopeful about life and had a future. I think things changed for him when his dad died. He seemed to become morose and I know his stomach illness seemed to really start to get worse. I think he started to feel like society was at war with him. Recently I heard that his mum was ill and had fallen on hard times too. Its so sad to see him come to this. Nothing forgives him for what he has done. But I suppose just wanted to say there was a time I thought of him as a friend.

Climate change and global justice: a letter to Al Gore
Camilla Toulmin 27 - 7 - 2006

Al Gore's arguments about addressing climate change in his film "An Inconvenient Truth" leave Camilla Toulmin with more questions than answers.

I left your lecture with mixed feelings, realising that the intellectual gulf across the Atlantic ocean – even in relation to a leading US liberal voice – was much wider than I had thought. If it is to be bridged, there has to be movement towards a shared understanding of the vision needed for 2012 and beyond. Here, I believe – as you seem not to – that questions of justice, redress and adaptation are critical to making a fair and robust deal.

This is a great - if old - piece on how the Israeli's shafted Arafat at Camp David.
-NiK

The New York Review of Books
August 9, 2001
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14380?email

Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors
By Hussein Agha, Robert Malley

Mr. Malley, as Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli
Affairs, was a member of the US peace team and participated in the
Camp David summit. Mr. Agha has been involved in Palestinian affairs
for more than thirty years and during this period has had an active
part in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

camp david

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060801170800738

Critical theory has become crucial for Nave’s teaching and training. He explained: ‘we employ critical theory primarily in order to critique the military institution itself – its fixed and heavy conceptual foundations. Theory is important for us in order to articulate the gap between the existing paradigm and where we want to go. Without theory we could not make sense of the different events that happen around us and that would otherwise seem disconnected. […] At present the Institute has a tremendous impact on the military; [it has] become a subversive node within it. By training several high-ranking officers we filled the system [IDF] with subversive agents […] who ask questions; […] some of the top brass are not embarrassed to talk about Deleuze or [Bernard] Tschumi.’10 I asked him, ‘Why Tschumi?’ He replied: ‘The idea of disjunction embodied in Tschumi’s book Architecture and Disjunction (1994) became relevant for us […] Tschumi had another approach to epistemology; he wanted to break with single-perspective knowledge and centralized thinking. He saw the world through a variety of different social practices, from a constantly shifting point of view. [Tschumi] created a new grammar; he formed the ideas that compose our thinking.11 I then asked him, why not Derrida and Deconstruction? He answered, ‘Derrida may be a little too opaque for our crowd. We share more with architects; we combine theory and practice. We can read, but we know as well how to build and destroy, and sometimes kill.’12

IDF
deleuze
guattari

Friends:

http://asayake.blogspot.com/2006/07/when-grass-is-cut-snakes-will-show.html

A piece here that I think needs careful reading. While I am not sure how I feel about the anti-German program, insofar as I have not yet been able to decide for myself if they are too easily conflating Hezbollah's popularity with fascism, I think there is much of merit here. Soon I will try to post Tim Luke's article on constructing Islamo-Facism. I'd be interested to see if it has any thoughts on current events.

NiK

anti-german

Israel responded to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, right? Wrong
The assault on Lebanon was premeditated - the soldiers' capture simply provided the excuse. It was also unnecessary

George Monbiot
Tuesday August 8, 2006
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1839281,00.html

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that "more than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and thinktanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail". The attack, he said, would last for three weeks. It would begin with bombing and culminate in a ground invasion. Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told the paper that "of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared ... By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board".