Palestinian Video Surveilling of Israelis
Can the battle for land and minds ever be won is Israel and Palestine?
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Violent Imagination Shaping Brain Reality
Does perceiving violent acts — real or imagined — change the shape of your brain and how it processes information? The blunt — and likely unpopular — answer is, “Yes.”
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Living in Perpetual Terror
Terrorism is not a single, violent, act.
Terrorism is living in fear of what might happen and not what has happened.
Is Carrie Underwood a Jesus Invoker or a Vigilante?
Carrie Underwood is a big star and she exploded as one of the winners of American Idol.
I find Ms. Underwood to be rather boring and without an invigorating personality, but the fact that her debut country album sold over 6 million copies says something about my taste in music or what country music fans find valuable in the promotional package that is Ms. Underwood’s carefully crafted good-girl facade made of peaches-and-cream and lots of virtuosity in the name of God and His only son.
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The Uglier One
Ugly is everywhere. Some of it is visual. Most of it is internal. None of it is ever hidden.
A lot of it used to be punished via Ugly Laws. Some of the best Ugly Advice I was ever given came to me as a 
youngster in the form of punches to my face from a crew-cut boy two years older than me — but in my same fifth grade class. His name was Alex.
He was a bully. He wore a perpetual scowl.
He outweighed most of us in class by 75 pounds.
Everyone hated him.
Everyone admired his giant fists and punching power.
He was a brute in a boy’s body.
He was a boulder that gathered moss.
While the rest of us wore mop-top bowl haircuts, Alex waxed the ends of his crew cut and shaved the base of his neck every morning.
Alex imparted his reality to me in a flurry of blows to my face after I had taken the advice of my mother’s boyfriend to “stand up to a bully and fight him on your own turf!”
Violence as Commerce in the Urban Core
Based 
on our conversation yesterday in the comments thread for my Red in Tooth and Claw: The Language of Killing article, I am curious to know your thoughts on the following matter.
Do you believe violence — as framed in the context of yesterday’s article — creates or serves as commerce in the urban core?
Is the infliction of physical suffering a necessary city commodity from which secular humanism rises?
Or does violence only eat itself by gnawing and clawing away at its inborn behavior until red is all that’s left?
Los Angeles Violence
A disturbing new Los Angeles survey of 73 middle schools and their 28,000 students suggests up to 90% of the children in those schools have been exposed to community violence.
The March 3, 2005 meeting of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) revealed the results during their annual meeting in Alexandria, Virginia.
The report goes on to explain that children who have been exposed to city violence before they reach the 6th grade have much higher rates of suspensions, absenteeism and expulsions. When those children are actually in class they do not perform well academically.
Here is more information from the report:
One-in-four American children have a significant traumatic experience by age 16. Many children suffer multiple and repeated traumas. A child exposed to a traumatic event is at risk of developing traumatic stress. Traumatic stress can seriously delay development of their brains and bodies. It can lead to depression, substance abuse, other mental health problems, acting out, educational impairment, as well as future health and employment problems.
Children who are not safe in their forming environments become adults who wound the world in the way they were wounded: If you control the child’s mind you own the adult body.
We must work to find safe passage for these children and we must discover ways to protect them from violent episodes that mark them, and us, forever to the grave.
Structural Violence and the Autonomy of Morals
by Andreas Saugstad
The world is not always as we think it is. I do believe that human beings can have a true and veridical access to external reality, but many of our opinions are shaped by our culture and social context.
I think George Bush is such a person, who lacks the ability to go beyond conventionalism, and see how the world really is. I have paid attention to Bush in the media for a while now, and he always talks tabloid, never penetrating into the deep structure of phenomena.
Structural Violence
One of those who radically differs from Bush, and always penetrates into the deep structure of political phenomena, is Johan Galtung (1930-). Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung is the founder of peace research as an academic discipline, professor at seven universities, and author of more than 50 books and 1,000 articles.
One of Galtung’s key concepts is structural violence. Often when we use the term “violence,” we think of direct or physical violence. But Galtung has seen how violence can have many faces, and that evil can exist in many subtle and evil ways. Structural violence is violence that does not hurt or kill through fists or guns or nuclear bombs, but through social structures that produce poverty, death and enormous suffering. Structural violence may be political, repressive, economic and exploitative, it occurs when the social order directly or indirectly causes human suffering and death.
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