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Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

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Matteo Tamburini's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/zero
Bio: I am currently a Math Faculty member at Northwest Indian College, a Tribal College located on the Lummi Indian reservation near Bellingham, WA. I was born and raised in Pistoia (Italy), and went t... (More)

All Tamburini Blogs

Remember Rachel Corrie: Five Years Later

By Matteo Tamburini at Mar 05, 2008


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Next week, five years will have passed from two events that deserve to be remembered, understood, and mourned. The more infamous is the launching of the U.S. invasion and subsequent Occupation of Iraq.

 The other event was the death of a Washington State college student – Rachel Corrie. On March 17th 2003, two days before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Rachel was killed – crushed by an armored Caterpillar bulldozer in the Palestinian town of Rafah, while she was trying to prevent it from destroying the home of a Palestinian family.

Rachel was standing in front of that house – one of hundreds that the Israeli Defense Forces have demolished in Palestine – for at least two reasons: one was to use her privileged position as a US citizen to help that particular family; the other was to send a message back to us.

That message is very simple: ‘we are responsible for the actions of our own government.’ It is becase we do not act upon that responsibility that our government gives more military aid to Israel than to any other country in the world, over two billion dollars a year. Despite the fact that Israel currently violates over 30 UN Security Council Resolutions; that Israel has a stockpile of about 200 nuclear warheads, and has repeatedly invaded Lebanon causing thousands of deaths; that during its four decade long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel routinely violates the Geneva Conventions, particularly with its colonial project of “transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” And so on.

Our mass media routinely minimizes or ignores the deaths of Palestinian civilians – most recently the more than 100 people who were killed during Israel’s latest incursion into the Gaza Strip – but when Rachel was killed, it was front page news in the Seattle dailies. We could have heard Rachel’s message then, and asked questions about the role our government plays in the Middle East. We could also have found out that the Palestinian struggle for self-determination is met with simpathy from vast sectors of the Israeli public, which wants the Occupation to end and understands that this would drain much of the support for the militant groups in Palestine who target civilians in Israel.

The ferocity of the US-sponsored Israeli Occupation has not abated since 2003, and as our campus is swept with fervor for the upcoming election, we should pay heed to Rachel’s message, and challenge the candidates who wish to represent us to be true to their promises of “change.” Their foreign policy positions include “defend and support the annual foreign aid package […] to Israel” [Obama], and “support the annual foreign aid bill […] for Israel” [Clinton] – with no qualifications to demand respect for the Geneva Conventions or the United Nations. This would perpetuate a foreign policy that crushes the idealism of youth with the bulldozers of militarism. Rachel could not prevent the demolition of that house – will we at least heed her message?

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By Dickey, Charles at Mar 17, 2008 15:11 PM

Thanks for reminding us of Rachel and the principles that she practiced: \'we are responsible for the actions of our own government.’

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Re: Remember Rachel Corrie: Five Years Later

By Kamalmaz, Mazen at Mar 16, 2008 00:08 AM

I offer all respects to the memory of rachel...she is a symbol of the passion and activism against injustice...mazen kamalmaz from arab world

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