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disturbing the comfortable
To all of you who liked and loved Peter:
He passed on 10/23/09 of complications from a routine colonoscopy. Though he lived in pain throughout his life, he never let it control or afect his relationships.
He had many friends who he loved dearly and gave what he had without hesitation or regret.
He practiced the red road quietly and with respect.
His web site and blog will be closed after this has been sent.
Peace.
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19:25
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disturbing the comfortable
B.F.D. Let me repeat that: B.F.D..
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18:50
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disturbing the comfortable
I had an op-ed piece in our local daily. In it I tried to counter the rabid-right's bulls**t about health care reform. Death panels, bankrupting the economy, government coming between patients and doctors—you know, the same ol' same ol'. Christ, we spend more on military spending than all the other countries in the world put together. All of them. And our military budget keeps going up year after year. America spends nearly $10 billion a year on "defense" alone. And our biggest threat, these days, are a bunch of nationalists with old Russian Ak-47s, and some newer weapons that we gave them. We've been fighting them for eight years now. Makes you wonder what the Sioux or Apaches could have done with automatic weapons...
Anyhow, some person responded to my ediorial with one of his own. Death panels, bankrupting the economy, goverment coming between patients and doctors...and, of course, the phrase "socialized medicine" waved around like a bloody battle flag. So, obviously, we're dealing with a belief system—like the Intelligent Design Cadres, or the birthers or the militia freaks.
Then I stopped writing this to watch a video of some congressperson from Texas (yeah, no need to say it) gabbling on about putting condoms on wild horses. He was the same one sitting at Obama's address on health care with a sign saying "What bill?" on his lap. Jesus.
Years back, commentators talked about how the hard core christian nuts were determined to take over the Republican Party. They did. We're living with (and in spite of) the results.
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18:29
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disturbing the comfortable
through it and then put it back together. It works fine, once again. That's a good feeling.
Now, if we could just take some people's heads apart and blow compressed air through the workings, maybe they'd work fine. I guess our system is a run-away train like in the movies, heading for a high trestle that's on fire, been washed away, collapsed, mined with high explosives, etc., etc.. The track, by the way, is in either a narrow deep cut or a long tunnel, so we can't jump off.
The air is bad, good water is getting scarce, and the fish are dying. Here's a very sad story from Alaska, the really last frontier:
The New York Times
[www.nytimes.com] October 3, 2009
Scarcity of King Salmon Hurt Alaskan Fishermen
By STEFAN MILKOWSKI
MARSHALL, Alaska — Just a few years ago, king salmon played an outsize role in villages along the Yukon River. Fishing provided meaningful income, fed families throughout the year, and kept alive long-held traditions of Yup’ik Eskimos and Athabascan Indians.
But this year, a total ban on commercial fishing for king salmon on the river in Alaska has strained poor communities and stripped the prized Yukon fish off menus in the lower 48 states. Unprecedented restrictions on subsistence fishing have left freezers and smokehouses half-full and hastened a shift away from a tradition of spending summers at fish camps along the river.
“This year, fishing is not really worth it,” said Aloysius Coffee, a commercial fisherman in Marshall who used to support his family and pay for new boats and snow machines with fishing income.
At a kitchen table cluttered with cigarettes and store-bought food, Mr. Coffee said he fished for the less valuable chum salmon this summer but spent all his earnings on permits and gasoline. “You got to sit there and count your checkbook, how much you’re going to spend each day,” he said.
The cause of the weak runs, which began several years ago, remains unclear. But managers of the small king salmon fishery suspect changes in ocean conditions are mostly to blame, and they warn that it may be years before the salmon return to the Yukon River in large numbers.
Salmon are among the most determined of nature’s creatures. Born in fresh water, the fish spend much of their lives in the ocean before fighting their way upriver to spawn and die in the streams of their birth.
While most salmon populations in the lower 48 states have been in trouble for decades, thanks to dam-building and other habitat disruptions, populations in Alaska have generally remained healthy. The state supplies about 40 percent of the world’s wild salmon, and the Marine Stewardship Council has certified Alaska’s salmon fisheries as sustainable. (In the global market, sales of farmed salmon surpassed those of wild salmon in the late 1990s.)
For decades, runs of king, or chinook, salmon — the largest and most valuable of Alaska’s five salmon species — were generally strong and dependable on the Yukon River. But the run crashed in the late 1990s, and the annual migrations upriver have varied widely since then. “You can’t depend on it any more,” said Steve Hayes, who manages the fishery for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Officials with that department and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, which jointly manage the fishery, say variations in ocean conditions related to climate change or natural cycles are probably the main cause of the weak salmon runs. Certain runs of chinook salmon in California and Oregon have been weak as well in recent years, with ocean conditions also suspected.
In Alaska, fishermen also blame the Bering Sea pollock fishing fleet, which scoops up tens of thousands of king salmon each year as accidental by-catch. The first hard cap on salmon by-catch is supposed to take effect in 2011, but the cap is not tough enough to satisfy Yukon River fishermen.
The Yukon River fishery accounts for a small fraction of the state’s commercial salmon harvest. But the fish themselves are considered among the best in the world, prized for the extraordinary amount of fat they put on before migrating from the Bering Sea to spawning grounds in Alaska and Canada, a voyage of 2,000 miles in some cases.
Most commercial fishing is done on the Yukon River delta, where mountains disappear and the river branches into fingers on its way to the sea. Eskimos fish with aluminum skiffs and nets from villages inaccessible by road. Beaches serve as depots and gathering places.
Kwik’Pak Fisheries, in Emmonak, population 794, is one of the few industrial facilities in the region. Forklifts cross muddy streets separating storage buildings, processing facilities and a bunkhouse for employees from surrounding villages.
For decades, almost all commercially caught king salmon were sold to buyers in Japan. But in 2004, Kwik’Pak began marketing the fish domestically, and for a few years fish-lovers in the lower 48 could find Yukon River kings at upscale restaurants and stores.
This year, Kwik’Pak sent just six king salmon to a single buyer in Seattle, and only a trickle of other kings made it to market. Most of those fish were caught incidentally during an opening for fall chum salmon.
Kwik’Pak is promoting chum salmon, also known as keta, and experimenting with an oily whitefish called cisco. But harvests of those fish are limited, and the price paid to fishermen is much less than for kings.
The company, which was formed in 2002 in part to develop local economies, now runs a store selling fishing supplies and hauls gravel in trucks that once carried fish. This summer, employees spent their time repainting the Catholic church.
“We’re a one-resource economy down here,” said Jack Schultheis, the company’s general manager. “We don’t have the oil fields or timber or anything else to work on. This is all we’ve got.”
In the 1980s and early 1990s, commercial fishermen on the lower river made an average of $8,000 to $12,000 in gross earnings, sometimes more. Since 2000, that number has been closer to $4,000, and this year, it dropped to just over $2,000.
“You gotta try to find some other work,” said Paul Andrews, a commercial fisherman in Emmonak. “It’s really, really hard out here.”
Like many on the Yukon delta, Mr. Andrews relies on income from fishing to sustain a subsistence lifestyle that also includes hunting for moose, seals and migratory birds.
Arthur Heckman, who manages a small store in the village of Pilot Station, says more and more people are asking him for credit. “Some days I have people call me up and say, ‘I just want a box of crackers,’ or ‘I just want to buy some Pampers,’ ” he said.
The cost of living in remote villages along the river is high, and many residents rely on a mix of part-time work and government aid. Most also rely on fish.
Nets stretch from riverbanks, and fish wheels — large rotating traps built on driftwood rafts — turn in the current near eddies. Simple smokehouses rise from every village beach and fish camp.
King salmon, which can weigh 30 pounds or more, are cut into long strips and dried for weeks over smoking alder or poplar. The candylike strips are ubiquitous here, served always with a sturdy cracker called Pilot Bread. Salmon are also canned, frozen and salted.
This year, fishery managers for the first time closed all subsistence fishing on the first pulse of king salmon and cut fishing times in half on later pulses, leaving many residents with just two 18-hour periods a week to fish.
Zeta Cleaver, one of the only people fishing in the middle-river village of Ruby in late July, said people called her from as far away as Anchorage wanting to buy fish. She used to catch more than a dozen king salmon a day and fill her smokehouse with fish for her children and grandchildren, she said. This year she got only a few kings.
Until recently, many residents gathered with family to fish from remote camps along the river, a holdover from a migratory lifestyle that included summer camps for fishing and winter camps for hunting and trapping.
This year, restrictions on fishing, combined with the high cost of gas and continuing societal shifts, kept many camps empty. A reporter’s 900-mile canoe trip down the Yukon and Tanana Rivers showed countless camps shuttered or abandoned. Multifamily camps that once rivaled nearby villages in population seemed more like quiet retreats from them.
High prices for heating fuel and limited fishing income left many lower-river residents in dire straits last winter and prompted shipments of food and other aid. With this year threatening to be even worse, Alaska’s governor, Sean Parnell, in August sought federal disaster relief for Yukon River residents. The request is still pending.
In Marshall, people are bracing for a long winter. Heating oil costs more than $7 a gallon here, and a can of condensed milk sells for nearly $4. Villagers are going moose-hunting in groups to save on the cost of gasoline.
“The whole community is kind of hurting,” said Mike Peters, a fisherman and heavy equipment operator. “People really depended on the fish, and it’s not there.”
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disturbing the comfortable
Here's something out of South Dakota that broke my heart
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Cheyenne River Sioux Sue Over Dress Code
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- By Chet Brokaw, The Associated Press
EAGLE BUTTE, South Dakota — Carol Moran spent all she could spare on new school clothes for her 15-year-old daughter. Then she found out a new dress code had been imposed at the junior high school that serves the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.
Moran, who walks with a cane and survives on welfare in one of most impoverished regions in the U.S., said buying a whole new set of clothes is out of the question. Her daughter, Kyann, already has been sent home twice for violating the dress code since school started two weeks ago.
"It was just like a slap in the face," Moran said.
Unexpected school expenses can stress any parent. But for many with students in the Cheyenne-Eagle Butte School District, finding gas money or a ride to an affordable store can prove all but impossible, much less paying for the clothes if they get there.
The Cheyenne River Sioux reservation covers Dewey and Ziebach counties, which encompass 4,265 square miles. About 8,000 residents live among the rolling, grass-covered prairie of north central South Dakota.
More than half of Ziebach County and 38% of Dewey County lived in poverty in 2005, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. The nearest discount store is about 90 miles away in the state capital of Pierre.
Moran and other parents have joined the tribe in a federal lawsuit seeking to block the school district from enforcing the dress code, which requires students to wear black, white or tan shirts, pants, skirts or shorts. Administrators say it is intended to avoid gang violence. An Aberdeen judge has said he might hold an initial hearing this week.
The school is run by a public board organized under state laws and one organized under the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education. The lawsuit argues the dress code violates federal regulations requiring such schools consult with tribes and parents of American Indian children in developing programs and policies.
Tom Van Norman, the tribe's attorney, said the dress code is not only a hardship for struggling parents but also an impediment to educating the children who are taken out of class and sent home or placed in a time-out room.
The dress code was publicized in the local weekly newspaper earlier in the summer, but many parents did not learn of it until receiving a packet of information about eight days before school started, Van Norman said. Classes started Aug. 27 and the tribe sued Sept. 1.
Two top school administrators declined to comment on the lawsuit or the dress code. But one of them, Bureau of Indian Education Supervisor Nadine Eastman, explained the dress code in a letter published Aug. 6 in the local newspaper, the West River Eagle.
"The purpose of the Uniform Dress Code is primarily to alleviate much of the gang-related violence in the school," Eastman wrote. "Many of our Junior High students wear gang-affiliated colors to school daily. Secondarily, we hope that an increase in safety will increase our academics for all students."
The dress code applies only to kindergarten, 7th and 8th grades this year, but officials intend to add a grade a year until it covers K-8, Eastman wrote. The junior high has about 150 students, with about 30 in kindergarten. Total school enrollment is about 800.
Winona Charger, whose grandson Justin Little Star has been suspended for violating the dress code, said she has seen little evidence of a gang problem. She said the schools should spend more time and money improving academic achievement.
The school district has repeatedly failed to make adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law, according to yearly report cards issued by the state Education Department.
"They're not teaching our kids. They're worried about what they're wearing to school. That's what makes me angry," Charger said.
Kim Low Dog said her twin daughters also have run afoul of the junior high's dress code because they wore blue jeans and different colored tops with designs. When she went to the school recently, she found one daughter and other dress-code violators had been taken out of classrooms and put in a separate room.
"She has a right to an education," Low Dog said. "She hadn't committed a crime or anything like that."
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-09-18-tribe-dress-code_N.htm
Copyright 2009 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
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disturbing the comfortable
When I was small, we lived right off Olympic Boulevard, down in L.A.. I spent a lot of time there, I remember it very well. When I was in college, we drank a lot of Olympia Beer— and now, every time we go up toward Seattle and Anacortes and Vancouver B.C., I look off to the right at the abandoned brewery in Tumwater. I drank a lot of their beer and I remember it...well, kinda.
A lot of people are very upset that Rio snared the Olympics, shutting out Chicago. Considering the way America's been behaving in the world (a dry drunk, you could say), I think we f**king deserved it. Actions cause reactions. Blowback.
Guess America ain't the Big Boss it used to be.
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12:20
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disturbing the comfortable
Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant and flawed man, as all men—and all women—are. I just read Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, An American Controversy, and that's how he comes across. Human, above all. It doesn't surprise or shock me that Jefferson was a slave owner or that he slept with slave women. Seems kind of normal, given the crazy power equation.
Sally Hemings seems, for what little we know of her, pretty normal, too. She made the best of a very bad situation for herself and her children. No blame.
Blame for the system, though. Lots of it there. And blame for people accepting it. And blame for those who now apologize for the barbarism of slavery and unequal power relationships. Either one, and both.
What struck me after reading the book was the casualness people had about owning slaves as light-skinned as they themselves. Sally Hemings and several of her children later were considered "white," even in the South. Obviously the system went beyond skin color. It boiled down to being able to see people as possessions. That, as the saying goes, is cold. It's a mark against Jefferson's character.
That owners slept with slave women was a given. It was rather common, as far as we know. But it wasn't talked about. Because it was so common? I don't think so: I think it was because Africans had been so philosophically trashed and white people so philosophically elevated, that it was a sign of some sort of depravity—like drinking too much. Maybe due to Original Sin. But, it just was. What was utterly not acceptable was the idea that white women might sleep with black men. There is some sort of bizarre insecurity involved in this, of course. Black men were portrayed as animals, jungle creatures, easily overcome with lust and lustful enough to utterly ravish white women. White women, of course, were such weak and flawed creatures that they might...gasp...like it. Black men were lynched by the thousands, over the years, because of these twisted psychological beliefs and fears. That's really what the KKK was all about, and what so much of the South is still obsessed with today. And a lot of the rest of the country, too.
That, I have a hunch, is part of the rage and fear and s**t-slinging at Obama is all about. I mean there's clearly a lot of outrage that a black man could become president, the ultimate high-status Alpha gig in America. But he's half-white. And the reason he's half-white is his mother, who we know was white, chose to marry a black man. Chose! What kind of a woman was she? We know she was a good mother, bright, all that, a good woman. But because of the almost indigenous racism in this country, a woman who marries a black man can't be good. There's got to be something wrong with her. And if there's something wrong with her, well, then, there's got to be something wrong with her child...and so it goes. The racists would be pissed if Obama's father was white and his mother black, but I bet they wouldn't be quite so pissed. Obama's heritage is a slap in the face to the racists...
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disturbing the comfortable
Maybe it's because women were selected out of the machinery of our times. Maybe it's because they really are not men in disguise (though some, like Hillary Clinton, have managed to make curious transformations), but these days it seems like some of the most insightful political commentary comes from women. I'm thinking of Naomi Klein, Arianna Huffington, and Arundhati Roy, specifically.
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What Have We Done to Democracy? Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos and a New Cold War in Kashmir Sunday 27 September 2009
by: Arundhati Roy | TomDispatch.com
"What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?"
Tom Englehardt: Introduction: Arundhati Roy, Is Democracy Melting?
So you, as a citizen, want to run for a seat in the House of Representatives? Well, you may be too late. Back in 1990, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website of the Center for Responsive Politics, the average cost of a winning campaign for the House was $407,556. Pocket change for your average citizen. But that was so twentieth century. The average cost for winning a House seat in 2008: almost $1.4 million. Keep in mind, as well, that most of those House seats don't change hands, because in the American democratic system of the twenty-first century, incumbents basically don't lose, they retire or die.
In 2008, 403 incumbents ran for seats in the House and 380 of them won. Just to run a losing race last year would have cost you, on average, $492,928, almost $100,000 more than it cost to win in 1990. As for becoming a Senator? Not in your wildest dreams, unless you have some really good pals in pharmaceuticals and health care ($236,022,031 in lobbying paid out in 2008), insurance ($153,694,224), or oil and gas ($131,978,521). A winning senatorial seat came in at a nifty $8,531,267 and a losing seat at $4,130,078 in 2008. In other words, you don't have a hope in hell of being a loser in the American Congressional system, and what does that make you?
Of course, if you're a young, red-blooded American, you may have set your sights a little higher. So you want to be president? In that case, just to be safe for 2012, you probably should consider raising somewhere in the range of one billion dollars. After all, the 2008 campaign cost Barack Obama's team approximately $730 million and the price of a place at the table just keeps going up. Of course, it helps to know the right people. Last year, the total lobbying bill, including money that went out for electoral campaigns and for lobbying Congress and federal agencies, came to $3.3 billion and almost 9 months into 2009, another $1.63 billion has already gone out without an election in sight.
Let's face it. At the national level, this is what American democracy comes down to today, and this is what George W. Bush & Co. were so infernally proud to export by force of arms to Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why we need to think about the questions that Arundhati Roy -- to my mind, a heroic figure in a rather unheroic age -- raises about democracy globally in an essay adapted from the introduction to her latest book. That book, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, has just been published (with one essay included that originally appeared at TomDispatch). Let's face it, she's just one of those authors -- I count Eduardo Galeano as another -- who must be read. Need I say more? Tom
What Have We Done to Democracy?
Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in Kashmir
By Arundhati Roy
While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By "democracy" I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.
So, is there life after democracy?
Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It's flawed, we say. It isn't perfect, but it's better than everything else that's on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: "Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia... is that what you would prefer?"
Whether democracy should be the utopia that all "developing" societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn't meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It's meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy -- too much representation, too little democracy -- needs some structural adjustment.
The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?
Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly -- our nearsightedness?
Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. It would be conceit to pretend I have the answers to any of these questions. But it does look as if the beacon could be failing and democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would.
A Clerk of Resistance
As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.
Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, "apply-through-proper-channels" nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me. My only excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold, calculated violence of the world's favorite new superpower. Repression "through proper channels" sometimes engenders resistance "through proper channels." As resistance goes this isn't enough, I know. But for now, it's all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl.
Today, words like "progress" and "development" have become interchangeable with economic "reforms," "deregulation," and "privatization." Freedom has come to mean choice. It has less to do with the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. Market no longer means a place where you buy provisions. The "market" is a de-territorialized space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling "futures." Justice has come to mean human rights (and of those, as they say, "a few will do").
This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language to voice their critique and dismiss them as being "anti-progress," "anti-development," "anti-reform," and of course "anti-national" -- negativists of the worst sort.
Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, "Don't you believe in progress?" To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs, and whose homes are being bulldozed, they say, "Do you have an alternative development model?" To those who believe that a government is duty bound to provide people with basic education, health care, and social security, they say, "You're against the market." And who except a cretin could be against markets?
To reclaim these stolen words requires explanations that are too tedious for a world with a short attention span, and too expensive in an era when Free Speech has become unaffordable for the poor. This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing.
Two decades of "Progress" in India has created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it -- and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts, and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines, and Special Economic Zones. All developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.
The hoary institutions of Indian democracy -- the judiciary, the police, the "free" press, and, of course, elections -- far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of Union and Progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colorful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.
A New Cold War in Kashmir
Speaking of consensus, there's the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir the consensus in India is hard core. It cuts across every section of the establishment -- including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, and even Bollywood.
The war in the Kashmir valley is almost 20 years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have "disappeared," women have been raped, tens of thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir valley, making it the most militarized zone in the world. (The United States had about 165,000 active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian Army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that's true. But does military domination mean victory?
How does a government that claims to be a democracy justify a military occupation? By holding regular elections, of course. Elections in Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed uprising that began in 1990. Since then elections have become a finely honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for India's deep state. Intelligence agencies have created political parties and decoy politicians, they have constructed and destroyed political careers at will. It is they more than anyone else who decide what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate from the people of Kashmir.
In the summer of 2008, a dispute over land being allotted to the Amarnath Shrine Board coalesced into a massive, nonviolent uprising. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people defied soldiers and policemen -- who fired straight into the crowds, killing scores of people -- and thronged the streets. From early morning to late in the night, the city reverberated to chants of "Azadi! Azadi!" (Freedom! Freedom!). Fruit sellers weighed fruit chanting "Azadi! Azadi!" Shopkeepers, doctors, houseboat owners, guides, weavers, carpet sellers -- everybody was out with placards, everybody shouted "Azadi! Azadi!" The protests went on for several days.
The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were nonviolent. For the first time in decades fissures appeared in mainstream public opinion in India. The Indian state panicked. Unsure of how to deal with this mass civil disobedience, it ordered a crackdown. It enforced the harshest curfew in recent memory with shoot-on-sight orders. In effect, for days on end, it virtually caged millions of people. The major pro-freedom leaders were placed under house arrest, several others were jailed. House-to-house searches culminated in the arrests of hundreds of people.
Once the rebellion was brought under control, the government did something extraordinary -- it announced elections in the state. Pro-independence leaders called for a boycott. They were rearrested. Almost everybody believed the elections would become a huge embarrassment for the Indian government. The security establishment was convulsed with paranoia. Its elaborate network of spies, renegades, and embedded journalists began to buzz with renewed energy. No chances were taken. (Even I, who had nothing to do with any of what was going on, was put under house arrest in Srinagar for two days.)
Calling for elections was a huge risk. But the gamble paid off. People turned out to vote in droves. It was the biggest voter turnout since the armed struggle began. It helped that the polls were scheduled so that the first districts to vote were the most militarized districts even within the Kashmir valley.
None of India's analysts, journalists, and psephologists cared to ask why people who had only weeks ago risked everything, including bullets and shoot-on-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their minds. None of the high-profile scholars of the great festival of democracy -- who practically live in TV studios when there are elections in mainland India, picking apart every forecast and exit poll and every minor percentile swing in the vote count -- talked about what elections mean in the presence of such a massive, year-round troop deployment (an armed soldier for every 20 civilians).
No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who materialized out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous presence in the Kashmir valley. Where had they come from? Who was financing them? No one was curious. No one spoke about the curfew, the mass arrests, the lockdown of constituencies that were going to the polls.
Not many talked about the fact that campaigning politicians went out of their way to de-link Azadi and the Kashmir dispute from elections, which they insisted were only about municipal issues -- roads, water, electricity. No one talked about why people who have lived under a military occupation for decades -- where soldiers could barge into homes and whisk away people at any time of the day or night -- might need someone to listen to them, to take up their cases, to represent them.
The minute elections were over, the establishment and the mainstream press declared victory (for India) once again. The most worrying fallout was that in Kashmir, people began to parrot their colonizers' view of themselves as a somewhat pathetic people who deserved what they got. "Never trust a Kashmiri," several Kashmiris said to me. "We're fickle and unreliable." Psychological warfare, technically known as psy-ops, has been an instrument of official policy in Kashmir. Its depredations over decades -- its attempt to destroy people's self-esteem -- are arguably the worst aspect of the occupation. It's enough to make you wonder whether there is any connection at all between elections and democracy.
The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the fault lines of a region that is awash in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its crystal clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several dangerous and conflicting ideologies -- Indian nationalism (corporate as well as "Hindu," shading into imperialism), Pakistani nationalism (breaking down under the burden of its own contradictions), U.S. imperialism (made impatient by a tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an occupation). Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive, reincarnated Russia, and the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil, and uranium reserves in Kashmir and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new Cold War (which, like the last one, is cold for some and hot for others).
In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India's 150 million Muslims who have been brutalized, humiliated, and marginalized. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.
There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country, or one ideology. Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the "party line."
Of course, we haven't yet reached the stage where the government of India is even prepared to admit that there's a problem, let alone negotiate a solution. Right now it has no reason to. Internationally, its stocks are soaring. And while its neighbors deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps, refugees, and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election. However, "demon-crazy" can't fool all the people all the time. India's temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun), have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.
Is Democracy Melting?
Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40 degrees Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the elements.
The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war -- thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents, and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly.
While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They're good people who believe in peace, free speech, and in human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the U.N. Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan… it's a long list.)
The glacial melt will cause severe floods on the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We'll need more weapons. Who knows? That sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life -- and the glaciers will melt even faster.
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Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. Her new book, just published by Haymarket Books, is Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. This post is adapted from the introduction to that book.
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15:51
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disturbing the comfortable
Not much to say about this:
Hummer Owners Claim Moral High Ground To Excuse Overconsumption, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2009) — Hummer drivers believe they are defending America's frontier lifestyle against anti-American critics, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Authors Marius K. Luedicke (University of Innsbruck, Austria), Craig J. Thompson (University of Wisconsin–Madison), and Markus Giesler (York University, Toronto) researched attitudes toward owning and driving Hummers, which have become symbols to many of American greed and wastefulness.
The researchers first investigated anti-consumption sentiments expressed by people who oppose chains like Starbucks and believe they are making a moral choice by shunning consumerism. To these critics, Hummers represent the ills of contemporary society. As one extreme example, on a website, people have posted thousands of photographs of middle fingers directed at Hummer vehicles.
They investigated various Internet expressions of anti-Hummer sentiment, but they were equally interested in the ways Hummer owners framed themselves as "moral protagonists" in the ongoing debate over consumer values. They conducted in-depth interviews with twenty U.S.-born and raised Hummer owners and found among these consumers an equally strong current of moralism.
"As we studied American Hummer owners and their ideological beliefs, we found that they consider Hummer driving a highly moral consumption choice," write the authors. "For Hummer owners it is possible to claim the moral high ground."
The authors explain that Hummer owners employ the ideology of American foundational myths, such as the "rugged individual," and the "boundless frontier" to construct themselves as moral protagonists. They often believe they represent a bastion again anti-American discourses evoked by their critics.
"Our analysis of the underlying American identity discourses revealed that being under siege by (moral) critics is an historically established feature of being an American," write the authors. "The moralistic critique of their consumption choices readily inspired Hummer owners to adopt the role of the moral protagonist who defends American national ideals."
Journal reference:
- Marius K. Luedicke, Craig J. Thompson, and Markus Giesler. Consumer Identity Work as Moral Protagonism: How Myth and Ideology Animate a Brand- Mediated Moral Conflict. Journal of Consumer Research, April 2010 (published online September 18, 2009)
Adapted from materials provided by University of Chicago Press Journals, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS
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15:28
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disturbing the comfortable
General McClatchey—according to a report I saw—thinks we will need 500,000 soldiers in Afghanistan if we want to thoroughly trounce the troublemakers. Afghanistan has about 36 million people, according to the CIA world fact book.
That means about one soldier for every 750 Afghanis.
At the peak of our intervention in Viet Nam, we had about 500,000 troops there. And the population was, in 1965, say, about 38 million people. Hmm. We couldn't win in Viet Nam with about the same ratio of soldiers per civilians. It's interesting to note that the French General LeClerc, who had commanded the French army of occupation said it would take 500,000 troops to hold the country—"and then it couldn't be done," he's supposed to have said. He was right. Too bad he isn't around to give a commentary on our current mess in Afghanistan. Hey, but we're America! We can do anything because God is on our side! Right? Right? Huh, right, huh? Huh...?
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16:43
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disturbing the comfortable
We actually went out last night: a friend is in a sort of neo-Grateful Dead band here in town. First time I've heard them. The setting was something called a "roots" festival, with a couple of venues over on the west side. It was at a popular yuppie breakfast restaurant, across the street from a popular slacker bar and grill and kitty-corner to a Mexican cafe (witch, under different ownership , was busted a while back for selling drugs through their take-out window, and thus became famous for selling "meth-ican food."). Quite the neighborhood around there.
We had a good time. The stage was in the cafe's parking lot and several hundred people were there. There were old fart freaks, slackers, a few dazed looking overdressed couples, dreadheads and deadheads, a few older activists I know from around town, kids, dogs—you know, all out for an early, warm, evening of Dead-ish rock. There was a lot of beer being drunk, but also a lot of soda pop and bottled water. Several times I got whiffs of patchouli oil and once or twice even a lyrical scent of weed. Some people danced, but other than some young boys, they were all female. The men hung, mostly.
The music was, well, good. Dead-ish without being copy-cat. Our friend did some old Jerry Garcia licks and took most of the vocals. His guitar playing didn't have the drug-addled noodling Garcia would get into, but it was inventive and pretty melodic. The rhythm guitarist sang more like Bob Hunter and that was OK, too. What the hell: it was free, it was fun, it was a Thursday night in the fall, and that was enough!
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10:48
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disturbing the comfortable
Michael Moore has been a bright lamp for years. Witty, smart, insightful, and, above all, funky. He's a product of the working class and has stayed true to those roots longer than, say, Springsteen (nothing against the boss, but the man is a celebrity, and thus The Boss—and no more bosses, OK?). Moore is kind of like Pete Seeger: consistent and true.
"Capitalism: A Love Story" is Moore's latest movie. As you probably have heard. He's on a good big promo tour and I hope the movie gets a big audience. He's been interviewed by Leno, he's been on "The View." The more people who realize that 1% of our population has 95% of our wealth, the better. We need to spread that wealth around; until we do, we really have an oligarchy rather than a democracy. Or a republic. We're not much better than one of those old not-quite legendary "banana republics," only with a very smooth p.r. machine filtering out awareness of the excesses. Moore keeps sliding around the p.r. machine. Way to go.
Naomi Klein is a smart and well-informed interviewer. That puts her several levels above the fluff-folks on TV.
Read on.
Naomi Klein Interviews Michael Moore on the Perils of Capitalism By Naomi Klein, The Nation
Posted on September 25, 2009, Printed on September 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142871/
Editors Note: On Sept. 17, in the midst of the publicity blitz for his cinematic takedown of the capitalist order, filmmaker Michael Moore talked with Nation columnist Naomi Klein by phone about the film, the roots of our economic crisis and the promise and peril of the present political moment. Listen to a podcast of the full conversation here. Following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Naomi Klein: So, the film is wonderful. Congratulations. It is, as many people have already heard, an unapologetic call for a revolt against capitalist madness. But the week it premiered, a very different kind of revolt was in the news: the so-called tea parties, seemingly a passionate defense of capitalism and against social programs.
Meanwhile, we are not seeing too many signs of the hordes storming Wall Street.
Personally, I'm hoping that your film is going to be the wake-up call and the catalyst for all of that changing. But I'm just wondering how you're coping with this odd turn of events, these revolts for capitalism led by Glenn Beck.
Michael Moore: I don't know if they're so much revolts in favor of capitalism as they are being fueled by a couple of different agendas, one being the fact that a number of Americans still haven't come to grips with the fact that there's an African American who is their leader. And I don't think they like that.
NK: Do you see that as the main driving force for the tea parties?
MM: I think it's one of the forces -- but I think there's a number of agendas at work here. The other agenda is the corporate agenda. The health care companies and other corporate concerns are helping to pull together what seems like a spontaneous outpouring of citizen anger.
But the third part of this is -- and this is what I really have always admired about the right wing -- they are organized, they are dedicated, they are up at the crack of dawn fighting their fight. And on our side, I don't really see that kind of commitment.
When they were showing up at the town-hall meetings in August -- those meetings are open to everyone. So where are the people from our side? And then I thought, wow, it's August. You ever try to organize anything on the left in August?
NK: Wasn't part of it also, though, that the left, or progressives, or whatever you want to call them, have been in something of a state of disarray with regard to the Obama administration -- that most people favor universal health care, but they couldn't rally behind it because it wasn't on the table?
MM: Yes. And that's why [President Barack] Obama keeps turning around and looking for the millions behind him, supporting him, and there's nobody even standing there, because he chose to take a half measure instead of the full measure that needed to happen. Had he taken the full measure -- true single-payer, universal health care -- I think he'd have millions out there backing him up.
NK: Now that [Montana Democrat Sen. Max] Baucus' plan is going down in flames, do you think there's another window to put universal health care on the table?
MM: Yes. And we need people to articulate the message and get out in front of this and lead it. You know, there's close to a hundred Democrats in Congress who had already signed on as co-signers to [Michigan Democratic Congressman] John Conyers' bill.
Obama, I think, realizes now that whatever he thought he was trying to do with bipartisanship or holding up the olive branch, that the other side has no interest in anything other than the total destruction of anything he has stood for or was going to try and do.
So if [New York Democratic Congressman Anthony] Weiner or any of the other members of Congress want to step forward, now would be the time. And I certainly would be out there. I am out there.
I mean, I would use this time right now to really rally people, because I think the majority of the country wants this.
NK: Coming back to Wall Street, I want to talk a little bit more about this strange moment that we're in, where the rage that was directed at Wall Street, what was being directed at AIG executives when people were showing up in their driveways -- I don't know what happened to that.
My fear was always that this huge anger that you show in the film, the kind of uprising in the face of the bailout, which forced Congress to vote against it that first time, that if that anger wasn't continuously directed at the most powerful people in society, at the elites, at the people who had created the disaster and channeled into a real project for changing the system, then it could easily be redirected at the most vulnerable people in society; I mean immigrants, or channeled into racist rage.
And what I'm trying to sort out now is, is it the same rage or do you think these are totally different streams of American culture -- have the people who were angry at AIG turned their rage on Obama and on the idea of health reform?
MM: I don't think that is what has happened. I'm not so sure they're the same people.
In fact, I can tell you from my travels across the country while making the film, and even in the last few weeks, there is something else that's simmering beneath the surface.
You can't avoid the anger boiling over at some point when you have 1 in 8 mortgages in delinquency or foreclosure, where there's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds, and the unemployment rate keeps growing. That will have its own tipping point.
And the scary thing about that is that historically, at times when that has happened, the right has been able to successfully manipulate those who have been beaten down and use their rage to support what they used to call fascism.
Where has it gone since the crash? It's a year later. I think that people felt like they got it out of their system when they voted for Obama six weeks later and that he was going to ride into town and do the right thing. And he's kind of sauntered into town promising to do the right thing but not accomplishing a whole heck of a lot.
Now, that's not to say that I'm not really happy with a number of things I've seen him do.
To hear a president of the United States admit that we overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran, that's one of the things on my list I thought I'd never hear in my lifetime. So there have been those moments.
And maybe I'm just a bit too optimistic here, but he was raised by a single mother and grandparents, and he did not grow up with money. And when he was fortunate enough to be able to go to Harvard and graduate from there, he didn't then go and do something where he could become rich; he decides to go work in the inner city of Chicago.
Oh, and he decides to change his name back to what it was on the birth certificate -- Barack. Not exactly the move of somebody who's trying to become a politician. So he's shown us, I think, in his lifetime many things about where his heart is, and he slipped up during the campaign and told Joe the Plumber that he believed in spreading the wealth.
And I think that those things that he believes in are still there. Now, it's kind of up to him.
If he's going to listen to the [Robert] Rubins and the [Tim] Geithners and the [Robert] Summerses, you and I lose. And a lot of people who have gotten involved, many of them for the first time, won't get involved again.
He will have done more to destroy what needs to happen in this country in terms of people participating in their democracy. So I hope he understands the burden that he's carrying and does the right thing.
NK: Well, I want to push you a little bit on this, because I understand what you're saying about the way he's lived his life and certainly the character he appears to have. But he is the person who appointed Summers and Geithner, who you're very appropriately hard on in the film.
And one year later, he hasn't reined in Wall Street. He reappointed [Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke. He's not just appointed Summers but has given him an unprecedented degree of power for a mere economic adviser.
MM: And meets with him every morning.
NK: Exactly. So what I worry about is this idea that we're always psychoanalyzing Obama, and the feeling I often hear from people is that he's being duped by these guys. But these are his choices, and so why not judge him on his actions and really say, "This is on him, not on them"?
MM: I agree. I don't think he is being duped by them; I think he's smarter than all of them.
When he first appointed them, I had just finished interviewing a bank robber who didn't make it into the film, but he is a bank robber who is hired by the big banks to advise them on how to avoid bank robberies.
So in order to not sink into a deep, dark pit of despair, I said to myself that night, That's what Obama's doing. Who better to fix the mess than the people who created it? He's bringing them in to clean up their own mess. Yeah, yeah. That's it. That's it. Just keep repeating it: "There's no place like home, there's no place like home ..."
NK: And now it turns out they were just being brought in to keep stealing.
MM: Right. So now it's on him.
NK: All right. Let's talk about the film some more.
I saw you on [Jay] Leno, and I was struck that one of his first questions to you was this objection -- that it's greed that's evil, not capitalism. And this is something that I hear a lot -- this idea that greed or corruption is somehow an aberration from the logic of capitalism rather than the engine and the centerpiece of capitalism.
And I think that that's probably something you're already hearing about the terrific sequence in the film about those corrupt Pennsylvania judges who were sending kids to private prison and getting kickbacks. I think people would say, "That's not capitalism, that's corruption."
Why is it so hard to see the connection, and how are you responding to this?
MM: Well, people want to believe that it's not the economic system that's at the core of all this. You know, it's just a few bad eggs. But the fact of the matter is that, as I said to Jay, capitalism is the legalization of this greed.
Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control.
Capitalism does the opposite of that. It not only doesn't really put any structure or restriction on it. It encourages it, it rewards it.
I'm asked this question every day, because people are pretty stunned at the end of the movie to hear me say that it should just be eliminated altogether. And they're like, "Well, what's wrong with making money? Why can't I open a shoe store?"
And I realized that [because] we no longer teach economics in high school, they don't really understand what any of it means.
The point is that when you have capitalism, capitalism encourages you to think of ways to make money or to make more money. And the judges never could have gotten the kickbacks had the county not privatized the juvenile hall.
But because there's been this big push in the past 20 or 30 years to privatize government services, take it out of our hands, put it in the hands of people whose only concern is their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders or to their own pockets, it has messed everything up.
NK: The thing that I found most exciting in the film is that you make a very convincing pitch for democratically run workplaces as the alternative to this kind of loot-and-leave capitalism.
So I'm just wondering, as you're traveling around, are you seeing any momentum out there for this idea?
MM: People love this part of the film. I've been kind of surprised, because I thought people aren't maybe going to understand this or it seems too hippie-dippy -- but it really has resonated in the audiences that I've seen it with.
But, of course, I've pitched it as a patriotic thing to do. So if you believe in democracy, democracy can't be being able to vote every two or four years. It has to be every part of every day of your life.
We've changed relationships and institutions around quite considerably because we've decided democracy is a better way to do it. Two hundred years ago, you had to ask a woman's father for permission to marry her, and then once the marriage happened, the man was calling all the shots. And legally, women couldn't own property and things like that.
Thanks to the women's movement of the '60s and '70s, this idea was introduced to that relationship -- that both people are equal and both people should have a say. And I think we're better off as a result of introducing democracy into an institution like marriage.
But we spend eight to 10 to 12 hours of our daily lives at work, where we have no say.
I think when anthropologists dig us up 400 years from now -- if we make it that far -- they're going to say, "Look at these people back then. They thought they were free. They called themselves a democracy, but they spent 10 hours of every day in a totalitarian situation, and they allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined."
Truly they're going to laugh at us the way we laugh at people 150 years ago who put leeches on people's bodies to cure them.
NK: It is one of those ideas that keeps coming up. At various points in history it's been an enormously popular idea. It is actually what people wanted in the former Soviet Union instead of the Wild West sort of mafia capitalism that they ended up with. And what people wanted in Poland in 1989 when they voted for Solidarity was for their state-owned companies to be turned into democratically run workplaces, not to be privatized and looted.
But one of the biggest barriers I've found in my research around worker cooperatives is not just government and companies being resistant to it but actually unions as well. Obviously there are exceptions, like the union in your film, United Electrical Workers, which was really open to the idea of the Republic Windows & Doors factory being turned into a cooperative, if that's what the workers wanted.
But in most cases, particularly with larger unions, they have their script, and when a factory is being closed down, their job is to get a big payout -- as big a payout as they can, as big a severance package as they can for the workers. And they have a dynamic that is in place, which is that the powerful ones, the decision makers, are the owners.
You had your U.S. premiere at the AFL-CIO convention. How are you finding labor leadership in relation to this idea? Are they open to it, or are you hearing, "Well, this isn't really workable"? Because, I know you've also written about the idea that some of the auto plant factories or auto parts factories that are being closed down could be turned into factories producing subway cars, for instance. The unions would need to champion that idea for it to work.
MM: I sat there in the theater the other night with about 1,500 delegates of the AFL-CIO convention, and I was a little nervous as we got near that part of the film, and I was worried that it was going to get a little quiet in there.
Just the opposite. They cheered it. A couple people shouted out, "Right on!" "Absolutely!"
I think that unions at this point have been so beaten down, they're open to some new thinking and some new ideas. And I was very encouraged to see that.
The next day at the convention, the AFL-CIO passed a resolution supporting single-payer health care. I thought, "Wow," you know? Things are changing.
NK: Coming back to what we were talking about a little earlier, about people's inability to understand basic economic theory: In your film, you have this great scene where you can't get anybody, no matter how educated they are, to explain what a derivative is.
So it isn't just about basic education. It's that complexity is being used as a weapon against democratic control over the economy. This was [Alan] Greenspan's argument -- that derivatives were so complicated that lawmakers couldn't regulate them.
It's almost as if there needs to be a movement toward simplicity in economics or in financial affairs, which is something that Elizabeth Warren, the chief bailout watchdog for Congress, has been talking about in terms of the need to simplify people's relationships with lenders.
So I'm wondering what you think about that.
Also, this isn't really much of a question, but isn't Elizabeth Warren sort of incredible? She's kind of like the anti-Summers. It's enough to give you hope, that she exists.
MM: Absolutely. And can I suggest a presidential ticket for 2016 or 2012 if Obama fails us? [Ohio Democratic Congresswoman] Marcy Kaptur and Elizabeth Warren.
NK: I love it. They really are the heroes of your film. I would vote for that.
I was thinking about what to call this piece, and what I'm going to suggest to my editor is "America's Teacher," because the film is this incredible piece of old-style popular education.
One of the things that my colleague at The Nation Bill Greider talks about is that we don't do this kind of popular education anymore, that unions used to have budgets to do this kind of thing for their members, to just unpack economic theory and what's going on in the world and make it accessible.
I know you see yourself as an entertainer, but I'm wondering, do you also see yourself as a teacher?
MM: I'm honored that you would use such a term. I like teachers.
Naomi Klein's latest book is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
© 2009 The Nation All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
[www.alternet.org] 
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15:38
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disturbing the comfortable
Evenings, I enjoy reading history. No specific areas, and usually semi-popular retellings and interpretations of history. A few areas, like north American history, I like reading the primary sources; otherwise, 2ndary sources are dandy.
Barbara Tuchman is one of my favorite writers, of course. She was witty and wise. Her analysis of American policy in the Viet Nam War is devastating. Lately I've been reading Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution. It's a study of the French, the English ("The Great"), the American, and the Russian revolutions. Both books seem relevant to the current scene. Afghanistan and the increasing troop levels bring back echoes from the past. We keep adding troops while knowing the government we're supporting stinks like a cesspool. Afghanistan 's reputation as an Empire Eater is widely known. The dynamics of revolutionary movements, particularly the thuggish stages where the legitimate government is overwhelmed, have parallels in today's far-right demonstrations like "tea bags" actions and the rudeness of town-hall disruptions. History does not repeat itself, but people too often do just that, as Freud and Jung and countless other explorers of consciousness have pointed out.
We got trouble right here in River City, folks.
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18:03
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disturbing the comfortable
Got a temporary reprieve from the colonoscopy: at least for a week. Actually, I'd rather just drink the polyethylene glycol and get it over with. But, doctors move in orbits that earthlings can only hope to link with on occasion.
So do capitalists.
Our daily daily, the—well, I'll just call it the Daily Daily—came out opposed to the minimum wage. Great: when people with jobs are squeaking through the checkout lines in grocery stores with food stamps, dodging bill collectors, and wondering what will happen if any of their family members get sick, the paper thinks wages should go lower. That's...really Christian of them. White of them. Thoughtless of them. Cold-hearted. I swear to god that paper would roll us back to the presidency of Wm McKinley if it could. Wages? Too high. Profits too low. Government? Too meddling. Growth? Wonderful! More more more growth!
Edward Abbey, you don't know what you've missed out on.
The Daily Daily, to be a bit even-handed, is heavily invested in our town as a growth industry; they agitated for a fourth crossing of the river so that the west side of town could grow faster; they find odious any land-use planning that prohibits growth (I was a bit even handed in that earlier clause), and they object to a recent statistic about the number of homeless in central Oregon (they believe it's way too high and it's bad publicity). A few years ago they moved from an old publishing plant on the east side of the river to a new huge one on the west side, and now their paper is very slender. There are so many houses for sale that few people are even bothering tolist them. There are usually less than two dozen jobs in the "Employment" section. The only growth section of the paper is in the classified section, though, where the foreclosures and sheriff's sales are listed.
And their favorite letters are the ones attacking the current administration, I do believe. Their cartoons certainly do that...
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17:12
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disturbing the comfortable
A night out in the woods, camped along a river. Chipmonks—OK, golden mantle ground squirrels, crested jays, scrub jays, a campfire. Like a long meditation, like being stoned. Sitting, watching, not thinking. Beth pointed out that we were the white trash element, because we had the dirty van, no big 5th wheel rig, not even a newer van and high-tech tent. Well, gee. I'd like to have, I think, a class B van, all self-contained, with room to stand up in it. But, we don't. This one works. No blame.
Anything new? Yeah, the Armed Right had a big rally in D.C., yawn. Once again, I'll mention there are a lot of people preaching sedition and if people had protested as loudly against Bush's policies, there would have been lot more arrests and broken heads. Tom Ridge would have called out the troops; at least Dick Cheney would have. There would have been hell to pay.
There may be hell to pay, yet. There're increasing numbers of attacks on homeless people, who make a good scapegoat. I think it's only a slight notch up to where the cars of liberals—like ones with bumper stickers, get thumped and vandalized. Libs are going to be the big scapegoats for these "tea party patriots." It's always easier to go after non-violent people than ones who might fight back. Assuming Democrats and liberals are passive...which not all of us are...
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18:10
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disturbing the comfortable
Somebody (aka Anonymous) responded to an old post about Cindy Sohappy, the girl from Warm Springs who died in a holding cell at Chemawa Indian school. This was a few years back. Ms Sohappy came back on campus drunk, was locked up, and subsequently died unattended because nobody checked on her. Kind of manslaughter by indifference. Nobody ever got punished for it.
The school is still there, slogging along, trying to help adolescents graduate from high school and get their heads on straight. Originally Chemawa was one of those Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools where Indian kids were supposed to be taught to become (low-echelon) white people. Thousands of students died in those boarding schools, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Measles, flu, heartbreak—sort of similar to the way Indians died in the Spanish missions down in California. We'll probably never know exactly how many. The kids were whipped for trying to speak their native languages; forcibly, their hair was cut; they had to wear, at least the boys, idiotic little pseudo-military uniforms and the girls were dressed like house-maids. That was the least of what happened to many of them. Do you believe in ghosts, bad spirits? I've been to Chemawa a half dozen times, walked the old grounds, and never found a cemetary. Has to be one, yeah.
Are there bad spirits hanging around a place with such sorrowful history? Like around, say, Big Hole Battlefield or the site of the Sand Creek Massacre or a thousand other places were awful things happened to the First People? I've visited some of those places and always left before sundown. I know there are good spirits around certain places—like Bear Butte in South Dakota, say. So, yeah, I think maybe there are some things at a place like Chemawa that are not healthy. I suppose that sounds like a Steven King plot, but...
Just rambling thoughts on the day after Labor Day.
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20:42
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disturbing the comfortable
September song: "Where did August go?"
Lily Tomlin turned 70 the other day: Happy Birthday, Lily, you're an asset! Your quote about satire being too hard because it's so difficult to keep up with things...We're living in a society that has become a satire of itself, right? I mean, who are these people screaming that Obama is a liberal/Nazi/Communist/Socialist who's trying to take over the country? These people are actually preaching Sedition, I believe. That's a major crime in my book. There's also, I think, a covert strategy to get some tinfoil-hat-wearer to whack our President. It may be an unconscious plot, even, but given our history, if you turn the heat up high enough, somebody's going to do something really stupid. Like assassinate the POTUS. I know everybody is stressed by the economy and a clear realization that yes, Virginia, the US did commit acts of torture.
What else is left of the American National Air-Conditioned Nightmare? Not much. We're not god's chosen after all—no more than the Russians, the Germans, Italians, Spanish...we're just nice normal f**kedup people. We behave no better than anybody else. That is a hard realization, especially when scoundrels like O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Palin, and others are still screaming that We Are The Elect.
We're not. Nobody is.
Why not just admit it? Why kill people who keep telling the truth? Because if they'd just shut up then everything will be OK, again. Sure.
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20:32
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disturbing the comfortable
Crap! Goof off for a while and the whole damn' world goes bonkers. I mean, where do you start? Lou Dobbs and the "birthers"? The shameful Democrat surrender over health care "reform"? Our increasing involvment in Afghanistan? Whatever happened to closing Guantanamo?
There is no longer any way of approaching the current world events with a straight face. We have sunk into total and complete satire—except it isn't satire any more, it's real life. It's a good thing we're only one planet in the universe: if we were more than that we'd be dangerous to everything including ourselves. As it is, the universe will little note nor long remember the little third planet from the sun...Except maybe as an object lesson.
America seems to have sunk back into middle 19th Century racism, along with the vast international empire we've maintained. The current furor over Obama's birth certificate is utterly nuts. So is our cancerous military budget—more than all the other countries on earth put together (and we've been fighting a rag-tag band of mountain guerillas in Afghanistan for eight years and can't defeat them...). We cannot get decent health care for all our citizens, not just the rich ones. If you're rich or middle-class you can live quite well, but if you're poor you might as well slit your wrists because the country doesn't want you around—except to mow lawns and clean up trash. What in the hell went on?
Nothing "went on." It's just the very careful and very thick make-up we put on over America's withered face finally started cracking and peeling. The lines, the scabs, the running sores, there they are for everyone to see. Just drive down the street and see the beggars. See the emotional crips stumbling along. Look over there, there's some gang-bangers out to find trouble. See the gold-plated rich folks pretending not to notice.
Yeah, I'm feeling kind of cynical about it all. Disappointed again, sigh. If we have real change makers, we kill them; the ones who promise change but don't deliver, well, they're OK. S**t.
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18:08
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disturbing the comfortable
I was just checking Ten Bears' blog, Homeless on the High Desert, and wanted to comment on a couple of his postings. Couldn't figure out how to do it. One was on the Bend Bulletin's editorial today about how the stimulus was a failure. Yeah.
The Bulletin is doing a remarkable job of trying to return to the thrilling days of the administration of Herbert Hoover. It's as though somebody fed the paper regression/reaction pills. They consistently come out against taxes on the rich, any sort of government action, and manage to editorialize their front page... It has become as informative as a Republican newsletter. I guess, on second thought, it is a Republican newsletter. Not a very big one, either. If it wasn't for foreclosure notices they could probably print their classified section on one 8 X 10 sheet of paper. The front section isn't much larger. The business section is simply a fold-over.
The other item I wanted to comment on was something about some pastor praying for Obama's death. That's really frightening. We know the right wing has a vast collection of guns and we know many of them are convinced they know god's will and it's for them to save this this country from Satan. I didn't expect, over the years, such a self-righteous wave of rage to sweep the country. I actually thought we were winning, slowly but surely. We being the forces of progressive politics, compassion, mediation not violence, and so on and so forth. I was wrong, yeah. The hyper-right has gone totally bat-s**t.
Now, the problem is, that we don't go bat-s**t trying to keep up with them.
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16:32
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disturbing the comfortable
According to a report on the Huffington Post, MSNBC anchors apologized because someone actually told the truth (god forbid): (function() { ad_spec = { "zone_info": "huffpost.media/news;media=1;politics=1;entry_id=230967;@ypolitics=1;@yus-news=1;@yvideo=1;david-shuster=1;marcy-wheeler=1;marcy-wheeler-blow-job=1;marcy-wheeler-msnbc-blow-job=1;msnbc-blow-job=1", "tile": 1, "interstitial": false, "width": 728, "height": 90, "el_id": "ad_728_90", "class_name": "ad_block ad_728_90b", "type": "iframe" } HuffPoUtil.WEDGJE.write(ad_spec); })(); _uacct = "UA-71081-1"; _uccn="HPVerticals"; _ucmd="HPInternal"; _uctr="Media"; _ucct="1.0"; urchinTracker(); _qoptions = { labels:"Media" }; _qacct="p-6fTutip1SMLM2";quantserve(); I Like It
I Don’t Like It --> Marcy Wheeler of FireDogLake, appeared on MSNBC Monday to argue for an investigation of secret C.I.A. operations under President Bush. But all of the post-segment discussion focused on her use of the word
"blow job", which drew an apology from the anchors.
Wheeler was responding to Townhall's Matt Lewis, who argued that looking backwards and "investigating policies and activities that happened in a previous administration" would set a bad precedent.
"[Y]our idea is that after investigating Bill Clinton for a blow job for like five years, we shouldn't investigate the huge, grossly illegal things that were done under the past administration, only because Alberto Gonzales was too much in the back pocket of Dick Cheney to do it while he was still in office," Wheeler said. "That's ridiculous."
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17:36
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disturbing the comfortable
Yeah. One of the famous lines of abusers is "Now see what you made me do!" Like, it's all your fault I hit/f**ked/molested/killed/insulted you—I'm really innocent. I'm the real victim. You put your face in the way of my fist.
So...the reporter from the Vancouver Sun has an account on Kos. Whoop-de-doo. That means, I guess, that he is therefore untrustworthy. So...did he make the Freepers write those absolutely foul comments about Malia Obama? This seems unclear. Maybe he wrote them all himself? Or, did he pay those corrupt lib-symps to write them? Or, what? The point is, the Free Republic is a web site for armed conservative paranoids—or, if their records prohibit them from owning weapons, the wannabe-be-armed conservatives. And, anymore, it seems like it's the waaay out in right field folks who love to blame others for their own aggressions.
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19:44
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disturbing the comfortable
When I saw this article, the only response I could make was "Whaaat?" Just think what the Free Republic folks would have come up with Malia was Jewish... This is what the "conservatives" are about, these days. They don't care what they say or how racist they sound: they have permission to be blind and vicious and they got permission from folks like Bill-O, Rush, Michelle Malkin, and Hal Turner. I'm disgusted and embarrassed.
Conservative Free Republic blog in free speech flap after racial slurs directed at Obama children By Chris Parry, Vancouver SunJuly 11, 2009 function resizeImage() { var imgBox = document.getElementById('imageBox'); var photo = document.getElementById('storyphoto'); if (imgBox != null & photo != null) { if(photo.width >= 460) { imgBox.className = 'imagesize460'; } else { if(photo.width >= 300) { imgBox.className = 'imagesize310'; } else { imgBox.className = 'imageboxpadding'; } imgBox.style.width = photo.width + 'px'; } } } function getStoryFontSize() { var storyfontsize = getCookie('storyfontsize'); // use cookied value, if present if (storyfontsize != null) { setClass('story_content',storyfontsize); } else // default it to para14 if no cookie { setClass('story_content','para14'); } } function getCookie( check_name ) { // split this cookie up into name/value pairs var a_all_cookies = document.cookie.split( ';' ); var a_temp_cookie = ''; var cookie_name = ''; var cookie_value = ''; var b_cookie_found = false; // set boolean t/f default f for ( i = 0; i 1 ) { cookie_value = unescape( a_temp_cookie[1].replace(/^s+|s+$/g, '') ); } // note that in cases where cookie is initialized but no value, null is returned return cookie_value; break; } a_temp_cookie = null; cookie_name = ''; } if ( !b_cookie_found ) { return null; } }
This photo of U.S. President Barrack Obama's daughter Malia, wearing a peace-symbol t-shirt touched off a storm of epithet-laced comments on the conservative 'Free Republic' blog
Photograph by: Remo Casilli , Reuters
"A typical street whore." "A bunch of ghetto thugs." "Ghetto street trash." "Wonder when she will get her first abortion."
These are a small selection of some of the racially-charged comments posted to the conservative 'Free Republic' blog Thursday, aimed at U.S. President Barack Obama's 11-year-old daughter Malia after she was photographed wearing a t-shirt with a peace sign on the front.
The thread was accompanied by a photo of Michelle Obama speaking to Malia that featured the caption, "To entertain her daughter, Michelle Obama loves to make monkey sounds."
Though this may sound like the sort of thing one might read on an Aryan Nation or white power website, they actually appeared on what is commonly considered one of the prime online locations for U.S. Conservative grassroots political discussion and organizing - and for a short time, the comments seemed to have the okay of site administrators.
Moderators of the blog left the comments - and commenters - in place until a complaint was lodged by a writer doing research on the conservative movement, almost a full day later.
"Could you imagine what world leaders must be thinking seeing this kind of street trash and that we paid for this kind of street ghetto trash to go over there?" wrote one commenter.
"They make me sick .... The whole family... mammy, pappy, the free loadin' mammy-in-law, the misguided chillin', and especially 'lil cuz... This is not the America I want representin' my peeps," wrote another.
Such was the onslaught of derision on the site that the person who originally complained about the slurs, a Kristin N., claims only one comment in the first hundred posted actually criticized the remarks as inappropriate.
A note on the front of the blog reads, "Free Republic does not advocate or condone racism, violence, rebellion, secession, or an overthrow of the government," but one comment on the thread read, "This disgusting display makes me more and more eager for the revolution," while another read, "I never actually wnated [sic] to be a pistol before but..."
After attention from other blogs, the thread was suppressed and placed under review, but before long it was returned to the site intact, and attracted a new series of racial slurs when the original complaint email was posted publicly to the site, with the sender's email address intact.
"The writer has a point," wrote site owner Jim Thompson sarcastically. "We should steer clear of Obama's children. They can't help it if their old man is an American-hating Marxist pig."
"I agree Jim," wrote commenter, by the nickname NoobRep. "The kids didn't pick their commie pinko pansy of a father. Nor did they choose to be put into the spotlight. But Obama/Soetoro is fair game and so is his witch of a wife."
"Poor kids. I hope they're not 'punished with a baby'," wrote another. "Hopefully they won't deal cocaine like the Kenyan."
"DIRTBAGS! All of them. Our [White House] is now a joke to the rest of the world. We have no respect and this is not going to turn out well, mark my words. We will be hit, and much worse than last time. We are now seen as weak and vulnerable. Ghetto and Chicago thugs have taken over."
Only after significant negative attention from a host of left wing political blogs did the maintainers of the Free Republic site place the thread under review for a second time, before finally pulling it.
In the wake of the controversy, some Free Republic posters complained about the vitriol.
One poster by the name of "fullchroma" wrote, "To Jim Thompson: The recent uptick here in racist vitriol, aimed at Barrack, Michelle and their children has made me wonder if I belong. My objection to Obama has nothing to do with skin tone. Is the ugly stereotype of Conservative racism true?"
Another, going by the name of TChris, wrote, "Free Republic is a political discussion forum. It SHOULD be beneath us as a group to stoop to such juvenile tactics as I see increasing here lately. Do we REALLY have to insult Mrs. Obama's appearance like a clique of nasty 14-year-old girls?"
But such opinions were not shared by all. Said Roses of Sharon, "Poor libs .... Too late, the battle has been joined."
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun // load up cookied story font size getStoryFontSize();
This photo of U.S. President Barrack Obama's daughter Malia, wearing a peace-symbol t-shirt touched off a storm of epithet-laced comments on the conservative 'Free Republic' blog
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17:13
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disturbing the comfortable
We just got back from a trip to Bi-Mart. Bi-Mart, as far as I'm concerned, is part of the Oregon Experience. No yuppies, usually, lots of old farts and fartettes, shopping for necessities, like plumbing stuff or house-wares, lots of people always in the sporting goods section.
I've been shopping at Bi-Mart for thirty or so years. It's like a small regional K-Mart. I love it. However.
You remember, a couple of months ago I took a bad fall and got broken up. I spent about six weeks in a wheelchair. A month or so back, when I was in the wheelchair, we went to Bi-Mart here in Bend. No automatic door. A sign on the door about how if you needed assistance, to stop by the service desk and they'd be happy to help. The service desk is inside, sure. So one friend opened the door and Beth wheeled me inside. The clerk at the service desk looked surprised that I was unhappy about the door. After a while, an assistant manager came and told me that many people in wheelchairs went to the exit door and waited until someone came out—the exit door, of course, is automatic. From the inside. He said there was a button on the outside of the door that would open it. No sign anywhere about that being the handicapped accessible door. The button was a reach for someone of average height, let alone sitting in a wheelchair. I complained in my polite way and sent a "customer satisfaction" form off to corporate HQ. That was about a month ago.
Today, the same scene. Nothing has changed. The clerk at the service desk told me a sign on the front door said where the accessible door was. I read it to her. It didn't mention an accessible door anywhere. She said, well you know where it is. I said, yes, and I know that Bend doesn't really care about disabled access but that doesn't mean Bi-Mart doesn't have to care either. She was nice, but clueless. I think that's the problem: people who aren't disabled have so much privilege they don't realize how many people there are they don't have those privileges—nor how much those of us who are disabled feel about being ignored. The ADA laws have been around for a generation now, and they still, at least here in Bend, are considered a problem more than a solution.
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14:09
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disturbing the comfortable
...which is going to take longer to recover: our economy or my shoulder. No causation here, just a little correlation, I hope. There sure aren't any big public works projects going on, or even in the talk-about stage.
Public works projects don't have to be on the scale of Grand Coulee or Hoover Dam. It's the P.R. that goes with them, I believe. Stuff like, "Renovating America's Cities, One Block at a Time!" or "Mile by Mile, We're Repaving American Roads!" A lot of economic recovery involves altering how people think and feel. They need to feel—we all need to feel—that change is happening, not that it's more of the same, a bunch of old white guys in thousand dollar suits making deals and calling it Government.
I'm big on positive thinking these days because it's what's keeping me on with exercising my new shoulder and not getting discouraged that eight weeks have gone by and I still can't walk and swing my arm like a normie can. Eight weeks isn't a long time, I know, but there's a part of me that's cynical and says, Jesus, this isn't ever going to get better. I want instant gratification. I want it now! So the prayer is always, Creator, I want to have patience and I want to have it right now...
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10:53
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disturbing the comfortable
Here're some wise words from a columnist I have great respect for, Bob Scheer, about the death (at least the bodily death—his soul died decades back) of Robert McNamara.
I go into this because McNamara was an Everyman: technologically advanced but morally delayed, sincerely shallow, and in love with his own perceived power. He could be any of us, except for the half-understood Mystery that makes us one person and not another. And he did, the son-of-a-bitch, cause the deaths of millions of people.
The trouble is, there are thousands more Bob McNamaras out there, awaiting their chances.
Published on The Smirking Chimp (
http://www.smirkingchimp.com) McNamara's Evil Lives On By Robert Scheer Created Jul 8 2009 - 10:53am
— from Truthdig [1]
Why not speak ill of the dead?
Robert McNamara, who died this week, was a complex man--charming even, in a blustery way, and someone I found quite thoughtful when I interviewed him. In the third act of his life he was often an advocate for enlightened positions on world poverty and the dangers of the nuclear arms race. But whatever his better nature, it was the stark evil he perpetrated as secretary of defense that must indelibly frame our memory of him.
To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be to mock the memory of the millions of innocent people McNamara caused to be maimed and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never made any sense. Much has been made of the fact that he recanted his support for the war, but that came 20 years after the holocaust he visited upon Vietnam was over.
Is holocaust too emotionally charged a word? How many millions of dead innocent civilians does it take to qualify labels like holocaust, genocide or terrorism? How many of the limbless victims of his fragmentation bombs and land mines whom I saw in Vietnam during and after the war? Or are America's leaders always to be exempted from such questions? Perhaps if McNamara had been held legally accountable for his actions, the architects of the Iraq debacle might have paused.
Instead, McNamara was honored with the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, to whom he had written a private memo nine months earlier offering this assessment of their Vietnam carnage: "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one."
He knew it then, and, give him this, the dimensions of that horror never left him. When I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times in 1995, after the publication of his confessional memoir, his assessment of the madness he had unleashed was all too clear:
"Look, we dropped three to four times the tonnage on that tiny little area as were dropped by the Allies in all of the theaters in World War II over a period of five years. It was unbelievable. We killed--there were killed--3,200,000 Vietnamese, excluding the South Vietnamese military. My God! The killing, the tonnage--it was fantastic. The problem was that we were trying to do something that was militarily impossible--we were trying to break the will; I don't think we can break the will by bombing short of genocide."
We--no, he--couldn't break their will because their fight was for national independence. They had defeated the French and would defeat the Americans who took over when French colonialists gave up the ghost. The war was a lie from the first. It never had anything to do with the freedom of the Vietnamese (we installed one tyrant after another in power), but instead had to do with our irrational Cold War obsession with "international communism." Irrational, as President Richard Nixon acknowledged when he embraced detente with the Soviet communists, toasted China's fierce communist Mao Tse-tung and then escalated the war against "communist" Vietnam and neutral Cambodia.
It was always a lie and our leaders knew it, but that did not give them pause. Both Johnson and Nixon make it quite clear on their White House tapes that the mindless killing, McNamara's infamous body count, was about domestic politics and never security.
The lies are clearly revealed in the Pentagon Papers study that McNamara commissioned, but they were made public only through the bravery of Daniel Ellsberg. Yet when Ellsberg, a former Marine who had worked for McNamara in the Pentagon, was in the docket facing the full wrath of Nixon's Justice Department, McNamara would lift not a finger in his defense. Worse, as Ellsberg reminded me this week, McNamara threatened that if subpoenaed to testify at the trial by Ellsberg's defense team, "I would hurt your client badly."
Not as badly as those he killed or severely wounded. Not as badly as the almost 59,000 American soldiers killed and the many more horribly hurt. One of them was the writer and activist Ron Kovic, who as a kid from Long Island was seduced by McNamara's lies into volunteering for two tours in Vietnam. Eventually, struggling with his mostly paralyzed body, he spoke out against the war in the hope that others would not have to suffer as he did (and still does). Meanwhile, McNamara maintained his golden silence, even as Richard Nixon managed to kill and maim millions more. What McNamara did was evil--deeply so.
_______
About author
Robert Scheer is the editor of Truthdig. rscheer@truthdig.com [2]
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10:47
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disturbing the comfortable
So Robert McNamara is dead. I'm sad his family has to go through the loss. But he was a man who brought a lot of death and destruction to millions of other familes.
July 7, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist After the War Was Over By
BOB HERBERT Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s icy-veined, cold-visaged and rigidly intellectual point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless deaths, has died at the ripe old age of 93.
Long after the horror of Vietnam was over, McNamara would concede, in remarks that were like salt in the still festering wounds of the loved ones of those who had died, that he had been “wrong, terribly wrong” about the war. I felt nothing but utter contempt for his concession.
I remember getting my draft notice in the mid-1960s as Johnson’s military buildup for the war was in full swing. I’m not sure what I expected. Probably that the other recruits would be a tough bunch, that they would all look like John Wayne. I was staggered on the first day of basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., to be part of a motley gathering of mostly scared and skinny kids who looked like the guys I’d gone to high school with. Who looked, basically, pun intended, like me.
That’s who was shipped off to Vietnam in droves — youngsters 18, 19, 20 and 21. Many, of course, would die there, and many others would come back forever scarred.
Johnson and McNamara should have been looking out for those kids, who knew nothing about geopolitics, or why they were being turned into trained killers who, we were told, could cold-bloodedly smoke the enemy — “Good shot!” — and then kick back and smoke a Marlboro. Many would end up weeping on the battlefield, crying for their moms with their dying breaths. Or trembling uncontrollably as they watched buddies, covered in filth, bleed to death before their eyes — sometimes in their arms.
I was lucky. The Army sent me to Korea, which was no walk in the park, but it wasn’t Vietnam. I served in the intelligence office of an engineer battalion. But no one could truly escape the war. I would get letters from home that would make my heart sink, letters telling me that this buddy had been killed, that that buddy had been killed, that a kid that I had played football or softball with — or had gone to the rifle range with — had been killed.
For what?
McNamara didn’t know. My sister’s boyfriend got shot. A very close friend of mine came back from Vietnam so messed up psychologically that he killed his wife and himself.
The hardest lesson for people in power to accept is that wars are unrelentingly hideous enterprises, that they butcher people without mercy and therefore should be undertaken only when absolutely necessary.
Kids who are sent off to war are forced to grow up too fast. They soon learn what real toughness is, and it has nothing to do with lousy bureaucrats and armchair warriors sacrificing the lives of the young for political considerations and hollow, flag-waving, risk-free expressions of patriotic fervor.
McNamara, it turns out, had realized early on that Vietnam was a lost cause, but he kept that crucial information close to his chest, like a gambler trying to bluff his way through a bad hand, as America continued to send tens of thousands to their doom. How in God’s name did he ever look at himself in a mirror?
Lessons learned from Vietnam? None.
As The Times’s Tim Weiner pointed out in McNamara’s obituary, Congress authorized the war after President Johnson contended that American warships had been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. The attack never happened. As Mr. Weiner wrote, “The American ships had been firing at their own sonar shadows on a dark night.”
But McNamara, relying on intelligence reports, told Johnson that evidence of the attack was ironclad. Does this remind anyone of the “slam dunk” evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction?
More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam and some 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese. More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq, and no one knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Even as I was writing this, reports were coming in of seven more American G.I.’s killed in Afghanistan — a war that made sense in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, but makes very little sense now.
None of these wars had clearly articulated goals or endgames. None were pursued with the kind of intensity and sense of common purpose and shared sacrifice that marked World War II. Wars are now mostly background noise, distant events overshadowed by celebrity deaths and the antics of Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford and the like.
The obscenity of war is lost on most Americans, and that drains the death of Robert McNamara of any real significance.
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17:21
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disturbing the comfortable
A followup on that excerpt yesterday (from The Huffington Post)—a news story today out of Seattle reported a large of number of arrests of a meth smuggling and distribution ring operating out of Jalisco, Mexico.
Aye, Jalisco, as the song goes... As the US cracked down on the marketing of ingredients for manufacturing meth here in the States, the Mexican drug cartels saw an opportunity to expand their product line. The result has been that the distribution of meth has become an international opportunity.
I would think that any free market-worshipping Rethugnican would have foreseen this. I mean, Jesus, you actually think shutting down the domestic supply will eliminate the demand? No, obviously it didn't, any more than Prohibition kept people from drinking. There seems to be an inability to learn from history involved in all this. Tobacco, coffee, opiates—just because you rearrange the marketing pattern doesn't mean you suppress the demand.
A few years ago I went to "Meth Summit" here in Bend. This was when the big push against domestic meth was on. Easy to remember: daily news stories about the horrors of the drug, how easy it was to make, bust after bust of small meth labs. Don't get me completely wrong, I think it is a bad drug; I've used it on occasion over the years, and the price of the high seemed way out of proportion to the quality of the euphoria. The quality deteriorated as well: the last time I took any, twenty-plus years ago, it tasted like something you might consider using to clear out a septic tank. Anyhow, the drug-of-the-year-hype rolled on, and here in Bend we got a "Meth Summit." The big push was to have all employees, in all businesses, randomly tested for drug use. I had the impression that all right-thinking Americans would go volunteer to be tested, too. That way, we were told, drug abusers would be forced out of employment. What a swell idea!
Except...that would raise the crime rate, since people need money to buy drugs. Hmm. Well, maybe if they all got busted and put in prison they'd get clean? Hmm. I guess it would improve the job market, at least for people who wanted to be prison guards... And, of course, we need to consider the number of deaths from meth overdoses vs. the number of deaths from tobacco use.
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17:23
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disturbing the comfortable
I don't want (MUCH) to tell you I told you so, but here's a little blurb off today's Huffington Post that says it all:
Ryan Grim, 07.01.2009
The NAFTA debate was difficult enough without having to talk about the sprawling Mexican drug trade and its attendant corruption. And how NAFTA would also end up benefiting the cartels. So President Clinton ordered his people not to talk about it.
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13:52
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disturbing the comfortable
Coleman finally caved in! You have to hand it to the Repugnicans: not only do they thrive on family values, they're absolutely the finest sportsmen (and women) to be found anywhere. Franken ought to sue Coleman for lost wages.
And I'm more or less (mostly less, to be honest) back to physically normal. At least I can take showers and get dressed by myself, I can walk, the rental wheelchair has been returned, and I can even wash dishes again. Yea! Started at the physical therapy place this morning. Nothing much, mostly stretching exercises.
I'm probably not going to the dance ceremony this year, particularly since Beth is working and Lucy is too broke to bring her motor home over the mountains. They'll have to do it all without me. They can. Wish I could go, but it's a lot of work and gimping around. I'm not even sure I could drag myself into the sweat lodge. Probably, but dragging myself out afterward would be the problem! I definitely am not going to drag the buffalo skulls, either.
But, at least, Coleman is out.
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16:10
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disturbing the comfortable
I'm in a quandary about this. Medium-sized quandary.
Where does tribal sovereignty become dangerous? I mostly think right about here. This is right on the edge, teetering. I mean people have the right to blow themselves up...but things are so wacky out there, with the flipped-out Right wing preparing for armed rebellion, that I'm worried. Remember the line about "Another nut with a gun?" Another nut with a pocketful of M-80s doesn't seem too good an idea.
I also think anything the tribes can do to make money off their occupiers is not necessarily bad...
And there certainly have been times in my life when I've enjoyed the hell out of firecrackers and M-80s... So, no easy answers.
[www.seattlepi.com]
Last updated June 27, 2009 1:34 p.m. PT
Explosive fireworks easy to find at Boom City
By KRISTA J. KAPRALOS
THE HERALD
EVERETT, Wash. -- Need a ditch dug? Skip the hard work and instead use a strategically placed purchase from Boom City.
Or, tie it to a tree you want to uproot.
Vendors at Boom City, the annual fireworks market on the Tulalip Indian Reservation, have all sorts of suggestions for people who purchase cherry bombs, M-250s and other explosives from their stands.
"Do something positive with it," one vendor said as he wrapped what he described as a quarter stick of dynamite in napkins. He carefully placed it in a plastic bag, along with a package of firecrackers - so the small purchase doesn't look so suspicious, he said.
Tulalip tribal leaders say the tribal police department spot-checks fireworks stands for illegal explosives, but it's still easy to buy M-80s, cherry bombs, and even what they claim is full-fledged dynamite on reservation land.
"There's always some fool who thinks he's going to get away with it," said Mike Dunn, chairman of the Boom City Committee.
Federal regulators warn that M-80s and other illegal devices aren't fireworks, they're explosives - small bombs. The devices purchased by The Herald at Boom City were turned over to the Everett Fire Department for destruction.
Tribal police shut down the stands of people in possession of explosives that are illegal under federal law and tribal code, Dunn said, but the temporary village is difficult to patrol. Tribal police often must chase away unlicensed vendors who loiter in the parking lot.
"There are people selling out of their trunks, and more times than once, we've run them out," Dunn said. "They show up and say, 'Hey, man, I got some M-80s. You want some M-80s?' And they go from rez to rez."
Boom City is a jurisdictional headache for other law enforcement agencies, too. The reservation is sovereign tribal land, subject only to federal laws. That means fireworks that are illegal under state law are legal on the reservation, as long as they comply with federal law.
State and local police agencies don't have jurisdiction over tribal land. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives only investigates if there's a complaint of illegal activity, spokesman Nicholas Starcevic said.
"The problem with reservations is that they're their own little entity," he said. "We don't regulate them."
The Consumer Product Safety Commission works jointly with Customs and Border Patrol to check imported goods at their point of entry, commission spokeswoman Nychelle Fleming said.
It's impossible to know how many of the illegal explosives seized each year were destined for Indian reservations because the paperwork attached to such shipments often doesn't state the ultimate destination, she said.
Starcevic, the ATF spokesman, said the people who likely expected such shipments can easily deny ever ordering illegal items.
If the explosives are homemade, it's nearly impossible to monitor their sales.
Tulalip tribal members and others have been convicted in the past of selling illegal explosives at Boom City. In 2001, one man was sentenced to a year in federal prison, and another man was sentenced to 14 months for manufacturing illegal explosives including M-80s, silver salutes and other devices. It's been some time since a vendor was shut down for illegal sales, Dunn said.
"We hear the rumors, 'Oh, you can get whatever you want out at Boom City,' but if that's true, (the vendor) will be going to tribal court because that will hurt all of us," Dunn said.
Even when every Boom City vendor observes the law, state and local police agencies say they struggle to control the flow of fireworks off the reservation. Some of what is allowed under federal law is illegal under state law on non-reservation land.
State troopers can't stop cars leaving Boom City unless there is a traffic violation or some other type of infraction, Sgt. Freddy Williams said. A trooper can seize fireworks that are illegal under state law if that trooper can see them in the car that has been stopped for such an infraction, but that doesn't give the trooper the right to search the vehicle for more illegal items, Williams said.
"If you have reasonable suspicion, you need consent to search from the person, or you need to get a search warrant," he said.
Troopers can take action if they discover people detonating illegal fireworks off-reservation, Williams said. Last year, state police confiscated fireworks 18 times, including four instances in and around Snohomish County, he said. Each time, troopers seized hundreds of bottle rockets, mortar shells, thunderbombs and other illegal firecrackers, he said.
There is a "detonation area" at Boom City to encourage people who buy fireworks to light them on tribal land, where they're legal, said Dunn of the Boom City Committee. Boom City organizers can't control people who are determined to take fireworks off the reservation, he said.
John Rivera of Tulalip is owner of Brickhouse Fireworks. He travels to China each year to design and produce colorful explosives that he then sells to tribal fireworks stand owners.
"Ninety-nine percent of my stuff" is legal under Washington state law, he said. The rest is illegal everywhere but on the reservation, he said.
People should be allowed to light fireworks wherever they live, Dunn said. He's proud that Boom City offers a place for fireworks lovers to legally detonate whatever they purchase.
"People want fireworks," he said. "Otherwise, they wouldn't be here."
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15:36
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disturbing the comfortable
Been quite a while since I've been here. Not my idea, for whatever that's worth. On May 3, I took a fall and spent a month in a local hospital and "skilled nursing facility" (AKA nursing home). It's only in the last few days I've been able to decently type using both hands (my shoulder and one leg have some new hardware in them), as well as walk around without a wheelchair. So, that's what I've been doing.
We have also moved during this same period. Beth did the moving—she made me stay in the nursing home an extra three days so I'd be out of the way during the actual move. She's smart, although at the time I felt blue about the idea...but now I'm glad I missed the chaos of the move. We're in a lovely house in a cheery neighborhood. It's like living on the fringes of a nice urban park. No upstairs neighbors. No neighbors just through through the wall. No parking lot outside our windows, either. Trees, lawns, squirrels, finches, even a rockchuck family that shows up across the street every so often. A nice deck out back, a garage, all kinds of storage, and we are living here. Quiet. Far out!
Of course, nothing has gone to hell in a hand-basket while I've been laid up—except for my serenity, a few dozen times. The war continues, even as the location changes. The great upholder of "traditional American values" keeps getting caught with its pants down. The best thing appears to be this: we're heading toward some sort of national health care insurance. The stock market is creeping upward; there are more jobs advertised in our local paper than there were six months ago. These are good signs.
Oregon had the 2nd highest unemployment rate in the country. Deschutes County, where I live, has an official unemployment rate of about 18%. Crook County, next door, has one of five out of work. Speed freaks—cranksters—meth addicts continue to steal their ways into jail. The next school district to the north will go to a four-day week next year because of budget shortages. These are not good signs.
Yes, the situation is mixed: some good, some bad. Gee, just like life, eh? As long as I can remember the situation has been mixed. That's the way it is. We're still a long way from Paradise.
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20:07
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disturbing the comfortable
Just got this from Blogger:
disturbing the comfortable Your blog is marked as spam
Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.
We received your unlock request on May 2, 2009. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.
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_uacct="UA-18003-7"; _uanchor=1; _ufsc=false; _usample = 10; urchinTracker(); _uff=0;
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19:12
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disturbing the comfortable
In the midst of packing for a move at the end of May. After ten years of living in an apartment, we're moving into a house. Glory!
But here're some sensible words:
[www.latimes.com] From the Los Angeles Times
Scientists see this flu strain as relatively mild
Genetic data indicate this outbreak won't be as deadly as that of 1918, or even the average winter.
By Karen Kaplan and Alan Zarembo
April 30, 2009
As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.
In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.
FOR THE RECORD:
Swine flu: An article in Thursday's Section A about the risks posed by swine flu said that in the United States annually "between 5% and 20% of the population becomes ill from the flu and 36,000 people die —a mortality rate of between 0.24% and 0.96%." The correct mortality rate is between 0.06% and 0.24%.
"Let's not lose track of the fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands around the world," said Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison.
His remarks Wednesday came the same day Texas authorities announced that a nearly 2-year-old boy with the virus had died in a Houston hospital Monday.
"Any time someone dies, it's heartbreaking for their families and friends," Olsen said. "But we do need to keep this in perspective."
Flu viruses are known to be notoriously unpredictable, and this strain could mutate at any point -- becoming either more benign or dangerously severe. But mounting preliminary evidence from genetics labs, epidemiology models and simple mathematics suggests that the worst-case scenarios are likely to be avoided in the current outbreak.
"This virus doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to kill like the 1918 virus," which claimed an estimated 50 million victims worldwide, said Richard Webby, a leading influenza virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.
When the current virus was first identified, the similarities between it and the 1918 flu seemed ominous.
Both arose in the spring at the tail end of the flu season. Both seemed to strike people who were young and healthy instead of the elderly and infants. Both were H1N1 strains, so called because they had the same types of two key proteins that are largely responsible for a virus' ability to infect and spread.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health published genetic sequence data Monday morning of flu samples isolated from patients in California and Texas, and thousands of scientists immediately began downloading the information. Comparisons to known killers -- such as the 1918 strain and the highly lethal H5N1 avian virus -- have since provided welcome news.
"There are certain characteristics, molecular signatures, which this virus lacks," said Peter Palese, a microbiologist and influenza expert at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. In particular, the swine flu lacks an amino acid that appears to increase the number of virus particles in the lungs and make the disease more deadly.
Scientists have identified several other differences between the current virus and its 1918 predecessor, but the significance of those differences is still unclear, said Dr. Scott Layne, an epidemiologist at the UCLA School of Public Health.
Ralph Tripp, an influenza expert at the University of Georgia, said that his early analysis of the virus' protein-making instructions suggested that people exposed to the 1957 flu pandemic -- which killed up to 2 million people worldwide -- may have some immunity to the new strain.
That could explain why older people have been spared in Mexico, where the swine flu has been most deadly.
The swine virus does appear able to spread easily among humans, which persuaded the WHO to boost its influenza pandemic alert level to phase 5, indicating that a worldwide outbreak of infection is very likely. And the CDC reported on its website that "a pattern of more severe illness associated with the virus may be emerging in the United States."
"We expect to see more cases, more hospitalizations, and, unfortunately, we are likely to see more deaths from the outbreak," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters Wednesday on her first day at work.
But certainly nothing that would dwarf a typical flu season. In the U.S., between 5% and 20% of the population becomes ill and 36,000 people die -- a mortality rate of between 0.24% and 0.96%.
Dirk Brockmann, a professor of engineering and applied mathematics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., used a computer model of human travel patterns to predict how this swine flu virus would spread in the worst-case scenario, in which nothing is done to contain the disease.
After four weeks, almost 1,700 people in the U.S. would have symptoms, including 198 in Los Angeles, according to his model. That's just a fraction of the county's thousands of yearly flu victims.
Just because the virus is being identified in a growing number of places -- including Austria, Canada, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Spain and Britain -- doesn't mean it's spreading particularly quickly, Olsen said.
"You don't ever find anything that you don't look for," he said. "Now that diagnostic laboratories and physicians and other healthcare workers know to look for it, perhaps it's not surprising that you're going to see additional cases identified."
And a pandemic doesn't necessarily have a high fatality rate. Even in Mexico, the fatalities may simply reflect that hundreds of thousands of people have been infected. Since the symptoms of swine flu are identical to those of a normal flu, there's no way to know how many cases have evaded government health officials, St. Jude's Webby said.
As the virus adapts to its human hosts, it is likely to find ways of spreading more efficiently. But evolution also suggests it might become less dangerous, Olsen said.
"If it kills off all its potential hosts, you reach a point where the virus can't survive," he said. Working to calm public fears, U.S. officials on Wednesday repeatedly stressed the statistic of yearly flu deaths -- 36,000.
Sebelius and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano also rejected calls to close the borders, which several lawmakers reiterated Wednesday on Capitol Hill.
"We are making all of our decisions based on the science and the epidemiology," Napolitano said. "The CDC, the public health community and the World Health Organization all have said that closing out nation's borders is not merited here."
Though scientists have begun to relax about the initial toll, they're considerably less comfortable when taking into account the fall flu season. They remain haunted by the experience of 1918, when the relatively mild first wave of flu was followed several months later by a more aggressive wave.
The longer the virus survives, the more chances it has to mutate into a deadlier form.
"If this virus keep going through our summer," Palese said, "I would be very concerned."
karen.kaplan@latimes.com
alan.zarembo@latimes.com
Staff writers Noam Levey in Washington, Thomas H. Maugh II in Los Angeles and Ken Ellingwood in Mexico City contributed to this report.
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16:14
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disturbing the comfortable
Everything is connected to everything else; there are no coincidences. Here's something else, along with the Israel-Palestine Wall, waterboarding, our national policy of domestic spying, "enemies list," and a few other awful things...that we're going to have to pay for—
Published on The Smirking Chimp (
http://www.smirkingchimp.com) An Odd Coincidence: Why Do So Many School of the Americas Grads Become Latin Death Squad Killers? By Sherwood Ross Created Apr 27 2009 - 9:49am
If the Pentagon's instructors didn't teach assassination at the School of the Americas(SOA) in Fort Benning, Ga., is it just coincidental that so many of its star pupils graduate to become mass murderers?
Take the strange case of Francisco del Cid Diaz, an SOA-educated second lieutenant in the El Salvadoran army who ordered his unit to drag 16 people out of the Los Hojas cooperative of the Associacion Nacional de Indigenas, beat them, shoot them, and dump their bodies into the Cuyuapa River.
Not content with his SOA undergraduate studies, Diaz re-enrolled after the massacre and was accepted again in 2003. By then the Pentagon had renamed SOA The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, (WHINSEC) as Latins joked SOA stood for "School of Assassins."
Perhaps the most infamous Salvadoran SOA grad was Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, who ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and who operated a death squad that used blowtorches on his victims. D'Aubuisson might not have learned to use this device at SOA, of course, as he also attended the CIA-run International Police Academy in Washington, one of the classier D.C. "finishing" schools.
It might just be that some weird metaphysical force beyond human understanding has been attracting thousands of criminally insane military officers like Diaz from all over Latin America to Ft. Benning---and that they were psychiatric basket cases before they flocked there. That's unlikely, of course, as a WHINSEC official claims "only personnel of unquestionable character" are admitted to study.
Yet, it's odd that case after case----hundreds of them, really---keep popping up in which perfectly mentally competent SOA/WHINSEC alumni after leaving Georgia have gone stark raving berserk once they got home, overthrowing governments and filling elected officials full of bullet holes. Didn't Georgia's "old sweet song" mellow them even a teensy-weensy bit?
Two of SOA's more notorious alumni, Generals Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, both of whom trained at SOA in 1981, went on to become dictators during the "Dirty War", in which 30,000 Argentines were put to death. The generals were assisted by five other SOA grads and when civilian rule was restored Viola was sentenced to 17 years for his crimes. Who's to say, though, that he learned his grisly trade from the Pentagon? He could have gotten his ideas just as well from studying Hitler's "Mein Kampf," right?
Then there's Bolivia. In 1980, SOA alumni General Garcia Meza Tejada assaulted the National Palace and forced the president to resign. His top aide, Luis Arce Gomez was also an SOA alum as were seven other coup criminals. In Brazil, the human rights group Torture Never Again linked 20 SOA graduates and two SOA instructors to crimes including false imprisonment, and torture methods such as electric shock, suffocation and other methods too nauseating to iterate.
In Colombia, half of some 250 officers cited for human rights violations in 1993 took advanced education at SOA. After his involvement in the 1988 Uraba massacre of 20 banana workers, the massacre of 19 business executives, and the assassination of a city mayor, General Faouk Yanine Diaz was a guest speaker at SOA in 1990, apparently so good he was brought back for an encore next year.
Another SOA grad, General Jorge Plazas Acevedo, was tried for the 1998 kidnapping and murder of Jewish business leader Benjamin Khoudari, and Col. Jesus Maria Clavijo, another SOA grad, stands accused of 160 murders during 1995-98. Yet another SOA grad, General Montoya Uribe, ran a "scorched earth" campaign in Putumayo.
It is well known that after the CIA overthrow in 1954 of Guatamala's president Jacobo Arbenz, more than 200,000 civilians were killed. Not as well known is that SOA graduates there created vigilante squads responsible for starring roles in the slaughter. One SOA grad, General Efrain Rios Montt, who seized power in a coup, wiped out more than 400 Mayan villages, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Involved also were SOA grads General Angel Rodriguez, defense minister, and Colonel German Barahoma, National Police director.
In Peru, six officers educated at SOA were among those that burst into the men's dorm at La Cantuta and dragged off six students and a professor that were "disappeared." One of the SOA goons, Vladimiro Torres, went on to run the notorious "Colina" death squad and became head of the National Intelligence Service(SIN). His boss, Alberto Fujimori, of course, has just been convicted of humanitarian rights abuses, including massacre.
The above treatise is a short list of the achievements of SOA/WHINSEC which, for my nickel, President Obama could shut down tomorrow on suspicion that it has been teaching militarists how to turn their homelands into living hells. Of course, maybe the new forward-looking president might consider reviewing the alleged crimes of the SOA grads repetitious and boring.
It does seem ironic, though, that the U.S. military, which preaches bravery, should be instructing officers in how to assassinate unarmed archbishops and priests whose principal "crime" has been advocating for Latin America's poor---the banana pickers, copper miners, and tillers of the soil, etc.
Information for this article was taken from legal documents submitted to a Federal judge by Louis Wolf, a resident of Washington, D.C., currently under six months' house arrest for his disrespectful, non-violent trespass at Ft. Benning, Ga., last November. Sentenced to prison at the same time by Federal Judge G. Mallon Faircloth of the U.S. District Court of Columbus, Ga., were Father Luis Barrios, of N. Bergen, N.J., an Associate Priest at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Manhattan; Theresa Cusimano, J.D.; seminary student Kristin Holm, of the Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago; Sister Diane Therese Pinchot of the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland; and Viet Nam veteran Al Simmons, a retired pre-school teacher of Richmond, Va.
It's a curious society that imprisons pacifists for trespass on military property where murder and torture allegedly are being taught to thousands of future Latin killers while a past president apparently guilty of a million murders walks free. Of course, the Pentagon may not be teaching anything criminal at Ft. Benning: the outcomes could all be one big coincidence, no es verdad?
_______
Dear Chimp Readers, Yo! Yo! Ahoy! Please take note: the column about Ford's superlative treatment of his work force referred to his early days, before he changed and hired goons and thugs to cow and beat his employees. Right at the beginning the column sa
About author
Sherwood Ross is an American reporter who has worked for major American newspapers and magazines as well as international wire services. To comment on this article or arrange for speaking engagements: sherwoodr1@yahoo.com [1]
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19:50
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disturbing the comfortable
What a surprise! White people, in our society, live longer than non-white people. This is not due to racism, no, of course not, why the very thought is racist...
The following concerns African American and Caucasians. However, think "Indians" instead of African American and you'll basically end up in the same place as the article. The health disparities between races has a high economic and color correlation.
[www.sciencedaily.com] More African-Americans Die From Causes That Can Be Prevented Or Treated
ScienceDaily (Apr. 24, 2009) — Two-thirds of the difference between death rates among African Americans and Caucasians are now due to causes that could be prevented or cured, according to a new study appearing in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
The study, "Black-White Differences in Avoidable Mortality in the United States, 1980-2005," found that death from preventable or treatable conditions represented half of all deaths for individuals under age 65 and accounted for nearly 70 percent of the black-white mortality difference.
"People should not be dying prematurely from stroke, hypertension, diabetes, colon cancer, appendicitis or the flu. Our study shows that while much progress has been made, our health care system is still failing to meet the very basic needs of some Americans. Many disparities can be conquered by focusing more on public policies that promote prevention and by ensuring that all Americans have access to good quality health care," said James Macinko, who conducted the research as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the lead author of the study.
The major reason for the black-white mortality gap—representing about 30 percent of the gap for men and 42 percent for women—is due to conditions that have effective treatments, the study found. Disparities were most pronounced for conditions or diseases for which deaths can be prevented, such as diabetes, stroke, infectious and respiratory diseases, preventable cancers, and circulatory diseases like hypertension.
The conditions analyzed included premature deaths from common infectious diseases, cervical cancers, appendicitis, maternal deaths, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, peptic ulcers and traffic accidents, all of which could be avoided through medical care or health policy changes. The study suggests that the reinforcement of policies that improve access to quality medical care will be important to reducing death disparities.
"As the nation turns its attention to health care reform, we now know that much can be done to reduce racial and ethnic health care disparities and to improve the health care for all Americans," said Macinko. "We also have a lot to learn from other health care systems that measure performance based on preventable deaths."
To analyze the death disparity among African Americans and Caucasians, the scholar used "avoidable mortality," a commonly used measure of health system performance in Europe. It is defined as premature death under age 65 from conditions responsive to medical care, changes in public policy, or behaviors. Over the last decade, avoidable mortality has declined less rapidly in the United States than in other industrialized nations.
"Avoidable mortality gives us one way to assess the shortcomings of our health care system, particularly in the area of prevention," said Irma T. Elo, Ph.D., co-author on the report and an associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. "It can help to identify where preventable disparities are greatest and aid in directing resources to where they can improve the health of vulnerable populations."
Elo also serves as an affiliated-faculty member for the RWJF Health & Society Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Journal reference:
James Macinko and Irma T Elo. Black-White Differences in Avoidable Mortality in the United States, 1980-2005. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 2009; DOI: 10.1136/jech.2008.081141
Adapted from materials provided by RWJF Health & Society Scholars Program
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18:52
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disturbing the comfortable
Of course, what I'm still thinking about is the moral question: Are we going to let Cheney, Yoo, Gonzales, Rummy, etc., get away with torturing people? Is the country actually going to take a moral stance and prosecute those s**theads?
It does echo the Dreyfuss case in France: will we protect the guilty because it's "best for the country," "move forward instead of dwell on the past," and other head-in-the-sand excuses, or will we, the United States, actually say enough is enough and these bastards aren't going to get away with it. I would bet we let them get away with their crimes and that the country will do it's absolutely most to keep any other country from prosecuting them.
And, maybe, this would be the historically consistent action. There's an awful lot of karma out there already, and it's going to fall on us sooner or later. It has to. The theft of land and genocide against the original inhabitants. Slavery. Jim Crow. The rape of the land we stole. Butte, Cripple Creek, Ludlow, Bisbee, the Couer d'Alenes, Pullman, Haymarket, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War...America has got away with a lot in not many years. I realize other countries have done the same damn thing. But that doesn't make it OK. "But, mom, everybody's doing it!" It didn't work for us when we were children, and it doesn't work for us as a nation. We grabbed the moral high ground when we tried German and Japanese after World War II. The reasons, the justifications, for that, have washed away like sand castles at high tide. When we become another has-been empire, subject to forces and powers utterly beyond our control, things will be better. Maybe even more just.
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17:44
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disturbing the comfortable
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Maybe not what was said, but yes, I do rememer tea parties. Not the hokey cowboy-hatted s**t-kicking "tea parties" on April 15th; no. Tea parties were times to get dopey (yeah, OK, it's a pun), laugh, listen music, and try to get laid. Nobody was ranting about someone's supposed phony birth certificate, or the communist/socialist/liberal/Jewish/Chinese Communist/fascist conspiracy (did I leave out any Straw Men?) they saw taking over the country. Nor did pot-bellied cigar-chomping dry drunks proclaim what a great country this is. Maybe they did while getting sonted in Muskogee, but I don't know about that.
Well, we're in a time of major social earthquake-ing; people's savings have been wiped out by shoddy financial scams, a war is bleeding our economy to death, and there's got to be somebody to blame, right? Can't be my fault! I followed the rules, mostly! I always said the Pledge of Allegiance, went to church when it was convenient, gave my sons crew-cuts, bought the biggest car I could almost-afford, and knew when to shift the blame and pass the buck. How come I got screwed? Must be somebody's fault!
Hey, it worked for Hitler.
And Goebbels said the bigger the lie the easier it was to get the masses to believe in it. That was an incredible political truth. A lot more meaningful than something like "all men are created equal," or almost equal or kind of equal, as long as...they were men, white, owned property, spent money quickly,and didn't ask too many questions, knew how to follow orders, and so on and so forth.
So, times are tough and we need to find scapegoats. I'm sad to say it, but most people are pretty dumb and pretty shallow. Below average. Politics, I used to think, depended on intelligence; the more educated you were, the more liberal. No, it ain't true. The more f**kedup people are, the more reactionary they are. There seems to be a lot of f**kedup people out there.
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15:11
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disturbing the comfortable
This morning, along with a few million other people, I read the OLC's "torture memos." I watched Amy Goodman and guests talking about the implications of America's use of torture—the bug judge who now smiles benevolently from the 9th Circuit Court Bench. I started weeping at what the country has done.
Jesus f**king Christ. "We" —that is the government that represents us all— have gone off the deep end, completely, into the s**t swamp. I keep thinking of the white South Africans, who during the years of Apartheid, smiled, watched TV, and went about their business. Yeah, or the Germans, who occasionally got irritated by the strange smells coming from those big kind of factory-like places that had recently been built outside of towns, who smiled, listened to the radio, and went about their business. Is there karma? You betcha. One way or the other, there's lotsa karma.
Bad enough with slavery. Bad enough with the Indians, the Chinese and Irish who built our big railroads, and bad enough, too, with the war in the Philippines and the Mexican War...How can anybody look at American history and say, "God has truly blessed this nation!" It's enough, Jim Harrison said, to make God puke. And after God is done puking...
Well, if Russia and Belgium and Japan and France and England and Germany keep on existing, maybe the U.S. will, too. For a while, at least. But it just seems like we're due for a good karma whipping.
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20:22
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disturbing the comfortable
Today's Bull had an article about how hard the employees are working at Nosler, the bullet-making company. People are stocking up, as per instructions from the neo-fascist talk radio heads. I wondered about that. There is a lot of insurrectionary talk, and from what I've seen all the gun freaks (the serious ones) have joined up with the Republicans and Christians to "pertek their right t'bar arms." That ain't good.
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20:05
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disturbing the comfortable
Well, that's what this town is starting to look like: a deserted back lot at a movie studio. Sub-division streets with cheat grass growing in the curbs, a few lonely-looking completed houses, and tattered flags. Every block has for sale and for rent signs. Office buildings have "for lease" signs as big as the windows.
Our daily Bull has eternally optimistic reporting about the local economy. It's sort of sad, I think...for a few seconds before I snarl at their bulls**t. Everything, according to the paper is right on the cusp of turning around, home sales are "looking up," and we won't mention the vacant house inventory—or the vacant office and retail space. I feel like I'm living in some bizarre replay of earlier times in America, when the boosters hustled the gullible, and things went boom and bust, boom and bust, over and over. It's the American dream: get in on the bust and get out on the boom. Good luck on that.
You cannot have a town, a city that grows and grows without a solid economic base. We never had that here. The forests turned out to be, surprise!, essentially a non-renewable resource. The trees were cut down much faster than they could replenish the forests. The climate is not good for agriculture—it's OK, but it snowed today, April 14th and that doesn't say much about a long growing season. Our water supply is limited; it's great country for antelopes and jack rabbits. There's no manufacturing to speak of, and the only commerce is retail. Tourists are our biggest economic resource. Don't get much tourism during a depression. Maybe a lot of people moving around, but they're looking to earn, not spend. No room here, sorry.
Another bubble has busted, another boom has ended.
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13:42
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disturbing the comfortable
While we're busy debating just how big bonuses for various CEOs should be, and the latest umpteen million dollar fighter jet squabble (not to mention Miley Cyrus's career moves), there are a few million people in this country who are really hurting. The old and the disabled.
We know that preventive care is cheaper and better—certainly morally better—that post-hoc care, like emergency rooms and nursing homes, mental health intervention costs less than imprisonment, and so on. I mean, there's just no argument about this. But. Nobody seems to care, really... Home health aides have lower costs to taxpayers than corrections officers; pre-school teachers don't cost as much as the court system. But, we'd rather wait for the crisis than take steps to prevent it. It's crazy.
April 12, 2009 States Slashing Social Programs for Vulnerable By
ERIK ECKHOLM PHOENIX — Battered by the recession and the deepest and most widespread budget deficits in several decades, a large majority of states are slicing into their social safety nets — often crippling preventive efforts that officials say would save money over time.
President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package is helping to alleviate some of the pain, providing large amounts of money to pay for education and unemployment insurance, bolster food stamp programs and expand tax credits for low earners. But the money will offset only 40 percent of the losses in state revenues, and programs for vulnerable groups have been cut in at least 34 states, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a private research group in Washington.
Perhaps nowhere have the cuts been more disruptive than in Arizona, where more than 1,000 frail elderly people are struggling without home-care aides to help with bathing, housekeeping and trips to the doctor. Officials acknowledge that some are apt to become sicker or fall, ending up in nursing homes at a far higher cost.
Ohio and other states face large cutbacks in child welfare investigations, which may mean more injured children and more taken into foster care. Despite tax increases, California has ended dental coverage for adults on Medicaid, all but guaranteeing future medical problems.
“There’s no question that we’re getting short-term savings that will result in greater long-term human and financial costs,” said Linda J. Blessing, interim chief of the Arizona Department of Economic Security, expressing the concerns of officials and community agencies around the country. “There are no good options, just less bad options.”
Arizona has one of the nation’s highest deficits in relation to its budget. As revenues sank late last year, forcing across-the-board cuts this spring, the child protection agency stopped investigating every report of potential abuse or neglect, and sharply reduced counseling of families deemed at risk of violence. Some toddlers with debilities like autism and Down syndrome are not getting therapies that can bring lifelong benefits. And here, as in other states, the drive to help disabled people live at home has been set back.
Mary Beth Thompson, 57, who lives in an apartment with two small dogs here, is on the growing waiting list for help. Seriously overweight, with chronic pain and weakness on her left side, she has trouble moving about and cannot step into the bathtub without falling, she said, displaying the cast on her broken wrist.
“I can’t even walk to do the laundry anymore,” she said from the chair where she spends most of her days playing with her dogs, one of which she has trained to knock the handset off the telephone so she can reach it when she falls.
Winona Conn, 75, who uses a wheelchair because of a paralyzed leg, has been on the waiting list for home aid for a year. “It feels like you’ve been shelved,” she said.
In Florida, recent modest cuts in home aid came on top of a growing backlog, while the number of people in need keeps climbing. State support for home and community services was reduced by $2 million in 2008, and the waiting list has grown to 50,000 from 30,000, said E. Douglas Beach, secretary of the Department of Elder Affairs.
Reluctantly endorsing another $1 million in cuts next year to salvage a different program, Mr. Beach told legislators, “It’s like trying to decide whether to give up your first-born boy or your first-born girl.”
Mary Lynn Kasunic, president of the Area Agency on Aging in Phoenix, described the potential consequences. “If you don’t give people a bath a couple times a week, change the linens and make sure they get their medicines, their health will decline much faster,” she said. “They end up in the emergency room in a crisis, and then in a nursing home.”
The Illinois governor’s budget proposal would scale back home visits to ill-equipped first-time mothers, who are given advice over 18 months that experts say is repaid many times over in reduced child abuse and better school preparation.
“We spend $1.2 billion a year on child welfare,” said Diana M. Rauner, director of the Ounce of Prevention Fund in Chicago, which channels government money to private agencies. “You’d think we’d spend a lot of money to keep people out of that system.”
Ohio’s proposed budget “will dramatically decrease our ability to investigate reports of abuse and neglect,” with some counties losing 75 percent of their investigators, said Joel Potts, director of the Ohio Job and Family Services Directors’ Association, which represents county officials.
New York State is using stimulus money and a tax increase to avoid most of the large cuts in child care, nurse visits to inexperienced mothers and other services that were originally proposed. But if revenues keep falling by the billions, “all bets are off,” said Karen Schimke, president of the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy in Albany, which studies child and family issues.
As in many states, Arizona’s crunch came on fast and hard. In January, the newly seated Republican governor, Jan Brewer, had to cut $1.6 billion from a $10 billion annual budget — squeezing all the reductions into the final five months of the fiscal year ending June 30.
Arizona expects a $3 billion shortfall in the next fiscal year. In a speech to legislators in March, Ms. Brewer proposed to fill the chasm with $1 billion in spending cuts, $1 billion in federal stimulus money and — in a risky idea she floated after emphasizing her conservative credentials — $1 billion raised through “a temporary tax increase.”
Some Republican legislators still argue that state expenses are too large, while officials say that carving another $2 billion from the budget will wreak havoc. Ms. Blessing, of the Department of Economic Security, said her agency had already laid off 800 workers, including 15 percent of its child protection investigators, and imposed furloughs amounting to a 10 percent pay cut.
In one bit of good news for the department and its clients, the state has secured $18 million from the stimulus package to save child care subsidies for the working poor.
But some efforts to prevent child abuse, like in-home counseling of troubled families, have been deeply cut. This presents investigators with a stark choice: either remove children and put them in foster care or, as one case worker put it, “wait for something bad to happen.”
Idolina Moreno, 36, and her five children are still together and happier, she says, because they have been visited weekly for the last several months by a counselor who defused a simmering crisis. One daughter was angry and violent, Ms. Moreno said, and badly bruised the infant boy; Ms. Moreno admits to throwing a plastic bat to stop her. A school nurse called Child Protective Services.
Instead of removing the children, the agency called in a counselor who meets with family members both individually and together. “She’s been wonderful,” Ms. Moreno said.
Officials said it appeared likely that the counseling will continue for now. But she has also been told that special therapies for her mentally retarded 6-year-old son may be eliminated. “I don’t know what I’ll do if that happens,” she said. “I’m really worried.”
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16:10
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disturbing the comfortable
Colorado is certainly an interesting state (of mind). Bad enough to have Focus on the Family, to be the site of Rocky Flats, the Air Force Academy, and assorted other odd-ball items. Apparently, the state also sees sex where it isn't. That's kind of an old American past-time, searching for smut. This, though, take the black belt in stupidity:
Woman's tofu license plate curdles in Colo.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DENVER -- One Colorado woman's love for tofu has been judged X-rated by state officials. Kelly Coffman-Lee wanted to tell the world about her fondness for bean curd by picking certain letters for her SUV's license plate. Her suggestion for the plate: "ILVTOFU." But the Division of Motor Vehicles blocked her plan because they thought the combination of letters could be interpreted as profane.
Says Department of Revenue spokesman Mark Couch: "We don't allow 'FU' because some people could read that as street language for sex."
Officials meet periodically to ensure state plates stay free of letters that abbreviate gang slang, drug terms or obscene phrases.
The 38-year-old Coffman-Lee says tofu is a staple of her family's diet because they are vegan and that the DMV misinterpreted her message.
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17:32
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disturbing the comfortable
There's still the lie, floating around the right-wing universe, that Obama is a "socialist" who wants to take over the banks, start a new currency, and so on and so forth. No doubt that's why he has people like David Axelrod and Larry Summers making decisions. Sommers, according to the Wall Street Journal (not exactly the American version of Pravda), got $5,000,000 in pay helping U.S. banks. The man is one of them, not a supervisor or watchdog. The administration, as much as I like Obama, is simply doing it's part of maintain the system; any reforms will have to be incidental.
And, by the way, no, there is no Chinese army ready to move up from Mexico. Nor is there any truth to the rumor that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree.
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23:05
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disturbing the comfortable
My sort of hope-free optimism isn't working too well.
I have the feeling that our crazed capitalist system may be so determined to...well, kind of like the last of the Nazis in the Berlin bunker, you know? Will the plutocrats, in their frenzy to preserve the ideology, actually let the country go to pieces, down the drain, flush the toilet, turn on the disposal? Yeah, I think they would, rather than change much of anything except the outside coat of paint. FDR went to the wall to preserve capitalism, and that's what's going to happen again, now.
Nobody seriously wants to change our system. They have too much invested (no pun intended, but it's OK there is one); all their lives they've been working within the corporate capitalist system. It's all they can see, all they know. They're in a mine tunnel they've dug in fragile rock and the tunnel is caving in. They took out the timber supports to speed things up and the ceiling is coming down. They're not going to do anything except throw in a few supports here and there and hope it's enough. Look, fellas, maybe we should try another way to dig this mine, maybe from a different direction or with a different set of tools. Who told us to dig here and dig this way, anyhow? Why don't we get rid of them and try something different? Not a perfect metaphor here, but you know what I mean. What's bad is that we're all in the mine tunnel, every one of us!
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19:58
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disturbing the comfortable
I'm still on the mend from the broken hip and pelvis, of course. But a lot has changed for the better. I've been spending long periods in the hot tub over at our local pool, working my leg around, doing simple exercises. That's wonderful in itself. A woman I met over there markets an herbal concoction called "Mrs Greenbalm Organic Healing Oil" and she gave me some to try.
Here's the link:
www.mrsgreenbalm.comI think it works. I think it works good. In case you haven't noticed, I'm a cynic, so this something I believe in. Anyhow, this is very clearly a plug for Mrs Greenbalm's product.
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15:13
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disturbing the comfortable
How is it that one can not be cynical? Hm. Must have something to do with being utterly and totally naive. Or maybe stupid. Whatever: I can remember the hearings about whether or not Roberts was material for the SCOTUS. I can also remember the terrible sinking feeling in my stomach. Of course the man is not a conservative: he's a f**king reactionary, for god's sake!
Report: Reid Says Roberts 'Didn't Tell Us the Truth' Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suggests Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts misled senators into believing he was not too conservative.
FOXNews.com
Friday, March 27, 2009
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts did not "tell us the truth" during his 2005 confirmation hearings, suggesting Roberts misled senators into believing he was more moderate than he really was.
According to Politico.com, Reid complained about Roberts during a discussion hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
"Roberts didn't tell us the truth. At least (Samuel) Alito told us who he was," Reid said, according to the article.
"But we're stuck with those two young men, and we'll try to change by having some moderates in the federal courts system as time goes on -- I think that will happen."
According to Politico.com, while Reid said Democrats will try to bring more moderates to the bench, he said they will not try to block Republicans' ability to filibuster nominees.
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16:10
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disturbing the comfortable
Here's something worth reading, esp. if you're involved with young people and concerned about the world they're inheriting:
Canada on Top in Sex Ed Rise in US teen pregnancies proves information beats abstinence. View full article and comments here
[thetyee.ca] By
Vanessa Richmond Published: March 25, 2009 TheTyee.ca
New U.S. government stats reveal that teen births are up for the second year in a row. But when Bill Maher, on his show Real Time last Friday, asked his guest panel why that might be the case, or what could be done about it, the trio became suddenly mute. Only one panel member, Carrie Washington, murmured something about Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin's not-so-abstinent daughter who is now a teen mother, not finding much success with abstinence-only education.
All they had to do was ask a Canadian. Despite Canadian and American women aged 15 to 44 declaring that they want the same number of kids (about 2.2), American women end up having 2.09 and Canadian women have about 1.6, and 30 per cent of that difference is due to teen births in the U.S., almost 90 per cent of which are unwanted.
What's going on? Are Canadian teens just more inhibited -- did the girls-gone-wild craze not get this far north? Or is it just too much effort to get the parkas off up here?
It turns out, when it comes to both banking and babies, Canada's more comprehensive policies might actually be beacons of sustainable light, not dull, lead weights.
Abstinence failing? More Abstinence!
First, here's the situation. In the U.S., the overall birth rate for those aged 15 to 19 rose for the second year in a row, from 41.9 births per 1,000 last year to 42.5 this year. That's not a huge jump, but it's still significant because until two years ago, it had declined every year for 14 years.
Predictably, many on the far right like Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association, are calling for even more abstinence-only education that would "provide skills for teens to avoid sex," even though scientific study, and Bristol Palin, have both proved that doesn't work. (And I'm not sure what they teach in abstinence classes that could be characterized as "skills.")
As Bristol Palin told Greta Von Sustren just a few weeks ago, "I think abstinence is like... everyone should be abstinent, but it's not realistic at all... [Sex] is just more and more accepted now among kids my age."
After a decade and $1.5 billion U.S. federal dollars spent on abstinence-only programs, a Congress-authorized, rigorous scientific study reported no real difference in the age at which program participants first had sex, whether they had sex before marriage, or in their number of sexual partners.
I might actually have to use the "duh" word here. Abstinence-only education is about as effective at decreasing teen pregnancy rates as creationism education is in raising scientific knowledge levels. Abstinence is a legitimate religious doctrine, and sometimes an individual personal choice, but it's not sex ed.
C. Everett Koop: more than just a great beard
Some U.S. experts are being quoted this week saying that the funding should be shifted to programs that include educating young people about contraceptives -- efforts that have been shown to be highly effective. Like those Canada has had for decades, and like some programs that were in place in the U.S. during C. Everett Koop's tenure as surgeon general (1982-1989), which lead to the 14-year decline in teen pregnancy. After the first reported cases of the virus in the early 1980s, Koop promoted HIV education, which led to a big increase in condom use. Then during the Clinton years, abstinence-only programs started, promoting the virtues of chastity. And voila, teen births.
This week, Salon interviewed a Texan-chastity-pledge-devotee-turned-sex-ed-youth-advocate Shelby Knox, who said, "If you spend $1.5 billion to spew shame-filled garbage to young people and then pass laws that limit their access to good information, contraception, emergency contraception and abortion, then you shouldn't be surprised when the health outcomes aren't to your liking."
Knox indirectly outlines Canada's approach. According to StatsCan's comparative study of fertility trends in Canada and the U.S., no other industrialized country has juvenile birth rates as high as those observed in the United States. The birth rate of American teenage girls is more than double that in other industrialized countries, including Canada, and 10 times greater than in Japan and the Netherlands.
The difference is not solely due to the ethnic composition of the U.S. population: the white population also has higher birth rates than other countries.
And it's not due to a higher abortion rate in Canada. In fact, unwanted pregnancies and births are more frequent in the U.S., as is the use of abortion.
Good information = informed choices
No, the main reason is that Canadian teens of all social classes get comprehensive information about contraception and about how to avoid unwanted pregnancies. They get more sex ed in school, and can access high-school-based family planning counselling though the nurse. They can also always access universally free medical services, including visiting family doctor and special health clinics. And at all levels, there's a more positive attitude towards the pill, and either cheap or free prescriptions for it.
As a result, young Canadian women use more effective pharmaceutical methods (i.e. birth control pills) rather than less effective ones (condoms, or the so-called withdrawal method).
The Washington Post reported the story of one teenager, Yasmin Herrera, 19, who learned a month ago that she is pregnant with her second child, an unwanted pregnancy. She had a new prescription for birth-control patches but not enough money to fill it. That kind of case is avoidable here.
It's important to point out there are other factors involved: the U.S.'s earlier average marriage age and higher levels of religious practice (which can bring more traditional, pro-abstinence-only ideas) also contribute to the higher rate. But there are no policy implications for either of those.
So the role institutions can play is one of providing information about the pill and condoms, rather than telling kids they shouldn't have sex.
And really, who can blame kids who do? Adult culture glorifies and even flaunts sex, then educators tell kids they shouldn't try it because of the consequences: both social and moral. I don't know about you, but when I hear that kind of double standard, age-ist nonsense, I almost feel a teenage-style huff and coming on.
And it's not just me. When adults treat teens as intelligent beings capable of making informed decisions when armed with good information, then they do. That's backed not just by belief, but by actual numbers and science.
Related Tyee stories:
Tyee contributing editor Vanessa Richmond writes the Schlock and Awe column about popular culture and the media.
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10:32
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disturbing the comfortable
I know, I know. I'm inconsistent. Lazy, too. One bad side effect is that stuff I consider worth blogging about backs up on my desktop, an article jam that may flood central Oregon unless I do something about it.
Where to start, yeah, always the question. A somewhat local, kid, from up in Madras, about 45 minutes north of here, is in a coma because of head-shots he took in a Golden Gloves fight. He and his family are poor; prize-fighting, he thought, was a way to support his folks. He probably isn't going to recover, according to today's news. Subdural hematoma: several parts of his brain are dead and he's likely to require full-time care. He's 19 years old. That's awful, I agree. People cannot take repeated blows to the head or concussions without paying a dreadful price. Football, boxing, war. What a trio of guaranteed ways to turn people into semi-ambulatory cabbages. But it goes on and on. With lots of social approval.
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15:37
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disturbing the comfortable
Amidst the turmoil and chaos of the financial collapse, here's something I found over on Firedoglake:
Breaking–AIG releases list of recipients of bailout money. US shortchanged. By:
looseheadprop Sunday March 15, 2009 3:28
AIG just relased its listof counter-parties (recipients of bailout money which flowed through AIG) There are 4 nifty charts.
Here's the take away:
Chart A:$6.2 billion out of $22.4 billion goes to US Financial concerns (that we know of. $41 billion is unaccounted for)
Cart B: $10 billion out of $29.6billion goes to US concerns
Chart C: $7 billion out of $12.1 billion (with $ 5.1 billion unaccounted for) goes to US concerns
Chart D: $14.7 billion out of $43.7 billion goes to US concerns
By "US concerns" I mean US banks and financial institutions,like Citbank or Goldman Sachs, or to States and municipalities in the US. The rest go to foreign banks, primarily in Europe.
So, out of $107.8 billion of US taxpayer money only $37.9 is specifically identified as going to US concerns.
We only got 35% of our own money!
I guess the message here, is that if AIG fails, it takes down the EU with it.
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15:32
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disturbing the comfortable
Damn: I'm in a swamp—I think it's from the vicodin I take to sleep at night, and it's really really hard to crawl up onto dry ground and walk on two legs. The pain isn't bad—it's bad when I'm lying down and trying to get to sleep and my body is going, ow, ooo, yike that hurts—but in the daytime it's just discomfort for the most part. Walking is still difficult. I teeter and totter like an old man, which I am, yeah, and it's slow and frustrating. For the most part, I don't use the cane around the house. That's a big improvement.
Tuesday I go back and get the staples out of my leg; that means I can go back to the pool and the hot tub and begin both loosening up and getting back in shape.
It doesn't need to be said I'm bored s**tless.
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11:16
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disturbing the comfortable
Lately, I've been taking things too seriously. The world is still absurd.
Fugitive drug lord makes Forbes' billionaire list
By MARK STEVENSON – 1 day ago
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Who says crime doesn't pay? A suspected drug lord who is Mexico's most-wanted fugitive made the Forbes list of billionaires on Wednesday with a fortune described as "self made."
The magazine estimates Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's worth at $1 billion — No. 701 on the list, right between a Swiss oil-trading tycoon and a U.S. chemical heir. Dozens of other people were also tied for the spot.
It is unclear what Guzman thinks of the distinction. Forbes senior editor Luisa Kroll notes that "unfortunately ... Guzman could not be reached for comment."
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11:13
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disturbing the comfortable
from The Devil's Dictionary Defiled:
Television - n. Device for casting spells on people so they believe their lives are unlivable in the absence of the latest faddish googah. Space between these spells is referred to in polite language as "programming."
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15:38
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disturbing the comfortable
Rare good news: the new attorney general has announced the DOJ is going to back off on busting medical marijuana clinics. It's an idea who's time has come—in fact, has been here for years, standing around like yet another elephant in the living room. Thousands and thousands of people, in fact, not just those ill enough to have truthful claims to needing medical maryjane, have been persecuted for smoking or possessing weed. The government spends...yeah, a lot of money on busting potheads and pot farms. They don't seem to be winning this aspect of the war on drugs. The best thing you can say about it is that it gives jobs to a lot of people: judges, lawyers, cops, jailers, stenographers...
AlterNet
The Drug War's Latest Tally: 872,721 Pot Arrests, an All-Time High
By Paul Armentano, AlterNet
Posted on September 16, 2008, Printed on September 16, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/98952/
If denial is the first sign of addiction, then Drug Czar John Walters is hooked to the gills. He's addicted to targeting and arresting marijuana consumers, and he'll do and say anything to keep this irrational and punitive policy in place.
Speaking earlier this month on C-Span, the reigning Czar stretched his usual deceit to outrageous new heights. Responding to a question from the Marijuana Policy Project's Dan Bernath, Walters flatly denied the charge that over 800,000 Americans are arrested annually for violating pot laws.
"We didn't arrest 800,000 marijuana users," Walters proclaimed. "That's [a] lie."
If only it were.
According to data released yesterday in the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report, police in 2007 arrested over 872,000 US citizens - that's nearly one out of every two Americans busted for illicit drugs -- for weed. (The raw data is available from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation here and here.) That figure is a five percent increase over the total number of Americans busted in 2006. It's more than three times the number of citizens charged with pot violations sixteen years ago.
Of those arrested in 2007, 89 percent - some 775,000 Americans -- were charged with simple pot possession, not trafficking, cultivation, or sale. (By comparison, 27 percent of those arrested for heroin and cocaine offenses were charged with sales.) Three out of four were under age 30; one in four were 18-years-old or younger.
The FBI's tally is the highest marijuana arrest total ever-reported in law enforcement history. If this pace continues, annual arrests for pot will surpass one million per year by 2010.
But to hear America's top drug cop tell it few, if any, citizens are ever arrested for pot possession, and absolutely no one goes to jail for breaking marijuana laws.
"The fact is today, people don't go to jail for the possession of marijuana," Walters alleged on C-Span. "Finding somebody in jail or prison for possession of marijuana is like finding a unicorn. It doesn't exist."
Not true says the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, which reported last year in black and white -- perhaps the Drug Czar is reading impaired - that 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug abuse violations are serving time for marijuana offenses. Combining these percentages with separate U.S. Department of Justice statistics on the total number of state and federal drug prisoners suggests that, at a minimum, there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for marijuana offenses. (The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county or local jails for pot-related offenses, nor did it take into account the number of inmates serving time for violating the terms of their marijuana-related probation, such as those who submitted a 'dirty' urine to their parole officer.)
No matter how one slices it, that's a lot of unicorns.
It also begs the question: Why does the Drug Czar feel the need to go to such absurd lengths to hide this overt outgrowth of American drug policy? After all, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy typically issue chest-thumping press releases when they achieve record busts for offenses involving cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine? Why then do they shy away from making similar proclamations for pot?
Perhaps it's because, deep down, even the Drug Czar knows that the use of cannabis does not pose anywhere near the health and safety threat as does the use of other intoxicants, including alcohol, and that most Americans - rightly - would be outraged to learn that our nation's so-called war on drugs is really just an assault on young adults caught with small bags of weed.
Paul Armentano is the Deputy Director of NORML and The NORML Foundation in Washington, DC.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
[www.alternet.org] AlterNet
The Drug War's Latest Tally: 872,721 Pot Arrests, an All-Time High
By Paul Armentano, AlterNet
Posted on September 16, 2008, Printed on September 16, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/98952/">[www.alternet.org] If denial is the first sign of addiction, then Drug Czar John Walters is hooked to the gills. He's addicted to targeting and arresting marijuana consumers, and he'll do and say anything to keep this irrational and punitive policy in place.
Speaking earlier this month on C-Span, the reigning Czar stretched his usual deceit to outrageous new heights. Responding to a question from the Marijuana Policy Project's Dan Bernath, Walters flatly denied the charge that over 800,000 Americans are arrested annually for violating pot laws.
"We didn't arrest 800,000 marijuana users," Walters proclaimed. "That's [a] lie."
If only it were.
According to data released yesterday in the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report, police in 2007 arrested over 872,000 US citizens - that's nearly one out of every two Americans busted for illicit drugs -- for weed. (The raw data is available from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation here and here.) That figure is a five percent increase over the total number of Americans busted in 2006. It's more than three times the number of citizens charged with pot violations sixteen years ago.
Of those arrested in 2007, 89 percent - some 775,000 Americans -- were charged with simple pot possession, not trafficking, cultivation, or sale. (By comparison, 27 percent of those arrested for heroin and cocaine offenses were charged with sales.) Three out of four were under age 30; one in four were 18-years-old or younger.
The FBI's tally is the highest marijuana arrest total ever-reported in law enforcement history. If this pace continues, annual arrests for pot will surpass one million per year by 2010.
But to hear America's top drug cop tell it few, if any, citizens are ever arrested for pot possession, and absolutely no one goes to jail for breaking marijuana laws.
"The fact is today, people don't go to jail for the possession of marijuana," Walters alleged on C-Span. "Finding somebody in jail or prison for possession of marijuana is like finding a unicorn. It doesn't exist."
Not true says the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, which reported last year in black and white -- perhaps the Drug Czar is reading impaired - that 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug abuse violations are serving time for marijuana offenses. Combining these percentages with separate U.S. Department of Justice statistics on the total number of state and federal drug prisoners suggests that, at a minimum, there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for marijuana offenses. (The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county or local jails for pot-related offenses, nor did it take into account the number of inmates serving time for violating the terms of their marijuana-related probation, such as those who submitted a 'dirty' urine to their parole officer.)
No matter how one slices it, that's a lot of unicorns.
It also begs the question: Why does the Drug Czar feel the need to go to such absurd lengths to hide this overt outgrowth of American drug policy? After all, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy typically issue chest-thumping press releases when they achieve record busts for offenses involving cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine? Why then do they shy away from making similar proclamations for pot?
Perhaps it's because, deep down, even the Drug Czar knows that the use of cannabis does not pose anywhere near the health and safety threat as does the use of other intoxicants, including alcohol, and that most Americans - rightly - would be outraged to learn that our nation's so-called war on drugs is really just an assault on young adults caught with small bags of weed.
Paul Armentano is the Deputy Director of NORML and The NORML Foundation in Washington, DC.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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15:29
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disturbing the comfortable
Someone was telling me, the other day, about "Slumdog Millionaire" and what a great movie it is. Uh-huh. It's Another Great Movie I think I'll Miss. A guy just happens to win a kajillion rupees on on a millionire TV show, after coming out of one the world's worst slums. Just like real life. A virgin whore becomes a virgin over and over again, courtesy of miracle surgery. Sure, happens all the time. A big happy Bollywood dance number and Everyone lives happily ever after. Yup, I see it happen around me all the time. Happiness is only a few dollars away.
Are they f**king serious? This is like the whore with the heart of gold; the lesbian who goes straight after meeting just the right guy; the god descending from heavenly thrown and making everything just dandy. It ain't the way things work. No.
Can you, by the way, imagine how those slums smell? No, the theatres don't give you scent-o-rama. Just bulls**t-o-rama.
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10:21
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disturbing the comfortable
And while we're at it, here's a nice statement about belief from one of the really unsung heroes of the American Revolution, T. Paine:
"It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
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10:20
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disturbing the comfortable
The rich get rich...you know the rest of the mantra:
Richest Americans’ Income Doubled as Tax Rate Slashed
By Ryan J. Donmoyer
(Corrects math error in first paragraph of story that ran Jan. 30 to show tax rate fell by a quarter, not a third.)
Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) -- The average tax rate paid by the richest 400 Americans fell by a quarter to 17.2 percent through the first six years of the Bush administration and their average income doubled to $263.3 million, new IRS data show.
The 17.2 percent tax rate in 2006 was the lowest since the IRS began tracking the 400 largest taxpayers in 1992, although the richest 400 Americans paid more tax on an inflation-adjusted basis than any year since 2000.
The drop from 2001’s tax rate of 22.9 percent was due largely to ex-President George W. Bush’s push to cut tax rates on most capital gains to 15 percent in 2003.
Capital gains made up 63 percent of the richest 400 Americans’ adjusted gross income in 2006, or a combined $66.1 billion, according to the data. In all, the 400 wealthiest Americans reported a combined $105.3 billion of adjusted gross income in 2006, the most recent year for which the IRS has data.
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10:11
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disturbing the comfortable
We do love hysteria in this great nation. Whether it be over a missing blond toddler, a murdered wife or mistress of a prominent person, the threat of a threat or a rumor of a threat of international danger...
Serious reporting is hard, time consuming and expensive. Sensationalism is easy, quick, and cheap. That's why "If it bleeds, it leads" is the mantra of local TV news shows. No need to worry about facts or causes: just throw some s**t together and get it on-screen.
Even national news reporting is in love with this approach. A situation is perceived, some dangers are inflated, and, zip, wow, news story after news story about the latest whatever. That's what this post, from Alternet, is about: teen-agers (OMG: Them!!) sending sexy text messages and photos to each other. The End of Civilization As We Know It has arrived.
AlterNet
What's the Matter with Teen Sexting?
By Judith Levine, The American Prospect
Posted on February 7, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
[www.alternet.org] A couple of weeks ago, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, prosecutors charged six teenagers with creating, distributing, and possessing child pornography. The three girls, ages 14 and 15, took nude or seminude pictures of themselves and e-mailed them to friends, including three boys, ages 16 and 17, who are among the defendants. Police Captain George Seranko described the obscenity of the images: They "weren't just breasts," he declared. "They showed female anatomy!"
Greensburg's crime-stoppers aren't the only ones looking out for the cybersafety of America's youth. In Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Utah (at last count) minors have been arrested for "sexting," or sending or posting soft-core photo or video self-portraits. Of 1,280 teens and young adults surveyed recently by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, one in five said they engaged in the practice -- girls only slightly more than boys.
Seranko and other authorities argue that such pictures may find their way to the Internet and from there to pedophiles and other exploiters. "It's very dangerous," he opined.
How dangerous is it? Not very, suggests a major study released this month by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Studies. "Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies," the result of a yearlong investigation by a wide range of experts, concludes that "the risks minors face online are in most cases not significantly different from those they face offline, and as they get older, minors themselves contribute to some of the problems." Almost all youth who end up having sex with adults they meet online seek such assignations themselves, fully aware that the partner is older. Similarly, minors who encounter pornography online go looking for it; they tend to be older teenage boys.
But sex and predatory adults are not the biggest dangers kids face as they travel the Net. Garden-variety kid-on-kid meanness, enhanced by technology, is. "Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most frequent threats that minors face, both online and offline," the report found.
Just as almost all physical and sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone a child knows intimately -- the adult who eats dinner or goes to church with her -- victims of cyber-bullying usually know their tormenters: other students who might sit beside them in homeroom or chemistry. Social-networking sites may be the places where kids are likely to hurt each other these days, but those sites, like the bullying, "reinforce pre-existing social relations," according to the report.
Similarly, young people who get in sexual or social trouble online tend to be those who are already at risk offline -- doing poorly in school, neglected or abused at home, and/or economically impoverished. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a child from a family whose annual income is less than $15,000 is 22 times more likely to suffer sexual abuse than a child whose parents earn more than $30,000.
Other new research implies that online sexual communication, no matter how much there is, isn't translating into corporeal sex, with either adults or peers. Contrary to popular media depiction of girls and boys going wilder and wilder, La Salle University sociologist and criminal-justice professor Kathleen A. Bogle has found that American teens are more conservative than their elders were at their age. Teen virginity is up and the number of sexual partners is down, she discovered. Only the rate of births to teenage girls has risen in the last few years -- a result of declining contraceptive use. This may have something to do with abstinence-only education, which leaves kids reluctant or incompetent when it comes to birth control. Still, the rate of teen births compared to pregnancies always tracks the rate among adult women, and it's doing that now, too.
Like the kids finding adult sex partners in chat rooms, those who fail to protect themselves from pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases and have their babies young tend to be otherwise at risk emotionally or socially. In other words, kids who are having a rough time in life are having a rough time in virtual life as well. Sexual or emotional harm precedes risky or harmful on- and offline behavior, rather than the other way around.
Enter the law -- and the injuries of otherwise harmless teenage sexual shenanigans begin. The effects of the ever-stricter sex-crimes laws, which punish ever-younger offenders, are tragic for juveniles. A child pornography conviction -- which could come from sending a racy photo of yourself or receiving said photo from a girlfriend or boyfriend -- carries far heavier penalties than most hands-on sexual offenses. Even if a juvenile sees no lock-up time, he or she will be forced to register as a sex offender for 10 years or more. The federal Adam Walsh Child Protection Act of 2007 requires that sex offenders as young as 14 register.
As documented in such reports as Human Rights Watch's "No Easy Answers: Sex Offender Laws in the U.S." and "Registering Harm: How Sex Offense Registries Fail Youth and Communities" from the Justice Policy Institute, conviction and punishment for a sex crime (a term that includes nonviolent offenses such as consensual teen sex, flashing, and patronizing a prostitute) effectively squashes a minor's chances of getting a college scholarship, serving in the military, securing a good job, finding decent housing, and, in many cases, moving forward with hope or happiness.
The sexual dangers to youth, online or off, may be less than we think. Yet adults routinely conflate friendly sex play with hurtful online behavior. "Teaching Teenagers About Harassment," recent piece in The New York Times, swings between descriptions of consensual photo-swapping and incessant, aggressive texting and Facebook or MySpace rumor-and insult-mongering as if these were similarly motivated -- and equally harmful. It quotes the San Francisco-based Family Violence Prevention Fund, which calls sending nude photos "whether it is done under pressure or not" an element of "digital dating violence."
Sober scientific data do nothing to calm such anxieties. Reams of comments flowed into The New York Times when it reported Dr. Bogle's findings. "The way TV and MUSIC is promoting sex and explicit content daily and almost on every network," read one typical post, from the aptly named MsKnowledge, "I would have to say this article is completely naive. The streets are talking and there [sic] saying teens and young adults are becoming far more involved in more adult and sexual activities than most ADULTS. Scientific data is a JOKE … pay attention to reality and the REAL world will tell you otherwise."
A better-educated interlocutor, NPR's "On the Media" host Brooke Gladstone, defaulted to the same assumption in an interview with one of the Harvard Internet task force members, Family Online Safety Institute CEO Stephen Balkam. What lessons could be drawn from the study's findings? Gladstone asked. "What can be and what should be done to protect kids?"
"There's no silver bullet that's going to solve this issue," Balkam replied. But "far more cooperation has got to happen between law enforcement, industry, the academic community, and we need to understand far better the psychological issues that are at play here."
It's unclear from this exchange what Gladstone believes kids need to be protected from or what issue Balkam is solving. But neither of them came to the logical conclusion of the Harvard study: that we should back off, moderate our fears, and stop thinking of youthful sexual expression as a criminal matter. Still, Balkam wants to call in the cops.
Maybe all that bullying is a mirror of the way adults treat young people minding their own sexual business. Maybe the "issue" is not sex but adults' response to it: the harm we do trying to protect teenagers from themselves.
Reprinted with permission from Judith Levine, "What's the Matter With Teen Sexting?," The American Prospect Online: February 02, 2009. www.prospect.org. The American Prospect, 1710 Rhode Island Avenue, NW, 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. All right reserved."
Judith Levine is the author of four books, including Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex.
© 2009 The American Prospect All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/125190/">[www.alternet.org] 
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10:03
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disturbing the comfortable
There're a lot of stories I've flagged and put on the desktop, with the purpose of sticking them here and making comments about them. A week's worth of them.
I've had a hectic week and didn't get around to them any sooner: q.west, my ISP, periodically sends me glitch, and since I'm not a techie, it sometimes takes me several days to figure out what it is—or to rectify it, without necessarily fixing it, right; I spent a lot of time on the phone arranging for some out-patient surgery to back out a screw the doctor put too far into the ball in my right hip; I've been fighting off a chest cold; still plenty of aches from the healing hip; he anniversary of my son's death is coming up next week; and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. You know the story: we all live it from time to time.
So, now I'll see what looks worthwhile and comment-worthy.
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11:27
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disturbing the comfortable
So, California may be the late, great state, after all. It's broke. It's self-destructing (with the help of a few good Republican conservatives). It's another example of incredible ideological stupidity, sort of economic McCarthyism.
California is very broke. The governor, Arnold S., promised he would not raise taxes when he was elected. Arnold just signed a bill to raise taxes, because there is no money. N-o-m-o-n-e-y. Because of this the conservatives are screaming bloody murder. One of their ideals, in this situation, appears to be to lay off every single state employee. However, they've yet to figure out who's going to watch the prisoners, fight fires, do the scut-work of running a state with a bigger infrastructure—and budget—than many nations. All they know is that taxes are going to go up, and that would be about like pissing on a Bible for many of them. These people are seriously detached from reality.
Oregon is going to have about a $2.5 billion deficit in the next biennium. Washington's will be over $8 billion. I regularly get newsletters from several Oregon state legislators who moan piteously for more tax cuts. There is, apparently, something in the contemporary Republican mind, magical about tax cuts. Tax increases are...my god, they're...communist or something. But, the problem is that tax-cuts are a major contributing reason America is dangling over the economic cess-pool right now. That and deregulation and free market wet dreams, of course.
The conservative fantasy of shrinking government to where it can "drowned in a bathtub" is just plain stupid. It's the ideology of the intelligence-challenged. You simply cannot have a complex society without structure. Not with religious structure, either. There's too much centrifugal force. The best we could hope for would be a North American Somalia. I actually believe a lot of conservatives would prefer a fastest-gun-in-town approach to society. That's probably why John Wayne is his western roles is so idolized by the right-wing-nuts.
But, it doesn't work in real life. It's like a fantasy for senile adolescents. Look at California, shudder, think again about adequately funding government.
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13:47
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disturbing the comfortable
So, if the Rethugnicans have their way, America's economy will collapse, are we agreed? I'm utterly confused about how they can on the one hand wail about the awful deficits and then on the other hand demand more tax cuts. As I can best figure it out, we have deficits because there isn't enough revenue to pay for the war, for domestic spending, and so on—we have to borrow money. Borrowed money equals deficits, right? So if we have further tax cuts, don't we have to borrow more money? Even if the GOP''s wet dreams of drowning government would work out, there are still a lot of pay checks to cut every month.
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18:15
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disturbing the comfortable
Is there a method in the madness of the Republican-refusenik party? I've been wondering. All I've come up with, though, is the possibility that by being such a collection of stonewall-heads they hope to bring on the destabilisation of our country—which would pave the way, they hope, for some Gingrich-like charismatic leader who would promise stability and jobs and running the buses on time and getting rid of the illegal immigrants who have dragged this country down into the morass of atheistic liberal Jewish bankers, blah blah. Yeah, that they've decided they aren't going to get their wishes unless we give up on what democracy we have left.
Well, it's possible. The Republican behavior is truly lock-step and regressive. Could it be the infiltration of the party by the unreconstructed southern racists-militarists-Christians has led them to such a point of view?
But, Pete, that would treason. Yeah, it would.
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16:00
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disturbing the comfortable
Not the best headline, I'm afraid. But Bend is teetering on the edge of economic collapse; from a city with notoriously over-priced houses, it is now a city with a notorious inventory of unsold properties. Of course, the big developers, the bankers, lenders, realtors, the newspaper, chamber of commerce folks—all the folks that brought you the wonderful housing boom and ever inflating home prices are all amazed. They had no idea it would ever end, let alone collapse. Uh-huh.
You cannot build a city on nothing. There has to be a solid, continuing revenue source or sources for a city to grow. The west is littered with ghost towns. Someone finds a rich streak of gold or silver or copper, and a town is laid out. People pour in, buildings go up, property values escalate, the hype is that the city is the coming metropolis. But then the gold or copper runs out. There's no financial base. Virginia City, Butte, Goldroad, Austin, Columbia, Bodie, Goldfield—those towns, if they still have inhabitants, are just museum sets, no matter how big they got during the boom. Why did they empty? There wasn't enough money to keep the town going. It takes agriculture or diverse industry, something along those lines, to keep a solid financial base for people to tap into. Bend doesn't have that. All Bend has is hype—publicity as the greatest destination in the west. The city has tried to fund itself on future growth; it's like doubling down on losing bets or something like that. Sad, yeah. Going to be a lot sadder as the property values continue to deflate.
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18:26
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disturbing the comfortable
Been saving this for a while. I'm not sure why, but maybe it has something to do with the nuttiness in Washington and New York.
Boston.com
How the city hurts your brain...And what you can do about it
[www.boston.com] By Jonah Lehrer | January 2, 2009
THE CITY HAS always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.
And yet, city life isn't easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it's also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.
Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.
"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."
One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.
This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities. For a species that evolved to live in small, primate tribes on the African savannah, such a migration marks a dramatic shift. Instead of inhabiting wide-open spaces, we're crowded into concrete jungles, surrounded by taxis, traffic, and millions of strangers. In recent years, it's become clear that such unnatural surroundings have important implications for our mental and physical health, and can powerfully alter how we think.
This research is also leading some scientists to dabble in urban design, as they look for ways to make the metropolis less damaging to the brain. The good news is that even slight alterations, such as planting more trees in the inner city or creating urban parks with a greater variety of plants, can significantly reduce the negative side effects of city life. The mind needs nature, and even a little bit can be a big help.
Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy thoroughfare like Newbury Street. There are the crowded sidewalks full of distracted pedestrians who have to be avoided; the hazardous crosswalks that require the brain to monitor the flow of traffic. (The brain is a wary machine, always looking out for potential threats.) There's the confusing urban grid, which forces people to think continually about where they're going and how to get there.
The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.
Natural settings, in contrast, don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. This idea is known as attention restoration theory, or ART, and it was first developed by Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. While it's long been known that human attention is a scarce resource -- focusing in the morning makes it harder to focus in the afternoon -- Kaplan hypothesized that immersion in nature might have a restorative effect.
Imagine a walk around Walden Pond, in Concord. The woods surrounding the pond are filled with pitch pine and hickory trees. Chickadees and red-tailed hawks nest in the branches; squirrels and rabbits skirmish in the berry bushes. Natural settings are full of objects that automatically capture our attention, yet without triggering a negative emotional response -- unlike, say, a backfiring car. The mental machinery that directs attention can relax deeply, replenishing itself.
"It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan," says Berman. "They needed to put a park there."
In a study published last month, Berman outfitted undergraduates at the University of Michigan with GPS receivers. Some of the students took a stroll in an arboretum, while others walked around the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor.
The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature.
"We see the picture of the busy street, and we automatically imagine what it's like to be there," says Berman. "And that's when your ability to pay attention starts to suffer."
This also helps explain why, according to several studies, children with attention-deficit disorder have fewer symptoms in natural settings. When surrounded by trees and animals, they are less likely to have behavioral problems and are better able to focus on a particular task.
Studies have found that even a relatively paltry patch of nature can confer benefits. In the late 1990s, Frances Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, began interviewing female residents in the Robert Taylor Homes, a massive housing project on the South Side of Chicago.
Kuo and her colleagues compared women randomly assigned to various apartments. Some had a view of nothing but concrete sprawl, the blacktop of parking lots and basketball courts. Others looked out on grassy courtyards filled with trees and flowerbeds. Kuo then measured the two groups on a variety of tasks, from basic tests of attention to surveys that looked at how the women were handling major life challenges. She found that living in an apartment with a view of greenery led to significant improvements in every category.
"We've constructed a world that's always drawing down from the same mental account," Kuo says. "And then we're surprised when [after spending time in the city] we can't focus at home."
But the density of city life doesn't just make it harder to focus: It also interferes with our self-control. In that stroll down Newbury, the brain is also assaulted with temptations -- caramel lattes, iPods, discounted cashmere sweaters, and high-heeled shoes. Resisting these temptations requires us to flex the prefrontal cortex, a nub of brain just behind the eyes. Unfortunately, this is the same brain area that's responsible for directed attention, which means that it's already been depleted from walking around the city. As a result, it's less able to exert self-control, which means we're more likely to splurge on the latte and those shoes we don't really need. While the human brain possesses incredible computational powers, it's surprisingly easy to short-circuit: all it takes is a hectic city street.
"I think cities reveal how fragile some of our 'higher' mental functions actually are," Kuo says. "We take these talents for granted, but they really need to be protected."
Related research has demonstrated that increased "cognitive load" -- like the mental demands of being in a city -- makes people more likely to choose chocolate cake instead of fruit salad, or indulge in a unhealthy snack. This is the one-two punch of city life: It subverts our ability to resist temptation even as it surrounds us with it, from fast-food outlets to fancy clothing stores. The end result is too many calories and too much credit card debt.
City life can also lead to loss of emotional control. Kuo and her colleagues found less domestic violence in the apartments with views of greenery. These data build on earlier work that demonstrated how aspects of the urban environment, such as crowding and unpredictable noise, can also lead to increased levels of aggression. A tired brain, run down by the stimuli of city life, is more likely to lose its temper.
Long before scientists warned about depleted prefrontal cortices, philosophers and landscape architects were warning about the effects of the undiluted city, and looking for ways to integrate nature into modern life. Ralph Waldo Emerson advised people to "adopt the pace of nature," while the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted sought to create vibrant urban parks, such as Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in Boston, that allowed the masses to escape the maelstrom of urban life.
Although Olmsted took pains to design parks with a variety of habitats and botanical settings, most urban greenspaces are much less diverse. This is due in part to the "savannah hypothesis," which argues that people prefer wide-open landscapes that resemble the African landscape in which we evolved. Over time, this hypothesis has led to a proliferation of expansive civic lawns, punctuated by a few trees and playing fields.
However, these savannah-like parks are actually the least beneficial for the brain. In a recent paper, Richard Fuller, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, demonstrated that the psychological benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.
"We worry a lot about the effects of urbanization on other species," Fuller says. "But we're also affected by it. That's why it's so important to invest in the spaces that provide us with some relief."
When a park is properly designed, it can improve the function of the brain within minutes. As the Berman study demonstrates, just looking at a natural scene can lead to higher scores on tests of attention and memory. While people have searched high and low for ways to improve cognitive performance, from doping themselves with Red Bull to redesigning the layout of offices, it appears that few of these treatments are as effective as simply taking a walk in a natural place.
Given the myriad mental problems that are exacerbated by city life, from an inability to pay attention to a lack of self-control, the question remains: Why do cities continue to grow? And why, even in the electronic age, do they endure as wellsprings of intellectual life?
Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory -- the crowded streets, the crushing density of people -- also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the "concentration of social interactions" that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists. The density of 18th-century London may have triggered outbreaks of disease, but it also led to intellectual breakthroughs, just as the density of Cambridge -- one of the densest cities in America -- contributes to its success as a creative center. One corollary of this research is that less dense urban areas, like Phoenix, may, over time, generate less innovation.
The key, then, is to find ways to mitigate the psychological damage of the metropolis while still preserving its unique benefits. Kuo, for instance, describes herself as "not a nature person," but has learned to seek out more natural settings: The woods have become a kind of medicine. As a result, she's better able to cope with the stresses of city life, while still enjoying its many pleasures and benefits. Because there always comes a time, as Lou Reed once sang, when a person wants to say: "I'm sick of the trees/take me to the city."
Jonah Lehrer is the author of the new book "How We Decide." His first book was "Proust Was a Neuroscientist." He is a regular contributor to Ideas.
© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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16:04
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disturbing the comfortable
Is the "stimulus."
Cut cut cut. I doubt that all the cuts are necessary. Maybe the cuts are necessary because the Democratic members of Congress are such a gang of wannabe "centrists"? Disgusting.
On the other hand, it's a nice snowy day here in central Oregon. I finally got back into the pool for some physical therapy—more than six weeks of being laid up. I basically pedaled around in deep water for twenty minutes, flexing out my hip, and then fifteen minutes in the hot tub. Feels wonderful. Out of my head and into my body. I came home and was able to remember the correct password to an account on Facebook. Now that I have that all figured out, of course, it's passed by with "Twaddle" or "Twitter," or "Dither" or "Dips**t." Whatever. I'm not going to be with it, ever, and the world will have to accept that. Got it?
OK, now, let's get back to making the revolution.
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7:26
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disturbing the comfortable
The official reality is that all threats of terrorism come from “leftists.” They’re tree-huggers or black nationalists or middle-easterners, something—someone—very subversive and very...umm...unwashed.
Then there was Tim McVey. And the guy who shot up the Unitarian Church and denounced liberals... But, mostly we seem to hear about eco-saboteurs and wannabe Marxist guerillas. Never see them, though. Hear about them.
Then there are good old fashion’ Americans, like a guy in Belfast, Maine, who was apparently shot to death by his wife. Sounds like he pretty much deserved it; I imagine her life is still going to be hell.
The thing is, though, the guy was one of those great far-right nutcases that too often slips through society way below the radar...this is from Raw Story:
Report: 'Dirty bomb' parts found in slain man's home
Agency says radioactive materials recovered in home of man allegedly slain by his wife
By Walter Griffin
BDN Staff
BELFAST, Maine — James G. Cummings, who police say was shot to death by his wife two months ago, allegedly had a cache of radioactive materials in his home suitable for building a “dirty bomb.”
According to an FBI field intelligence report from the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center posted online by WikiLeaks, an organization that posts leaked documents, an investigation into the case revealed that radioactive materials were removed from Cummings’ home after his shooting death on Dec. 9.
The report posted on the WikiLeaks Web site states that “On 9 December 2008, radiological dispersal device components and literature, and radioactive materials, were discovered at the Maine residence of an identified deceased [person] James Cummings.”
It says that four 1-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon were found in the home.
Also found was literature on how to build “dirty bombs” and information about cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60, radioactive materials. The FBI report also stated there was evidence linking James Cummings to white supremacist groups. This would seem to confirm observations by local tradesmen who worked at the Cummings home that he was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler and had a collection of Nazi memorabilia around the house, including a prominently displayed flag with swastika. Cummings claimed to have pieces of Hitler’s personal silverware and place settings, painter Mike Robbins said a few days after the shooting.
***
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18:48
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disturbing the comfortable
When you negotiate a contract, you ask for more than you think you'll get. The rules of the game require this. Then you can negotiate down to what you'll settle for, what you want. Say you need to borrow five thousand dollars. You ask for ten thousand and, after dickering around a great deal, you'll get five thousand—maybe six thousand if you're lucky. Like selling a car or buying a house. The buyer offers less, the seller asks more. I hope this is what's happened with the stimulus bill. It seems to me that absolute honesty in these negotiations is about the last thing anyone wants. Are there other ways to finance more food stamps? Head start programs? I imagine there are.
I wonder if what the Dems are doing is letting the Republicans dig their graves a bit deeper by being such unrepentant assholes. By letting them fluster and buster and go on pursuing policies that have driven us to the edge of the cliff, I think public opinion is building against them, more and more. The posturings of people like Rush Limbaugh are not helping. There're too many bitter people right now, people realizing they've been sold a bucket of s**t and were told it's gold, and to have lard-heads like Limbaugh saying, no it really is gold isn't helping the Republican cause. At least that's what I'm hoping...
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18:37
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disturbing the comfortable
I'm utterly disgusted by Leon Panetta saying he would not hold various interrogators liable for what they did because they were following orders. Wow: the last sixty-odd years of history were just thrown down the toilet. Nazis. War crimes. Remember? "I vass chust following ordersss..." Goddamit, this stinks. Panetta's stomach should turn itself inside out if he has a soul. How many people did we hang, how many people did we hang for following orders? What was the principle?
War crimes. Our new administration has announced to the world that we do not commit war crimes. Because we say so, basically. Oh, sure, torture may be a war crime, but our torturers believed they were acting legally. I'm sure there were many Nazis who believed you could not commit war crimes against Jews because they were sub-human. Maybe we need to offer posthumous pardons to them. F**k. I'm glad I'm old; I won't have to watch the utter degradation of this country—just the partial degredation, yeah.
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11:52
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disturbing the comfortable
The stimulus bill has been, sort of, approved. The Republicans are snarling about many aspects of it, mostly because they know in their hearts their own policies are what got us to this point. The line I like best is from some Repu who said he didn't want to mortgage our children's future...yeah, like what the f**k did they do concerning the war and the biggest deficits ever encountered by human beings? They mortgaged the hell out of the future.
Is Rush Limbaugh the top Republican these days? Apparently he believes he is, seriously. Could it be the viagra has gone to his head instead of his dick—assuming those are two different places? Is he back on pain pills? Was he ever off of pain pills? Would he exist without either pain pills or viagra? Or without cigars? A rabble-rousing raggedty-brained fool is the head of the GOP? Yeah, sounds right. Once the shock and awe of utterly failed policies sets in, anything is possible.
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13:06
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disturbing the comfortable
So, wotthehell wotthehell, the Republicans are behavior worse than usual and, natch, getting away with it.
How people who have given us an unmitigated economic disaster for the last eight years can claim any sort of authority or intelligence or even decency... I mean they're still out there on TV, arguing that just because X has been a drunk for the last umpteen years and had innumerable traffic accidents and caused even more, why should we not give X some more money to buy booze? That's the old it's crazy to keep on doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome routine I heard so many times in AA. That is craziness, yeah, and it's like expecting a drunk to go out and have a drink and come home sober. What a whacked out way of doing anything—especially politics.
Send them all to rehab (which I'm fairly certain would at least sober up a good number of the Republican opposition)! Hell, send the Dems to rehab too! They're all wet-brain idiots. And they've damn near destroyed the country in their haste to pick up brib—ah, campaign donations.
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14:00
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disturbing the comfortable
“Kleptocracy.” A new word? It means a rule of thieves. It means that during the Iraq war, a gang of thieves was running the show. We lost billions and billions of dollars in “reconstruction funds” that were, basically, stolen.
I believe these funds were stolen the way torture became an established interrogation technique—a word from on high, a wink, and it was done. And I think the word and wink came from the same people in both cases. Hey, you supported us getting into office, here’s a little present...
washingtonpost.com
l
Iraq Auditor Warns of Waste, Fraud In Afghanistan
By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 2, 2009; A06
After five years of investigations and 250,000 pages of audits, Stuart W. Bowen Jr. wishes he could say that the $50 billion cost of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was money accounted for and well spent.
"But that's just not happened," Bowen said.
Instead, the largest single-country relief and reconstruction project in U.S. history -- most of it done by private U.S. contractors -- was full of wasted funds, fraud and a lack of accountability under what Bowen, the congressionally mandated special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, calls an "ad hoc-racy" of lax or nonexistent government planning and supervision.
And despite the Iraq experience, he said, the United States is making many of the same mistakes again in Afghanistan, where U.S. reconstruction expenditures stand at more than $30 billion and counting.
...
Bowen's office, known as SIGIR, is releasing a book today that recounts the Iraq experience and suggests how to avoid future mistakes. "Hard Lessons" is being published as the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting holds its first public hearing. ...
"Hard Lessons," a draft of which was leaked to the news media in December, concludes that the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was a failure, largely because there was no overall strategy behind it. Goals shifted from "liberation" and an early military exit to massive, ill-conceived and expensive building projects under the Coalition Provisional Authority of 2003 and 2004. Many of those projects -- over budget, poorly executed or, often, barely begun -- were abandoned as security worsened.
In a preface to the 456-page book, Bowen writes that he knew the reconstruction was in trouble when he first visited Iraq in January 2004 and saw duffel bags full of cash being carried out of the Republican Palace, which housed the U.S. occupation government.
Security was a constant problem, not only for military and civilian officials serving in Iraq but also for SIGIR. Auditor Paul Converse was killed in March during a rocket attack in Baghdad, following a year in which five other SIGIR employees were wounded.
The book recounts, in colorful detail based on SIGIR interviews with nearly all the principals, the deep divisions during the same period between the Pentagon, under Donald H. Rumsfeld; the State Department under Colin L. Powell; and the White House office of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage recounts an argument between Rumsfeld and Rice in the fall of 2003 during which each said the other was in charge of supervising the Coalition Provisional Authority.
...
In one previously publicized case recounted in "Hard Lessons," Bowen's auditors discovered a cash disbursement of $57.8 million by the CPA to the U.S. comptroller for south-central Iraq. "Pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills" were removed from the CPA vault in Baghdad and driven to the regional office in two unarmored SUVs. There, the local acting comptroller, Robert J. Stein Jr., who later was convicted for money laundering and fraud, had himself photographed with mountains of cash.
Overall, SIGIR and other law enforcement agencies have obtained 35 convictions, including two major bribery schemes involving $14 million solicited by U.S. military officers who ran Kuwait-based units contracting for the billions of dollars in supplies sent to Iraq.
...
When he took the job five years ago, Bowen said, "I didn't know that we didn't have a system to protect our interests abroad in post-conflict or contingency operations. . . . It would have been a much funner job to issue 250 reports on how well our rebuilding program went . . . and that the money was well accounted for and that we're leaving Iraq a peaceful and democratic place and nonviolent country."
Given that $4 billion in appropriated U.S. reconstruction funds remain unspent in Iraq, Bowen's work is not likely to end anytime soon.
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12:35
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disturbing the comfortable
February, and not a moment too soon. January was a very long month. Things seem to be speeding up; I have an appointment with the orthop. next Monday to see how my hip and pelvis look. I think they're pretty good, although there are still moves that don't feel good. Sort of like discovering there's a piece of barbed wire down in there, rubbing around. I think that's pretty normal. Hope so, anyhow. We'll see.
Once again, I "missed" the superbowl. I chose not to watch it, like I choose not to watch Dr Phil or Fox News. We took a drive over to Sisters, following the countless backroads, hoping we'd find some great little spunky lost dog who didn't have an owner we could find. No luck. Saw a bunch of deer, though, the usual horses and cows, some bicyclists out on their recumbent wheels.
Sisters, which I guess is an OK town except for the corny wannabe-Knott's-Berry-Farm old west style of downtown, looked like it was on the way to being an old west ghost town. Usually, on a Sunday, the downtown is full of pedestrians, parking places are hard to find, and traffic is creepy. The town looked semi-deserted. Is the superbowl that important? I don't think so; when a place's whole reason for existing is tourism, and the tourists stay home, the town goes to hell. Sisters, like Bend, was once a timber town. Bend had the sawmills and Sisters was surrounded by nice flat ground filled with big Ponderosa pines. The big trees are gone, now, along with the sawmills. How does a town survive without it's economic base? Tombstone, Angel's Camp, Virginia City, Bisbee, and other mining towns pretty much depend on tourism. And they're shadows of their pasts. Sisters has a lot of fancy ranches around it, quarter horse ranchs, places like that. Bend has, uh, uh, well it has housing. Bend went for years being some sort of destination mecca. There's ski-ing close by, sure, and there's lakes and rivers...once upon a time there was outstanding fishing, but these days it's put-and-take or it's catch-and-release, sometimes a combination of the two. The town is built on image and advertising. It became a product, marketed like sporty cars (or, more appropriately, SUVs—the image of outdoorsy, robust, adventurous, but comfortable and polished and expensive).
I guess Sun Valley is the model for that, at least in the west. I have no idea how things are going there. Here, they're going badly. There are for sale and for rent signs all over town. New office buildings and strip malls have too many vacancies. And the city government is nearly broke. They thought the boom would go on and on—just like the mining companies thought the Comstock Lode would never run out of ore. Or the Anaconda Company thought Rich Hill would never quit producing copper. Buying houses to flip them, resell them quickly, was a popular activity. You could get loans on $250,000 homes if you were working full time and for low wages. Same old story. Eventually it became obvious Bend was drastically over-priced. And now...who knows what? There's no economic base here, no industry to speak of, no vast reserves of...oil? Natural gas? Coal? Silver? No, no, and no. A whole lot of this town developed, grew, to offer houses to the retiring boomer generation and their parents. They'd worked for good Cold War wages; maybe blue collar, but still good wages.They owned property free and clear in, say Los Angeles, and it sold for a whole lot of money. They came up here to retire. They did. Some of them don't like the climate; some of them thought their kids would want to live here, and some of them died. There's nobody to sell to, now. Even with house-prices down by 1/4th or 1/3rd. No buyers. Ooops.
I don't know what'll happen. I wish I did, but I don't.
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12:21
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disturbing the comfortable
And, on the other hand, it's now been five weeks, or it will be this coming Saturday night, since my hip and pelvis got rejoined in the OR over at St Charles Hospital. So, next week I'll make an appointment to see the orthopedist who did the rebuild and see how it's going. I’m really tired of this.
Yeah, I have it easy compared to a lot of other people with Osteogenesis Imperfecta. I have it easier than a lot of other people, period. Our local paper ran a 3-parter on a woman I’ve spoken to, and see often, over at the pool; she has a disorder that they can’t even diagnose—but it’s taking her down as sure as termites wreck a house. She’s less than half my age, but she’s on daily dialysis because her kidneys are failing; she walks with a cane because she has severe osteoporosis and has only semi-controlled seizures. Her muscles are atrophying. When she was a teen-ager blood leaked in one of her eyes and she lost it. I don’t have anything like all that.
Easy, though, is a comparative term. My easy might be your hard, or your hard might be my easy. It’s like comparing stories of abuse. Who’s to say who had worse abuse? Or a happier childhood or...
So, anyhow, I’m tired of this being the way it is. I’ll be glad to get back to relatively unrestricted freedom; even using a cane will be an improvement.
I’ll try taking the camera with me to the dr’s appointment and see if I can get a shot of the x-ray. If I can, I’ll try to post it here. Just because.
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11:57
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disturbing the comfortable
What I first wanted to say was this: the Huffington Post has an article today on the CD that one of the candidates for chairing the Republican party has put out. He made the news—some news, anyhow, not all of it—for including a song "Barrack the Magic Negro," if you remember that. Now it turns out that on the CD is another ditty "The Star Spanglish Banner," "Jose, can you see...". Jesus. Salsman, the candidate admits that the Obama song may not be in good taste; taste, you see, being something inconsequential as opposed to racist which no good Republican would ever be, no. Huh-uh.
So, making fun of the elected president's skin color is, oh, you know, like the difference between ranch dip and fry sauce. Nothing implied.
However...sticking another song on there making fun of hispanic-latinos is, oh, hell, you like catsup with your fries or salsa? that's all. Nothing implied. Purely...circumstantial. Accidental. Lie, you know, finding a trout in a glass of milk: no, no, doesn't mean the milk's been watered down. Not at all.
What a crock of s**t!
Not only has the Republican Party been over-run and captured by religious fanatics, it's also been over-run by barely covert racists. At least, thirty or forty years ago, they were quiet about how they felt toward people with different colored skin. No more. Maybe, though, it's for the best: at least it's out there like an open fly. And they're exposed their dick-dom, that's certain.
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13:40
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disturbing the comfortable
Like I said the other day, now that the thugs-in-chief are off the scene, we're learning just how awful their collective thuggery was.
This is from today's Raw Story
David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
Published: Thursday January 22, 2009
Ex-analyst believes program actually the remnants of 'Total Information Awareness,' shut down by Congress in 2003
On Wednesday night, when former NSA analyst Russell Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann that the Bush administration's National Security Agency spied on
everyone in the United States, specifically targeting journalists, the
Countdown host was so flabbergasted that Tice was invited back for a second interview.
On Thursday, he returned to the airwaves with expanded allegations against the NSA, claiming the agency collected Americans' credit card records, and adding that he believes the massive, warrantless data vacuum to be the remnants of the Total Information Awareness program,
shut down by Congress in 2003.
Asked for comment by Olbermann's staff, the agency responded, "NSA considers the constitutional rights of US citizens to be sacrosanct. The intelligence community faces immense challenges in protecting our nation. No matter the challenges, NSA remains dedicated to performing its mission under the rule of law."
Olbermann ran the quote under a banner which read, "Non-denial denial."
"As far as the wiretap information that made it though NSA, there was also data-mining that was involved," Tice told Olbermann during the pair's second interview. "At some point, information from credit card records and financial transactions was married in with that information."
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12:58
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disturbing the comfortable
Is terrorism defined by skin color?
I have a nagging feeling it still is. 37 machine guns, 60 hand grenades, pounds of C-4, grenade launchers...if these had been collected by a group of black or brown people it would be front-page news all over the country—probably with headlines saying, more or less “Terror Cell Busted?” But, since it was collected by a white guy (working alone? I doubt it!), it didn’t get that kind of coverage at all. Just a little story about a guy who had some odd choices in weapons...
Wednesday, January 21, 2009 - Page updated at 09:24 AM
Grenade launchers, machine guns, C-4, weapons cache stuns agents
By Mike Carter
Seattle Times staff reporter
A 65-year-old Spokane man has been ordered held in custody on federal charges of illegally possessing automatic weapons and illegally storing explosives in a Bellevue commercial storage shed while agents investigate how he came to possess a huge military-grade arsenal that included grenade launchers, machine guns and plastic explosives.
Ronald Struve, heavyset and bearded, appeared in Seattle before U.S. Magistrate Judge Mary Alice Theiler on Tuesday after being extradited from Spokane, where he was arrested Jan. 7 during a raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).
In four searches in Bellevue and Spokane, agents seized 37 machine guns, 12 silencers, two grenade launchers, more than 60 high-explosive grenades, several pounds of military-grade C-4 plastic explosives and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Most of this material was stored in commercial sheds near businesses and homes, said Assistant U. S. Attorney Thomas Woods.
At a detention hearing set for Friday, Woods said he will present evidence that Struve possessed "anti-government material."
According to a complaint filed earlier this month, Struve "planned to use the items at some uncertain date in the future."
Two law-enforcement sources familiar with the case, but who spoke on condition of anonymity, used the term "Armageddon" to describe what Struve was apparently awaiting in stockpiling the weapons.
Agents have served four search warrants — three in Spokane and another in Lynnwood.
The Lynnwood shed was empty; however, agents recovered eight machine guns and additional grenade rounds in a search on a storage shed in Spokane.
The search of the Bellevue storage shed did not require a warrant because agents were given permission by a man who purchased the contents at an auction.
ATF Special Agent Heidi Wallace said much of the recovered ordnance was almost certainly stolen from the military because there is no other place to get it.
Woods said the investigation is continuing and that a grand-jury indictment is possible. So far, agents have questioned at least two others — including a man who rented the shed in Bellevue. No other arrests have been made.
Wallace, who was at Struve's court hearing Tuesday, said there was no evidence at this point that Struve was involved in domestic terrorism.
Struve first came to the ATF's attention in November, when the man who had purchased the shed's contents contacted the agency after he found it full of boxes of firearms, shells and other military-style hardware and wanted to know if the weapons were legal to keep.
The bureau sent Wallace to the buyer's garage, where he had stacked the contents from the storage unit. What Wallace found were "many boxes, plastic bins and ammunition containers."
The first box contained what appeared to be several machine guns. Likewise, the second box contained military-type firearms. In the third box, Wallace found "two grenades and other possible explosives."
Other agents were called, and what they found was startling — and worrisome.
"In all my years, I've never seen this sort of firepower in one place," said ATF Special Agent Nick Starcevic, the Seattle office's senior operations officer.
One box contained 54 M406 high-explosive grenade rounds — 40-millimeter shells that can be launched from a shoulder-fired weapon to distances of 300 yards or more, according to military specification.
Its explosion creates a "kill radius" of up to 16 feet from the point of impact and injuries dozens of yards beyond that.
Agents also found several other anti-personnel grenades, including a Korean War-era "Chicom" stick grenade.
In another box, agents found six blocks of C-4 plastic explosives.
Agents counted 32 apparent machine guns, including M-14s, M-16s, and several "Sten guns," a mass-produced submachine gun known for its high rate of fire — upward of 500 rounds per minute.
They also found nine silencers and the parts for several others, as well as thousands of rounds of ammunition and various other military hardware.
"All of the military explosive items seized are considered contraband and cannot be possessed by anyone other than the military," Wallace wrote in a search warrant. "The majority of the items seized appeared to be stolen military explosive materials."
Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com
Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company
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19:07
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disturbing the comfortable
So now that the Cheney-Bush administration is out of power, we begin hearing things about just how bad that gang was. As if the billions that vanished into the sand dunes wasn't enough; the lies about fabulous rescues of injured GIs, the horrors of the seige of Falluja, and the infamous WMDs. We have been under the thumb of a gang of thieves. And we'll pay for it for generations.
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Contracting company—KBR—electrocuted GIs in Iraq
By KIMBERLY HEFLING – 6 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Army investigation called the electrocution death of a U.S. soldier in Iraq a "negligent homicide" caused by military contractor KBR Inc. and two of its supervisors, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press.
An Army criminal investigator said the manner of death for Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, 24, of Pittsburgh, has been changed from accidental to negligent homicide because the contractor failed to ensure that "qualified electricians and plumbers" worked on the barracks where Maseth died, according to the document.
Heather L. Browne, a spokeswoman for Houston-based KBR, said in an e-mail that the company maintains that its activities in Iraq did not play a role in Maseth's death.
The Green Beret died of cardiac arrest on Jan. 2, 2008. He was electrocuted while taking a shower in his barracks in Baghdad. He was assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group at Fort Campbell, Ky.
The document obtained by the AP, dated Dec. 16, said the case was under legal review at Army's Criminal Investigation Command headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Va. A spokesman for the Army's criminal division, Christopher Grey, said the investigation is continuing and he could not comment.
Last year, Maseth's parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Allegheny County, Pa., against KBR. It alleges that KBR allowed U.S. troops to continue using electrical systems "which KBR knew to be dangerous and knew had caused prior instances of electrocution."
Maseth's mother, Cheryl Harris, testified on Capitol Hill about electrical problems in military facilities. Since then, the Army has made changes such as creating an electrical code for U.S. facilities in Iraq. At one point last year, the deaths of at least 18 U.S. service members and contractors were under investigation as possible electrocutions.
Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said in a statement that the Army CID's investigation validates the work by Maseth's mother.
"We must not only ensure that full accountability is served in this case, but that the Pentagon is also doing all that it can to prevent future electrocutions of American personnel in both Iraq and Afghanistan," Casey said.
KBR was previously owned by Halliburton Co., the oil services conglomerate that former Vice President Dick Cheney once led. Congressional Democrats long have complained that KBR has benefited from its ties to Cheney.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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13:46
»
disturbing the comfortable
History is a daily happening, yeah. Today is very historical. I feel like I have to make some sort of commentary about it, because, well...jesus christ. A person of color, the first out-and-out liberal, has just become the POTUS.
I never fantasized I’d see it happen. I couldn’t. My experience with national politics and politicians has been a downward spiral. I voted for the lesser of two evils so many times it almost became automatic. I didn’t think that when I marked Obama’s name on my ballot. But I wasn’t sure he’d win. I really wanted him to win, very much. But there’ve been so many disappointments....But he did. And then I started holding my breath: there are so many nuts with guns out there, and so many stunts to derail the inauguration.
My ex-wife called this morning and told me how she’d got up to listen to the inauguration and the radio wouldn’t work. She went out and sat in her cold car, surrounded by ice crystals, turned on the car radio and listened and cried for joy. That’s about how I feel. It started watching the celebration in Grant Park. That’s when we all started phoning each other and saying, “We won, we did it.” Then the breath-holding and child-like prayers—please, please let it happen. It happened.
Watching the whole thing on TV is watching the faces of the people. So many smiles and grins, people crying with happiness and relief, people dancing and waving. A national day of celebration of hope.
I didn’t think I’d see it.
But I did and it's wonderful.
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11:37
»
disturbing the comfortable
I'm still lurching around the ruins of my mind; Jesus, it's a mess in here/there. My attention span is a bit better, since I've cut back on the vicodin, but the physical discomfort is up. Balance that out? At least with the vicodin I don't get bored: I can't remember enough to be bored—oh, I just spent the last two hours on the bed, looking out the window, and holding a cup of coffee in my hand? Oh. OK.
The world is lurching along, too. Israel is doing to Gaza what they shouldn't do. We're not the only amnesiac country. I'm waiting for Israel to move into the "rescuer" phase; they hang onto the Victim part real well, and don't like it when people say, Uh, you're persecuting the civilians there in Gaza...It's the Laurel and Hardy Theory of History: "Now see what you've made me do!" It's awful. I guess it's normal, though, because it sure is one of the recurring themes in history. It's not our fault, we were forced to do this. The big deal is to avoid taking responsibility.
And a fair amount of bad news about old friends: this one is dying of cancer, that one is going blind; so and so has emphysema, and who's his face needs a liver transplant. Bad. Normal, but not not good. I'm still not a spiritual giant.
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11:20
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disturbing the comfortable
I've been laid up since last week. I slipped on the ice around here and broke my pelvis and my hip. I had a nice visit over at St Charles Hospital. It's a pretty pleasant (considering) place with a cheery staff. There are a lot of lot-worse hospitals.
So I haven't written anything; the good things about pain meds are that, a, they knock down pain, and b, they let you realize you do have an attention span because the meds destroy it. True existential living, spasm to spasm, pill to pill. Even, now, where I'm thinking out the vicodin with straight Tylenol, it's difficult to stay focused. Kinda fun to try, though.
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18:50
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disturbing the comfortable
There's been an on-going flap around these parts over naming a bridge—a small one—over the Deschutes River. It's been known as the Portland Avenue Bridge for as long as I can remember. Some local peace-activists have urged the city to name it the "Peace Bridge," since we already have one named after a military hero.
You might have thought, from the uproar, that it would named the Karl Marx Bridge or something like that. Jesus: every half-drunk old legionaire ranted and raved about how subversive and un-American it would be to name something after Peace. One of the local TV stations (KTVZ.com) has an on-line forum and the froth flew like spittle from a rabid dog. Someone said they would never drive over a bridge that so dishonors our brave fighting... You know. Nothing like a little war to stir up the bar-room patriots.
The city council, since most of them are going out of office, stepped bravely forward and announced the bridge would be renamed the "Peace Bridge." The new city council, composed of folks heavily backed by business, will probably rename it something the "Free Market Memorial Bridge," and put up a toll booth to benefit the Chamber of Commerce.
Small cities are so much fun.
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13:06
»
disturbing the comfortable
We need to be more aware of heroes. We got villains coming out of the wood-work, but good people seem to be scarce. Here's a story about one:
The Independent
December 19, 2008
Independent Appeal: The rape victim who took the stigma out of HIV
The victim of an appalling crime when she was nine, Memory Phiri was treated like an outcast. The experience has turned her into an eloquent campaigner against prejudice. Paul Vallely reports
"You can be a hero," said the young woman, looking directly into my eyes. "There is a hero in you." This was not flattery. Memory Phiri believes that anyone can do something of heroic stature, if they so choose. After all, she did.
She does not look an obvious candidate. A diminutive figure, with eyes almost as big as her hooped earrings and feet clad in boots that look as if they came from children's department, she looks like a slip of a schoolgirl as she sits quietly in the green room backstage at the Royal Albert Hall. But she has come a long way from the little village in Zambia, where she was raped when she was only nine, to become one of the world's most persuasive Aids campaigners. Now just 20, she was about to step out on to the stage to address an audience of 4,000 people.
The occasion was a concert to mark the 50th anniversary of VSO, the charity once known as Voluntary Service Overseas, one of the three charities being supported by this year's Independent Christmas Appeal. On stage were the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and a bill of internationally renowned African artists, including Angelique Kidjo. Yet Memory seemed unfazed to be among their number.
Her journey has been extraordinary. Eleven years ago, Memory and her sister, who was 14, had accepted a lift home from a man in a lorry after visiting her sister's dying husband in a Zambian hospital. After dropping her sister off, the man raped the nine-year-old. That same year, her mother died (her father had died when she was seven) and she and her siblings were split up. The boys went to live with their grandma and she was sent to live with an aunt.
When she was 13, her aunt decided she could not afford to keep her and sent her to an orphanage. The City of Hope orphanage just outside the capital, Lusaka, has links with the Zambia Open Community Schools project, which provides a free basic education to 16,000 orphans in a country where, still, a third of children between seven and 13 (mostly girls) do not attend school. VSO provides many of the teachers who volunteer to work in the schools and assists with books, clothing and food.
On arrival at the orphanage, each girl is given a medical check-up. There the Salesian nuns who ran it discovered Memory was HIV-positive. "They didn't tell me immediately," she says. "I was the only one of the 84 girls there who was positive. They discussed among themselves how they should handle the situation." But one of the other pupils, who was washing up in the nuns' kitchen, overheard. Not long after, graffiti appeared on the wall outside her classroom. It read, "Memory Phiri has Aids", she says.
"The other girls right away didn't want to play with me. They even refused to eat with me. I went to see the nun in charge, an Italian named Sister Maria, who sent me to see a counsellor. The counsellor gave me a lot of information about HIV. I thought, 'Why is she telling me all this?' And then it clicked, and I started crying. It was my most saddest moment in life. My grandmother had just died. My two young brothers were eight and 10; who was going to look after them?"
Sister Maria arranged for Memory to meet counsellors who were HIV-positive. "That gave me great courage," Memory says. "I thought, 'If they can live with it then I can'." But the other girls in the orphanage continued to shun and scorn her. At this point, Memory took a courageous step. "With Sister Maria's help, I called them into groups and told them my story. All the girls wept when they heard. They thought that to have HIV must mean you were a prostitute or had been sleeping around with boys." The school bully, who had written the graffiti, apologised to Memory. "A number of girls had been raped too but had never been able to talk about it. They came to me privately and told me their story. It all changed. Everyone was kind to me."
Her HIV counsellors were impressed by the instinctive skill with which she handled her peers. They arranged for her to begin counselling training. She was put on anti-retroviral drugs and her condition began to improve. Her CD4 count – which measures the level of HIV in the blood and helps predict the risk of complications and infections – rose from 104 to 700 (the range in normal adults is between 500 to 1,500 cells per cubic millimetre of blood). Her latest was 1001 as her body continues to respond to the anti-HIV therapy.
"I have to take my medicine at 7am and 7pm, and can't miss by more than 30 minutes," she says. "I have to eat lots of nutritious vegetables. But it is important to feed the mind too; if you say, 'I will die soon', you will; but if you say, 'I will see my children's children' then you take control. When you have a car, it is you who is the driver, and you tell the virus, which is the passenger, where it will go. I feel much healthier now." The advice she gives herself is the same as she now delivers to HIV-positive people the world over.
The process has helped her come to terms with the rape which gave her the virus. "I think it will always be in my mind. He was a stranger but I can remember his face. At first, I had evil thoughts about him. But through the therapies I was trained in as a counsellor I came to see that I am not the problem, he is the problem. I used to feel if I see him I would kill him, but today I would just look at him and nothing else. But it has taken me five or six years to get to that point."
In the process, she became a national figure as the first girl in Zambia to break the news that she had HIV. She became a poster-girl in schools, clinics and hospitals, and attended international conferences in South Africa, Malawi, Nigeria and New York where she addressed the United Nations "to tell them how people in the rural areas with HIV are still neglected". She added: "I feel proud of myself. By the time I die, I know I'll have had an impact on many people's lives. I've tried to do my best."
Her favourite technique in dealing with children orphaned by HIV, or who have themselves contracted the virus, is what she calls a hero book. "In it, you look back at where you have come from. You write down your happiest moment, your saddest one, and tell the story of someone who has been a hero in your life. Not Superman or even Nelson Mandela. It might be your mother or father, or your auntie, anyone whose courage you admire. A hero is a person who is able to overcome a problem without hurting others." At this point Hugh Masekela, the master of African jazz, a dumpy man in a flat cap, enters the Albert Hall green room. He asks to meet her, and she hugs him casually. "He looks fatter than in his photograph," she says after he has gone. The star is clearly not her hero, so who is? "Sister Maria. She is a very strong lady, very hardworking, full of ideas. She's like my mother, so caring and so kind. She gave me hope when I had no hope."
Through her training, Memory has also been catching up on her education, doing two school years in one for the past seven years. "I am in grade 12 now. Most people in the class are 18 and two years younger than me, but that is OK. Next year, I will begin to train to do accounts and get a job so I can save the money to train to be a doctor," she says, calculating that in four years she will have earned enough to begin her seven-year medical training. She will be a doctor, she says, by the time she is 31. She would like to specialise in paediatrics.
"I know people who are not HIV-positive who have no hope for life. But me, every morning, I smile and say, 'It's a new day and I'm breathing'." Then she adds: "There is a strength in all of us; we just have to find it." Of such stuff heroes are made. You could be a hero too. Do something heroic today.
[iCopyright] © 2008 Independent News and Media. Permission granted for up to 5 copies. All rights reserved.
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13:06
»
disturbing the comfortable
We need to be more aware of heroes. We got villains coming out of the wood-work, but good people seem to be scarce. Here's a story about one:
The Independent
December 19, 2008
Independent Appeal: The rape victim who took the stigma out of HIV
The victim of an appalling crime when she was nine, Memory Phiri was treated like an outcast. The experience has turned her into an eloquent campaigner against prejudice. Paul Vallely reports
"You can be a hero," said the young woman, looking directly into my eyes. "There is a hero in you." This was not flattery. Memory Phiri believes that anyone can do something of heroic stature, if they so choose. After all, she did.
She does not look an obvious candidate. A diminutive figure, with eyes almost as big as her hooped earrings and feet clad in boots that look as if they came from children's department, she looks like a slip of a schoolgirl as she sits quietly in the green room backstage at the Royal Albert Hall. But she has come a long way from the little village in Zambia, where she was raped when she was only nine, to become one of the world's most persuasive Aids campaigners. Now just 20, she was about to step out on to the stage to address an audience of 4,000 people.
The occasion was a concert to mark the 50th anniversary of VSO, the charity once known as Voluntary Service Overseas, one of the three charities being supported by this year's Independent Christmas Appeal. On stage were the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and a bill of internationally renowned African artists, including Angelique Kidjo. Yet Memory seemed unfazed to be among their number.
Her journey has been extraordinary. Eleven years ago, Memory and her sister, who was 14, had accepted a lift home from a man in a lorry after visiting her sister's dying husband in a Zambian hospital. After dropping her sister off, the man raped the nine-year-old. That same year, her mother died (her father had died when she was seven) and she and her siblings were split up. The boys went to live with their grandma and she was sent to live with an aunt.
When she was 13, her aunt decided she could not afford to keep her and sent her to an orphanage. The City of Hope orphanage just outside the capital, Lusaka, has links with the Zambia Open Community Schools project, which provides a free basic education to 16,000 orphans in a country where, still, a third of children between seven and 13 (mostly girls) do not attend school. VSO provides many of the teachers who volunteer to work in the schools and assists with books, clothing and food.
On arrival at the orphanage, each girl is given a medical check-up. There the Salesian nuns who ran it discovered Memory was HIV-positive. "They didn't tell me immediately," she says. "I was the only one of the 84 girls there who was positive. They discussed among themselves how they should handle the situation." But one of the other pupils, who was washing up in the nuns' kitchen, overheard. Not long after, graffiti appeared on the wall outside her classroom. It read, "Memory Phiri has Aids", she says.
"The other girls right away didn't want to play with me. They even refused to eat with me. I went to see the nun in charge, an Italian named Sister Maria, who sent me to see a counsellor. The counsellor gave me a lot of information about HIV. I thought, 'Why is she telling me all this?' And then it clicked, and I started crying. It was my most saddest moment in life. My grandmother had just died. My two young brothers were eight and 10; who was going to look after them?"
Sister Maria arranged for Memory to meet counsellors who were HIV-positive. "That gave me great courage," Memory says. "I thought, 'If they can live with it then I can'." But the other girls in the orphanage continued to shun and scorn her. At this point, Memory took a courageous step. "With Sister Maria's help, I called them into groups and told them my story. All the girls wept when they heard. They thought that to have HIV must mean you were a prostitute or had been sleeping around with boys." The school bully, who had written the graffiti, apologised to Memory. "A number of girls had been raped too but had never been able to talk about it. They came to me privately and told me their story. It all changed. Everyone was kind to me."
Her HIV counsellors were impressed by the instinctive skill with which she handled her peers. They arranged for her to begin counselling training. She was put on anti-retroviral drugs and her condition began to improve. Her CD4 count – which measures the level of HIV in the blood and helps predict the risk of complications and infections – rose from 104 to 700 (the range in normal adults is between 500 to 1,500 cells per cubic millimetre of blood). Her latest was 1001 as her body continues to respond to the anti-HIV therapy.
"I have to take my medicine at 7am and 7pm, and can't miss by more than 30 minutes," she says. "I have to eat lots of nutritious vegetables. But it is important to feed the mind too; if you say, 'I will die soon', you will; but if you say, 'I will see my children's children' then you take control. When you have a car, it is you who is the driver, and you tell the virus, which is the passenger, where it will go. I feel much healthier now." The advice she gives herself is the same as she now delivers to HIV-positive people the world over.
The process has helped her come to terms with the rape which gave her the virus. "I think it will always be in my mind. He was a stranger but I can remember his face. At first, I had evil thoughts about him. But through the therapies I was trained in as a counsellor I came to see that I am not the problem, he is the problem. I used to feel if I see him I would kill him, but today I would just look at him and nothing else. But it has taken me five or six years to get to that point."
In the process, she became a national figure as the first girl in Zambia to break the news that she had HIV. She became a poster-girl in schools, clinics and hospitals, and attended international conferences in South Africa, Malawi, Nigeria and New York where she addressed the United Nations "to tell them how people in the rural areas with HIV are still neglected". She added: "I feel proud of myself. By the time I die, I know I'll have had an impact on many people's lives. I've tried to do my best."
Her favourite technique in dealing with children orphaned by HIV, or who have themselves contracted the virus, is what she calls a hero book. "In it, you look back at where you have come from. You write down your happiest moment, your saddest one, and tell the story of someone who has been a hero in your life. Not Superman or even Nelson Mandela. It might be your mother or father, or your auntie, anyone whose courage you admire. A hero is a person who is able to overcome a problem without hurting others." At this point Hugh Masekela, the master of African jazz, a dumpy man in a flat cap, enters the Albert Hall green room. He asks to meet her, and she hugs him casually. "He looks fatter than in his photograph," she says after he has gone. The star is clearly not her hero, so who is? "Sister Maria. She is a very strong lady, very hardworking, full of ideas. She's like my mother, so caring and so kind. She gave me hope when I had no hope."
Through her training, Memory has also been catching up on her education, doing two school years in one for the past seven years. "I am in grade 12 now. Most people in the class are 18 and two years younger than me, but that is OK. Next year, I will begin to train to do accounts and get a job so I can save the money to train to be a doctor," she says, calculating that in four years she will have earned enough to begin her seven-year medical training. She will be a doctor, she says, by the time she is 31. She would like to specialise in paediatrics.
"I know people who are not HIV-positive who have no hope for life. But me, every morning, I smile and say, 'It's a new day and I'm breathing'." Then she adds: "There is a strength in all of us; we just have to find it." Of such stuff heroes are made. You could be a hero too. Do something heroic today.
[iCopyright] © 2008 Independent News and Media. Permission granted for up to 5 copies. All rights reserved.
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19:05
»
disturbing the comfortable
It was only a few months back that the right wingers were ranting on about how Obama was some sort of far-left covert terrorist-symp or something like that. Pals with ex-weatherpersons and ominously angry black preachers... And now we have a cabinet that's about as radical as the Osmonds, a notably stupid reactionary evangelist to do the invocation at the inaugural and god only knows what's next. Seriously, were people so out of the political loop they thought the Illinois Democratic Machine would hand us a flaming liberal? I guess so. For what it's worth, why the hell is there a preacher at the inaugural in the first place?
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13:09
»
disturbing the comfortable
Here:
Published on The Smirking Chimp (
http://www.smirkingchimp.com) Land of the Free (To Torture and Imprison Without Trial) By Brian Cloughley Created Dec 16 2008 - 12:23pm
There are some happenings that are surreal to the point of engendering total astonishment, and a recent official US pronouncement concerning human rights violations is a prime example. The statement about Uzbekistan by the State Department that "We are deeply disappointed about the serious deficiencies of due process . . . and about the allegations of torture" would be extremely serious was it not so bizarrely in line with what the entire world is saying about American torture in Guantanamo Bay and other hideous persecution parlors around the world.
The preposterous Sean McCormack of State had the brass neck, the amazing nerve, the chilling chutzpah, to announce that "Credible allegations have been raised that [a prisoner in Uzbekistan] was tortured with boiling water in pre-trial detention, resulting in serious injury."
Uzbekistan is a wacky dictatorship run by a nutcase only marginally more weird than the present inhabitant of the White House, but it is absurd for the US to criticize him for human rights abuses for so long as Washington indulges in illegal imprisonment and torture of innocent people. Let's hope that Mr Obama will act swiftly to ban these gross violations of human rights.
The brilliant writer Johann Hari noted the other day that "Colonel Allen West, commanding a US unit in Baghdad, heard a rumor that one of the Iraqi policeman he was working with was a secret insurgent. He ordered his officers to go and seize Yehiya Hamoodi, a thin, bespectacled 31-year-old, from his home. They dragged him into a Humvee, beat him, and then handcuffed, shackled and blindfolded him. In a dank interrogation room, they told him he had better start talking."
Of course they only "beat him." Nothing serious like Uzbekistan's use of boiling water. Well, for a while, anyway, until "Perplexed and terrified, Yehiya explained he didn't know what they were talking about: why was he here? So West was called in. He told Yehiya he was going to be killed. While his men beat him again, he explained he had one last chance to save his life - by talking. Yehiya protested: I am innocent! What are you talking about? So West took him outside, had him pinned down, and began to shoot. First he fired into the air. Then he ordered his men to ram Yehiya's head into a barrel used for cleaning weapons - and fired right next to his head. Then he began to count down from five. Finally Yehiya began to scream out names - any name he could think of, just to make it stop. The men he named were seized and roughed up in turn. No evidence was found of any plot, and after another 45 days of terror, Yehiya was released. Today, he is severely traumatized."
But the repulsive Colonel West isn't traumatized. He's reveling in the approval of redneck crowds who fall about laughing at his squalid "joke" that what he did "wasn't torture. Seeing Rosie O'Donnell naked would be torture." This man isn't human. Intellectually and morally he is on a level with the lowest forms of manically aggressive sewer-life. And he is far from being alone, because there are many thousands of Americans who are involved in designing and practicing torture. Sadly, there are even more who cheer them on.
Seventeen of the hundreds of innocent people caged in dire conditions in the US gulag at Guantanamo Bay are Chinese. In September a federal judge ruled that they should be freed, because they are - surprise, surprise - innocent. Not only that, but they have never been charged with any crime. They were seized in Afghanistan, subjected to horrible treatment, and transported like cattle to Guantanamo. There, they can meet with their lawyer only if they are chained to the floor. They are forbidden to return to China because they belong to a minority ethnic group in Western China which wants autonomy. They have, however, been offered homes and the opportunity to start their lives afresh in America. Various Christian (real Christian; not Palin-style fanatics) and other charity organizations are prepared to look after them. But no, this can't be allowed. In a typically spiteful and malevolent reaction to having been proved wrong "the US justice department has now blocked moves for them to be allowed to go to the US mainland."
"According to the justice department, the men 'are linked to an organization that the state department has labeled to be a terrorist entity, and it is beside the point that the organization is not "a threat to us" because the law excluding members of such groups does not require such proof'." Heads I win; tails you lose. Even if it is proved without doubt that someone is innocent, that person must be guilty when the Bush "Justice" Department declares him to be so. This is straight out of Alice in Wonderland, when the Queen screams "sentence first - verdict afterwards!" The new President is going to have a lot of work on his hands, but one major priority must be that he gets a grip of this Department, fast.
Then there is the case of the six innocent Algerians who have been in Guantanamo for over six years. The bogus charges brought against them have been dropped, but they are likely to remain prisoners of the Land of the Free forever. This may have something to do with the pronouncement by Bush in his 2002 State of the Union Address that "our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy [in Sarajevo]." In spite of a Bosnian court ruling that the six men were not involved in any such plot, it is essential for Washington that they be regarded as dangerous terrorists because . . . well, because the president said they are. It is still maintained that the men are "enemy combatants", so they must remain in hell.
There are more forms of torture than using boiling water or water-boarding, as refined by Hitler's Gestapo. The very act of keeping these innocent men in prison without charge, without trial, and with no indication of what there future might be - after almost seven years of humiliation and torment - is of itself an act of torture. And when an interrogator, a particularly disgusting piece of filth, told one of them that "I am going back to my wife and children, and you are going back to your cell like a dog," one worries deeply about what has happened to America.
The Washington Post recorded that "tribunal sessions in December 2005 show the US military is no longer accusing the Algerians of conspiring to attack the US Embassy in Sarajevo. No explanation for the change is given. The military has listed other factors in its decision to label the men a security threat. One detainee was judged a threat in part because he was a karate expert and had taught martial arts to Bosnian orphans . . . He was also classified as potentially dangerous because he was familiar with computers. Another detainee was flagged because he had performed mandatory service in the Algerian army more than a decade ago, as a cook. Boudella was accused by the U.S. military of joining bin Laden and Taliban fighters at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, the mountain hideout where the al-Qaeda leadership escaped from US forces in December 2001. In fact, at the time, Boudella was locked up thousands of miles away in Sarajevo, after his arrest in the later-discredited embassy plot."
The case against these men is a concoction of fabricated nonsense. But their illegal imprisonment continues.
Practitioners and supporters of torture and captivity without trial are sick perverts, and deserve our pity. It is pointless to regard them with anger or contempt, because they are mentally retarded. But it is essential that the system of American legal practice and international justice be revitalized so that people who order and indulge in torture can be brought to justice. It is unlikely that these pitiable warped people could ever be drawn to morality, integrity and compassion, but at least they might be made accountable for their evil, and deterred from continuing it. Will this happen under President Obama?
The foundations of American justice have been almost destroyed in the past eight years, and it will take a long time to rebuild them. We must hope that President Obama and the elected representatives in the Land of the Free will enact legislation to forbid torture and detention without trial. That would be a start to restoring America to dignity and decency.
_______
About author
Brian Coughley's web site is www.briancloughley.com [1]
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16:21
»
disturbing the comfortable
He said they were size 10s, but who knows?
How much evidence needs to accumluate—hell, pile up!—before people finally get it through their heads that we are not welcome in Iraq? Not only are we not welcome, we are thoroughly rejected. We invaded the country, obliterated the fragile working infrastructure, and nearly blasted it back to the Stone Age. We are occupiers, as welcome as Nazi troops in, say, France in 1943. Sure, a certain number of French people enjoyed having the Germans in their nation, but not enough to count. After the German occupation was broken, remember, those who had welcomed the occupiers were beaten, disgraced, and in many cases, shot. Occupying troops are seldom loved.
At last, though, a direct picture of the anger toward Americans in that ass-kicked country.
You mean they don't like us? Jesus. Things are about to the point where America is the only country that loves America. We've moved beyond being a rogue state: we're almost a pariah state. It didn't take long, did it? In my life-time we went from being a beacon of freedom (more or less, depending on who was looking) to a symbol of tyranny.
Bush needs a lot more shoes thrown at him. As well as some warrants for his arrest.
An update on Firedoglake reports that the reporter who threw the shoes has been imprisoned and severely beaten.
[firedoglake.com]
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12:47
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disturbing the comfortable
Happy to see Prineville's decision to violate their own procedures and yank the Sherman Alexie book is making the national news. At one time, 100 or so years back, Prinveville was the scene of one of the archetypal western stories: cattle ranchers versus sheep. Prineville was home to a group called "The Crook County Sheep-shooters Association." Of course nobody was ever busted for the hundreds and hundreds of sheep that were killed by the cattle-ranchers.
Last night we were discussing Prineville's glorious history of tolerance and intelligence with a friend of our's. She said, "Well, you know, they found a new use for sheep over there: wool."
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16:58
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disturbing the comfortable
Of all the younger writers out there, my favorite is Sherman Alexie. He's funny, insightful, touching, and has a great easy-reading style. The only novel of his I haven't read is The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
High school kids over in Prineville have been reading it, though. Until now. A parent got upset because it talks about masturbation (!). We know young people masturbate (hell, so do us old people, too), but we don't want young people to know that other young people... You know what I mean. It is, well, a stupid move. If I was rich, I'd buy a bunch of copies and stand just off the high school grounds and give the copies away. Jesus.
Censorship is such a strange control trip. People think that by censoring ideas or books or music they can control other people...maybe they just want attention, you think? I didn't consider that. Demanding books get removed from schools is a fine way to get your name in the papers and on TV...hmm. Anyhow, censorship doesn't work: we all know that. The bigger the fuss you make about something, the more people will want to see or read or hear what it is you're upset about. And young people have a mission to upset their elders: it's part of the job description of being young. I expect a lot more Prineville kids will read Alexie's book now that before.
The superintendent of schools over there, a guy named Shultz, constructed a lovely sentence about the book: "It's unfortunate those kind of graphics have to be used in a book that has good lessons to learn." I guess he means "it'll learn you some lessons," but I'm not sure. It's a quaint and probably dumb usage.
So, tomorrow, I'll go buy me a banned book. It's kind of my patriotic duty.
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16:53
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disturbing the comfortable
I'm happy to report the end of an obnoxious head cold.
I believe I picked it up over Thanksgiving, up in Anacortes, WA. I gobbled Vitamin C tablets and held it at bay for a week or so. Last Friday I went into my doctor's and got an anti-flu shot. Saturday we found a stray dog—a Silky terrier—and brought it home. Sunday morning I tried to get one of our cats past the terrier (who regarded the cat like it was another piece of furniture), and I got to spend two hours in the local ER getting my arm sewn up. Monday we found the dog's owner and said good-by to him. Monday evening I started sneezing. The next two days were awful. Today is much better.
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16:06
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disturbing the comfortable
Think back: Halliburton. Cheney.
Speaking of corruption in the U.S., the following article—and link—may jog some memories. Maybe it won’t. We’re not the most memory-enabled country in the world. But I don’t know how people got away with this stuff. I don’t know how George Bush I got away with it, let alone Dick Cheney or George II. There’s such contempt for law and decency in the out-going regime it’s hard to imagine it in any semi-civilized society. Bush (both) and Cheney simply behaved badly. Somehow Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, and other companies had it made clear to them they could do what they wanted in Iraq and elsewhere and nobody would bother them.
(see also,
[www.militarytimes.com] )
Suit claims Halliburton, KBR sickened base
[www.armytimes.com] By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Dec 4, 2008 14:02:10 EST
A Georgia man has filed a lawsuit against contractor KBR and its former parent company, Halliburton, saying the companies exposed everyone at Joint Base Balad in Iraq to unsafe water, food and hazardous fumes from the burn pit there.
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“Defendants promised the United States government that they would supply safe water for hygienic and recreational uses, safe food supplies and properly operate base incinerators to dispose of medical waste safely,” according to the lawsuit, filed Nov. 26 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. “Defendants utterly failed to perform their promised duties.”
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“Plaintiff witnessed the open air burn pit in operation at Balad Air Force Base,” the lawsuit states. “On one occasion, he witnessed a wild dog running around base with a human arm in its mouth. The human arm had been dumped on the open air burn pit by KBR.”
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A report from Wil Granger, KBR’s water quality manager for Iraq, states that non-potable water used for showering was not disinfected. “This caused an unknown population to be exposed to potentially harmful water for an undetermined amount of time,” according to the report. The report also stated the problems occurred all across Iraq and were not confined to Balad.
The lawsuit states there was no formalized training for KBR employees in proper water operations, and the company maintained insufficient documentation about water safety. The suit notes that former KBR employees Ben Carter and Ken May testified at a congressional hearing in January 2006 that KBR used contaminated water from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Carter testified that he found the water polluted with sewage and that KBR did not chlorinate it.
The lawsuit states the swimming pools at Balad were also filled with unsafe water.
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“Defendants knowingly and intentionally supplied and served food that was well past its expiration date, in some cases over a year past its expiration date,” the lawsuit states. “Even when it was called to the attention of the KBR food service managers that the food was expired, KBR still served the food to U.S. forces.”
The food included chicken, beef, fish, eggs and dairy products, which caused cases of salmonella poisoning, according to the lawsuit.
“KBR prevented their employees from speaking with government auditors and hid employees from auditors by moving them from bases when an audit was scheduled,” the lawsuit states. “Any employees that spoke with auditors were sent to more dangerous locations in Iraq as punishment.”
The lawsuit also accuses KBR of shipping ice in mortuary trucks that “still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them when they were loaded with ice. This ice was served to U.S. forces.”
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“Wild dogs in the area raided the burn pit and carried off human remains,” the lawsuit states. “The wild dogs could be seen roaming the base with body parts in their mouths, to the great distress of the U.S. forces.”
According to military regulations, medical waste must be burned in an incinerator to prevent anyone from breathing hazardous fumes.
“On at least one occasion, defendants were attempting to improperly dispose of medical waste at an open-air burn pit by backing a truck full of medical waste up to the pit and emptying the contents onto the fire,” the lawsuit states. “The truck caught fire. Defendants’ fraudulent actions were thereby discovered by the military.”
The lawsuit also states that the contractors burned old lithium batteries in the pits, “causing noxious and unsafe blue smoke to drift over the base.”
Military Times has received more than 100 letters from troops saying they were sickened by fumes from the burn pits, which burned plastics, petroleum products, rubber, dining-facility waste and batteries.
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12:55
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disturbing the comfortable
So, home again. A nice holiday with friends up in Anacortes, WA. Pretty town; too bad it's so damn' damp up there. A good trip up and back on the train, as well.
And, now, back to business.
Back when I was young, corruption was seen as something in other cultures, other countries. It wasn’t something we had to deal with in America. At least that was how we played it.
Boy, was that a corral-full of bulls--t.
The oil companies buy and sell politicians. Various federal agencies regularly get exposed as being corrupt. The White House appoints “watchmen” who sleep on the job. Money from the various narcotics cartels insures a steady flow of illegal drugs into this country. Psychiatrists and psychologists assist in torture. Got a problem with the law? A little green lubrication can help you out... It’s corruption, no other term fits quite so well.
A recent headline said something about 1 out of 5 young people have personality problems. At least the shrinks are telling us that. But it’s what they aren’t telling us that’s really really spooky:
[www.alternet.org] Renowned Psychiatrists on Drug Company Payrolls
Money from pharmaceutical companies has corrupted much of the psychiatric profession.
By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on December 2, 2008
National Public Radio announced on November 21, 2008 that it had fired psychiatrist Frederick Goodwin and would be terminating his program "The Infinite Mind." Goodwin was released after NPR learned that he had received at least $1.3 million from drug companies between 2000 and 2007. In the 2008 ongoing Congressional investigation of psychiatry, Goodwin is the most recent prominent psychiatrist exposed for either unethical or, in some cases, illegal financial relationships with drug companies.
During the last decade, Goodwin's "The Infinite Mind" aired weekly in more than 300 radio markets. The program received major financial support from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. "The Infinite Mind" billed itself as "public radio's most honored and listened to health and science program," but on November 21, 2008 the New York Times reported:
In a program broadcast on Sept. 20, 2005, Dr. Goodwin warned that children with bipolar disorder who are left untreated could suffer brain damage, a controversial view. "But as we'll be hearing today," Dr. Goodwin reassured his audience, "modern treatments -- mood stabilizers in particular -- have been proven both safe and effective in bipolar children." That very day, GlaxoSmithKline paid Dr. Goodwin $2,500 to give a promotional lecture for its mood stabilizer drug, Lamictal, at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla. Indeed, Glaxo paid Dr. Goodwin more than $329,000 that year for promoting Lamictal, records given Congressional investigators show.
Goodwin claims that NPR was aware of his financial relationship with drug companies, but his show's producer Bill Lichtenstein said that he had called Goodwin earlier this year and asked him "point-blank" if he was receiving funding directly or indirectly from pharmaceutical companies and Goodwin's answer was, "No." While it is not certain as to who is lying in this instance, Goodwin's assertion that not treating children diagnosed with bipolar disorder results in brain damage has no scientific basis; in fact, there is evidence that psychiatric medication can, in some cases, cause brain damage.
This is not the first time Frederick Goodwin's embarrassment of a high-profile employer resulted in his job termination. On February 28, 1992, the New York Times reported the following about Goodwin, "The director of the Federal Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration resigned today amid a new round of criticism for his comments that appeared to suggest a scientific link between the violent behavior of monkeys and the social problems of inner cities." After Goodwin was forced to resign for what his critics in Congress and the media believed were racist remarks, he was appointed as director of the National Institute of Mental Health.
Goodwin has not been psychiatry's only public relations disaster in 2008, as Congressional investigators have exposed several other renowned psychiatrists for improper financial relationships with drug companies. The New York Times on June 8, 2008 reported:
A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials ... By failing to report income, the psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman, and a colleague in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, may have violated federal and university research rules designed to police potential conflicts of interest.
Congressional investigators discovered that two of Biederman's colleagues in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, Timothy Wilens and Thomas Spencer, received an additional $2.6 million from drug companies from 2000 to 2007.
Recently, emails inside Johnson & Johnson (manufacturer of the powerful antipsychotic drug Risperdal) regarding Biederman were made public as a result of suits brought by parents against Johnson & Johnson and other antipsychotic manufacturers, claiming that their children were harmed by these drugs whose risks the companies minimized. The New York Times on November 25, 2008 reported:
In one November 1999 e-mail, John Bruins, a Johnson & Johnson marketing executive, begs his supervisors to approve a $3,000 check to Dr. Biederman in payment for a lecture he gave at the University of Connecticut. "Dr. Biederman is not someone to jerk around," Mr. Bruins wrote. "He is a very proud national figure in child psych and has a very short fuse." Mr. Bruins wrote that Dr. Biederman was furious after Johnson & Johnson rejected a request that Dr. Biederman had made to receive a $280,000 research grant. "I have never seen someone so angry," Mr. Bruins wrote.
In October 2008, Congressional investigators disclosed that one of psychiatry's most influential researchers, Charles Nemeroff of Emory University, had received more than $2.8 million from drug companies between 2000 to 2007 and had failed to report at least $1.2 million of that income to his university and also appeared to have violated federal research rules. And other less prominent psychiatrists researchers with similar ties to drug companies have also been exposed by Congressional investigators.
Earlier in 2008, Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, was particular troubled by what investigators told him about psychiatry's premier professional organization, the American Psychiatric Association (APA), described by the New York Times as "the voice of establishment psychiatry." After he learned that the president-elect of the APA, Alan Schatzberg of Stanford University, had $4.8 million stock holdings in a drug development company and that the APA itself was heavily dependent on drug-company financing, Grassley wrote a letter to the APA stating, "I have come to understand that money from the pharmaceutical industry can shape the practices of nonprofit organizations that purport to be independent in their viewpoints and actions."
Recent studies reveal some of how drug company money has compromised the objectivity of drug research. Psychological Medicine in November 2006 reported that drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies show positive results for psychiatric drugs 78 percent of the time, while drug studies without pharmaceutical company funding show favorable results only 48 percent of the time. This was discovered after examining 301 articles that were published between 1992 and 2002 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Archives of General Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, and Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology.
Also reported by Psychological Medicine was that the percentage of studies sponsored by drug companies increased from 25% in 1992 to 57% in 2002. Currently, it is increasingly rare for a drug study not to be funded by the drug's manufacturer.
Why are so many doctors unaware of just how poorly antidepressants have actually fared in studies? The New England Journal of Medicine (January 17, 2008) reviewed both published and unpublished antidepressant studies registered with the FDA between 1987 and 2004 on twelve antidepressants, and it reported that most studies with negative results were never published in journals. While 94 percent of antidepressant studies published in journals show antidepressants to be more effective than placebos, only 51 percent of all registered studies were determined by the FDA to show antidepressants superior to placebos.
The damage to the general public caused by drug company corruption of psychiatry goes beyond the cover up of the ineffectiveness and dangers of drugs. Drug company corruption of psychiatry has also resulted in a disregard of non-drug solutions for emotional and behavioral difficulties. In response to his corruption charges, former NPR host Frederick Goodwin told the New York Times that because he consults for so many drug makers at once that he has no particular bias, "These companies compete with each other and cancel each other out." Using Goodwin's logic, if a politician is on the take from every oil corporation, then that politician has no conflict of interest with regard to energy policy.
Even before the extensive media coverage of the 2008 Congressional investigations of psychiatry, a 2006 Gallup poll revealed that the American public had relatively low confidence in psychiatrists' honesty and ethics. When Americans were asked about the "honesty and ethical standards" of several professions, only 38 percent of respondents had a positive opinion of psychiatrists, much lower than the 69 percent positive rating for other medical doctors (nurses topped the list of professionals with an 84 percent positive rating).
When Gallup published the results of it its honesty and ethical standards poll, the American Psychiatric Association concluded that the problem of Americans' lack of confidence in the honesty and ethics of psychiatrists is not with psychiatrists but with an ignorant American public. Commenting on the Gallup poll, a spokesperson for the APA in the Psychiatric News (an APA publication) concluded that psychiatrists need "to educate the public about who we are and what it is that we do."
How arrogant does an authority need to become before it loses its authority? How corrupt does an authority need to become before it loses its authority? How many times does an authority get to be wrong before it loses its authority? And how many bad apples does it take for Americans to suspect the entire barrel?
The good news is that while Americans often have no choice but to deal with many arrogant, corrupt, ignorant institutions, most adults are not actually forced to hand over their emotional and behavioral problems to establishment psychiatry.
Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green, 2007).
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18:09
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disturbing the comfortable
Come 7 a.m. tomorrow, I'm climbing on a bus bound for Portland, to connect with a train going up to Mt Vernon, WA; thanksgiving week with friends. My sweetie-pie has to work, having finally landed a job. I deserve a little trip, is her thinking. I'm uptight, of course, before a trip. This time it's a bit more stressful.
A couple of months ago, we took a package deal from Qwest. The DSL service is fairly inexpensive, compared to the one we used to have. I think I know why. Their tech support seems to be in a far far away land. Switching over involved several hours' of phone calls and conversations. Now the outgoing mail server isn't working right; the tech person suggested I call either Microsoft or Macintosh for help on working out the configuration. This seems kind of odd. Since the DSL provider is Qwest...
However: I have to get up at 5:30 or so tomorrow. I'm not enthusiastic about doing that—years ago I spent years getting up at that hour. Life's too short get get more uptight about taking off tomorrow, early hour and all, and f--kall. Qwest can wait. Gmail works OK.
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17:49
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disturbing the comfortable
America may have the most diagnosed population in the world. We’re filled with anxieties and anorexias, schizophrenias, paranoias and phobias, ptsd, adhd... and who knows what’s the next thing to come down the pike. Apathy Disorder? Who cares?
There’re several reasons for this: our society is crazy is probably the main reason. Greedy drug companies are running a very close second, and the insurance companies have an incredible demand for documentation on billing. There are too many paper pushers; there can be no blank spaces, every dime has to be justified before it’s reimbursed. And, the big AND, too many doctors are too close to too many drug manufacturers. That’s more than simply the opportunity for corruption.
[www.latimes.com] From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
Wrangling over psychiatry's bible
By Christopher Lane
November 16, 2008
Over the summer, a wrangle between eminent psychiatrists that had been brewing for months erupted in print. Startled readers of Psychiatric News saw the spectacle unfold in the journal's normally less-dramatic pages. The bone of contention: whether the next revision of America's psychiatric bible, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," should be done openly and transparently so mental health professionals and the public could follow along, or whether the debates should be held in secret.
One of the psychiatrists (former editor Robert Spitzer) wanted transparency; several others, including the president of the American Psychiatric Assn. and the man charged with overseeing the revisions (Darrel Regier), held out for secrecy. Hanging in the balance is whether, four years from now, a set of questionable behaviors with names such as "Apathy Disorder," "Parental Alienation Syndrome," "Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder," "Compulsive Buying Disorder," "Internet Addiction" and "Relational Disorder" will be considered full-fledged psychiatric illnesses.
This may sound like an arcane, insignificant spat about nomenclature. But the manual is in fact terribly important, and the debates taking place have far-reaching consequences. Published by the American Psychiatric Assn. (and better known as the DSM), the manual is meant to cover every mental health disorder that affects children and adults.
Not only do mental health professionals use it routinely when treating patients, but the DSM is also a bible of sorts for insurance companies deciding what disorders to cover, as well as for clinicians, courts, prisons, pharmaceutical companies and agencies that regulate drugs. Because large numbers of countries, including the United States, treat the DSM as gospel, it's no exaggeration to say that minor changes and additions have powerful ripple effects on mental health diagnoses around the world.
Behind the dispute about transparency is the question of whether the vague, open-ended terms being discussed even come close to describing real psychiatric disorders. To large numbers of experts, apathy, compulsive shopping and parental alienation are symptoms of psychological conflict rather than full-scale mental illnesses in their own right. Also, because so many participants in the process of defining new disorders have ties to pharmaceutical companies, some critics argue that the addition of new disorders to the manual is little more than a pretext for prescribing profitable drugs.
The more you know about how psychiatrists defined dozens of disorders in the recent past, the more you can appreciate Spitzer's concern that the process should not be done in private. Although a new disorder is supposed to meet a host of criteria before being accepted into the manual, one consultant to the manual's third edition -- they're now working on the fifth -- explained to the New Yorker magazine that editorial meetings over the changes were often chaotic. "There was very little systematic research," he said, "and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge -- scattered, inconsistent and ambiguous. I think the majority of us recognized that the amount of good, solid science upon which we were making our decisions was pretty modest."
Things are different today, the new consultants insist, because hard science now drives their debates. Maybe so, but still, I shudder to think what the criteria for "Relational Disorder" and "Parental Alienation Syndrome" will be. And I'm not the only one worrying. Spitzer is bothered by the prospect of "science by committee." Others, like forensics expert Karen Franklin, writing in American Chronicle, warn that advocacy groups are pressing for the inclusion of dubious terms that simply don't belong in a manual of mental illnesses.
The row between Spitzer and Regier apparently dates to Regier's refusal to share the minutes of his task-force meetings with Spitzer, citing concerns about confidentiality that could jeopardize the integrity of the discussions. Regier insists, in personal correspondence that has since been made public, that the process is designed to ensure "input" from all interested parties. But Regier won't share any information except a handful of "periodic reports to the membership and media." Bypassed, conveniently, are the details of the debates themselves.
Spitzer counters that "the real purpose ... is to avoid possible criticism of the ... process." He has called the attempt to revise the DSM in secret "a big mistake" and a likely "public relations disaster."
I fear that I may have unintentionally contributed to Regier's excessively secretive behavior. Back in the 1970s, during the creation of the third edition of the manual, I published much of the correspondence that had circulated between committee members. Some of the exchanges were frankly hair-raising. They included proposals for the approval of such dubious conditions as "Chronic Complaint Disorder" and "Chronic Undifferentiated Unhappiness Disorder." When asked to define how he was using the term "masochism," one leading psychiatrist replied: "Oh, you know what I mean, a whiny individual ... the Jewish-mother type." And so it went for dozens of other terms that later became bona-fide illnesses.
Regier obviously wants to prevent any such embarrassment for his task force; he apparently fears the public will not find his committee's work entirely convincing.
I'm not interested in embarrassing anyone. My concern is the lack of proper oversight. If the proposed new disorders don't receive a full professional airing, including a vigorous debate about their validity, they will be incorporated wholesale into the fifth edition in 2012. Joining the ranks of the mentally ill will be the apathetic, shopaholics, the virtually obsessed and alienated parents. It's hard to imagine that anyone will be left who is not eligible for a diagnosis.
Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University, is the author of "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness."
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20:39
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disturbing the comfortable
Here’s a little piece, from the Guardian, UK, on how the US and the UK may find themselves in international trouble. It would be appropriate. The US, certainly, lied as outrageously as any 20th or 21st Century nation over justifying going to war with Iraq. It’s shameful. That the Liar-In-Chief and his gang are unpunished is a sin—no matter how many people of Color we elect to office. The thing is: karma can be a bitch. What happened in the first, say, three hundred years of America’s existence is bad enough. We compounded that in the 20th Century with the use of the Atomic Bomb, the on-going existence of the KKK, the internment of Japanese-Americans—and, in the 21st Century, going to war against Iraq was/is just plain awful. There’s a big karmic debt to be paid.
Top judge: US and UK acted as 'vigilantes' in Iraq invasion
Former senior law lord condemns 'serious violation of international law'
* Richard Norton-Taylor
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday November 18 2008 00.01 GMT
* The Guardian, Tuesday November 18 2008
One of Britain's most authoritative judicial figures last night delivered a blistering attack on the invasion of Iraq, describing it as a serious violation of international law, and accusing Britain and the US of acting like a "world vigilante".
Lord Bingham, in his first major speech since retiring as the senior law lord, rejected the then attorney general's defence of the 2003 invasion as fundamentally flawed.
Contradicting head-on Lord Goldsmith's advice that the invasion was lawful, Bingham stated: "It was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had." Adding his weight to the body of international legal opinion opposed to the invasion, Bingham said that to argue, as the British government had done, that Britain and the US could unilaterally decide that Iraq had broken UN resolutions "passes belief".
Governments were bound by international law as much as by their domestic laws, he said. "The current ministerial code," he added "binding on British ministers, requires them as an overarching duty to 'comply with the law, including international law and treaty obligations'."
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats continue to press for an independent inquiry into the circumstances around the invasion. The government says an inquiry would be harmful while British troops are in Iraq. Ministers say most of the remaining 4,000 will leave by mid-2009.
Addressing the British Institute of International and Comparative Law last night, Bingham said: "If I am right that the invasion of Iraq by the US, the UK, and some other states was unauthorised by the security council there was, of course, a serious violation of international law and the rule of law.
"For the effect of acting unilaterally was to undermine the foundation on which the post-1945 consensus had been constructed: the prohibition of force (save in self-defence, or perhaps, to avert an impending humanitarian catastrophe) unless formally authorised by the nations of the world empowered to make collective decisions in the security council..."
The moment a state treated the rules of international law as binding on others but not on itself, the compact on which the law rested was broken, Bingham argued. Quoting a comment made by a leading academic lawyer, he added: "It is, as has been said, 'the difference between the role of world policeman and world vigilante'."
Bingham said he had very recently provided an advance copy of his speech to Goldsmith and to Jack Straw, foreign secretary at the time of the invasion of Iraq. He told his audience he should make it plain they challenged his conclusions.
Both men emphasised that point last night by intervening to defend their views as consistent with those held at the time of the invasion. Goldsmith said in a statement: "I stand by my advice of March 2003 that it was legal for Britain to take military action in Iraq. I would not have given that advice if it were not genuinely my view. Lord Bingham is entitled to his own legal perspective five years after the event." Goldsmith defended what is known as the "revival argument" - namely that Saddam Hussein had failed to comply with previous UN resolutions which could now take effect. Goldsmith added that Tony Blair had told him it was his "unequivocal view" that Iraq was in breach of its UN obligations to give up weapons of mass destruction.
Straw said last night that he shared Goldsmith's view. He continued: "However controversial the view that military action was justified in international law it was our attorney general's view that it was lawful and that view was widely shared across the world."
Bingham also criticised the post-invasion record of Britain as "an occupying power in Iraq". It is "sullied by a number of incidents, most notably the shameful beating to death of Mr Baha Mousa [a hotel receptionist] in Basra [in 2003]", he said.
Such breaches of the law, however, were not the result of deliberate government policy and the rights of victims had been recognised, Bingham observed.
He contrasted that with the "unilateral decisions of the US government" on issues such as the detention conditions in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
After referring to mistreatment of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib, Bingham added: "Particularly disturbing to proponents of the rule of law is the cynical lack of concern for international legality among some top officials in the Bush administration."
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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20:29
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disturbing the comfortable
I’m pretty certain Newt Gingrich has above average intelligence. For better or for worse he’s been a college instructor and apparently managed to develop a curriculum. He’s certain skilled at group dynamics.
I wonder if he’s crazy.
I mean, the following exchange between Gingrich and Bill O’Reilly is absolutely cracked. It’s as whacked out as anything Hitler dreamed up about the Jews having a secret agenda for world domination.
Yes, I realize that “fascism” is currently a buzz-word of the far right. I think this is because of projection. Projection happens, right, when people take parts of their own personalities they don’t like, don’t want, can hardly admit to having, and claim other people have it and that’s why those people are dangerous and need to be punished. Like the politicians and preachers who rant against homosexuals and predators and then get busted for...
Anyhow, there’s no doubt O’Reilly is a cynical manipulator of public opinion. That’s something that isn’t healthy. Gingrich, particularly in this interview shows himself to be just as bad.
[mediamatters.org] Gingrich: "[T]here is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us"
Summary: Discussing actions by individual protesters of Proposition 8, Newt Gingrich stated: "I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion."
On the November 14 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, in reference to actions by individual protesters of Proposition 8, the recently passed California ballot initiative amending the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich stated: "I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion." Gingrich also stated: "[W]hen the radicals lost the vote in California, they are determined to impose their will on this country no matter what the popular opinion, no matter what the law of the land."
As Media Matters for America noted, after a caller said on the November 10 broadcast of The Savage Nation that "[h]omosexuals and homosexual marriage is a choice," host Michael Savage declared: "[I]t's a lifestyle or a death-style choice, depending upon how you look at it." Media Matters recently compiled numerous other examples of conservative talk radio hosts issuing smears pertaining to sexual orientation or targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans.
From the November 14 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:
O'REILLY: OK, now, the culture war. I know you've been flying around the country, and you're doing stuff. In the last three or four days, this is really nasty stuff. I mean, you know, hyper -- we're gonna show you some of the video. A woman getting a cross smashed out of her hand. We had a church in Michigan invaded by gay activists. We're gonna show you the video on Monday of that -- we have exclusively. We had a guy in Sacramento fired from his job. We had boycotts called on restaurants.
I mean, it is getting out of control, very few days after the election. How do you assess that?
GINGRICH: Look, I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact. And, frank -- for that matter, if you believe in the historic version of Islam or the historic version of Judaism, you have to confront the reality that these secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they're the opposite, of what you're taught in Sunday school.
O'REILLY: Are you surprised at the speed of it? You figure that there'd be --
GINGRICH: Oh, I --
O'REILLY: -- a two-week breathing, you know -- wham.
GINGRICH: No. I think -- I think when the left -- when the radicals lost the vote in California, they are determined to impose their will on this country no matter what the popular opinion, no matter what the law of the land. You've watched them, for example, in Massachusetts, basically drive the Catholic Church out of running adoption services, drive Catholic hospitals out of offering any services, because they impose secular rules that are fundamentally --
O'REILLY: Yeah, and that's -- right --
GINGRICH: -- sinful from the standpoint, you know.
O'REILLY: Of the church --
GINGRICH: And so I think, we need -- look, we need a debate. [Gingrich's wife] Calista [Gingrich] and I just did a YouTube video on the Capitol Visitors Center where there's also an effort to take "In God We Trust" out of the Capitol Visitors Center.
O'REILLY: OK, we'll talk about that when we come back.
GINGRICH: That's how bad it is.
O'REILLY: All right, so when we come back, I want to talk about the economy, which is frightening everybody. I want to talk about the illegal alien amnesty, and we'll talk about the "In God We Trust," all right. We'll have more with the speaker in a moment.
— L.K.A.
Posted to the web on Monday, November 17, 2008 at 02:26 PM ET
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disturbing the comfortable
As the saying goes, check your local listings...
Sunday, November 16, 2008 - Page updated at 12:00 AM
On TV
"March Point"
10 p.m. Tuesday and 3 a.m. Saturday on KCTS-TV, as part of PBS' Independent Lens series.
Three Swinomish Indian Reservation high-schoolers turn the camera around
By Marc Ramirez
Seattle Times staff reporter
FOR THREE HIGH SCHOOL BOYS on the Swinomish Indian Reservation, the chance to make an environmental film at first seemed like a chance to get out of drug court and hang out with friends. The subjects of their film — the nearby Shell and Tesoro oil refineries on land that once belonged to their community — were just fixtures they'd grown up with.
But as Nick Clark, Cody Cayou and Travis Tom interviewed elders and learned about their history, they discovered that generations-old tribal traditions of crabbing and clam-digging had been jeopardized by years of chemical waste. More important, the process led them to discover themselves and the far-ranging power of their efforts.
"March Point," the result of their work, will air Tuesday on PBS. A project of Native Lens, which teaches digital media to youth in several local tribes, the film was named best documentary at Toronto's ImagineNative Film Festival.
Native Lens is among the programs offered by Seattle-based Longhouse Media, a nonprofit founded in 2005 to encourage youth to use film to address issues such as cultural identity, drug prevention and addiction.
"March Point" began as a short film about the effects of the refineries on the reservation, nestled between La Conner and Anacortes. But during a Swinomish community screening, producer Tracy Rector and director Annie Silverstein realized there was a better story to be told. The screening earned a standing ovation for the boys, who were mostly too shy to take the mic.
"We realized it was the boys' story," Silverstein says.
The final, feature-length product tells that story against a backdrop suggesting connections between the refinery issue and the challenges faced by reservation youth and the community as a whole.
The boys' questions created momentum, prompting community interest in an issue tribal officials had begun pursuing on their own. "It seems like every day, somebody's asking us about it," Nick, now 18, says in his squinty, molasses-paced manner.
In the film, he says: "If I didn't get involved with Native Lens, I don't know where I'd be. Probably out on the streets or locked up."
THE THREE BOYS, friends since childhood, were on shaky foundations when Native Lens came to them in September 2005, their outlook colored by deaths in their families and discouraging dropout rates among Native American kids at the high school they attend, La Conner High.
They'd found trouble in a place where, in their words, there was "nothing to do." Ennui bred smoking, and smoking turned to drinking. "After drinking," Cody says in the film, "that's where everything gets all messed up."
They moved on to drugs, but when the Native Lens opportunity arose, they made a deal with their drug counselor and arranged to get school credit. They'd hoped to make gangster movies and rap videos, but a chance was a chance: Soon they were in Native Lens' Swinomish offices, where a poster advertises "Smoke Signals," the 1998 movie based on the work of Native writer Sherman Alexie.
"All the kids we work with can recite it by heart," Silverstein says. "That's still the movie."
The boys vaguely understood that the Pacific waters bordering their lands had been a longtime source of clams, crab and fish. ("When the tide is out, the table's set," the saying used to go.) But they knew little or nothing about making a movie. "They were learning filmmaking as we were filmmaking," Silverstein says. "But that's what makes it so authentic."
"March Point," then, is built on imperfections, showing the boys' struggles as they learn filming and interviewing techniques, an often difficult, frustrating and time-consuming process. They grumble as equipment sneaks into view during a shoot and stumble through interrogations. "Ask me again, Nick," one interviewee says after one shaky outing.
But it was also empowering and eye-opening. They talk to the tribal chairman and general manager, learning how President Ulysses S. Grant ceded March Point away from the tribe — a move the tribe might contest in court — and how surrounding waters were tainted with chemical runoff from the refineries that eventually rose there. They talk to concerned local fishermen and residents. "When you have biologists telling you there's carcinogens in your fish," says tribal member Tony Cladoosby, "... it's scary."
A tribal health-clinic doctor says she's torn about what to tell patients. Fish is what their elders ate; it's healthy, generally. "But now I'm sorta caught," she says. "... It really is hard as a provider to know what kind of advice to give."
A Shell Oil spokesman tells them the plant more than adheres to current safety and environmental regulations. Craig Bill of the state Office of Indian Affairs encourages them to pursue the political process. But the boys come to see a pattern of petrol facilities located on or near reservations, and they begin to question. At one point, Cody realizes the complexity of the situation, sensing the potential negatives of refineries and oil production but knowing he could never give up his own car.
Though repeated requests for an interview with Gov. Christine Gregoire go unheeded, their inquiries ultimately take them to Washington, D.C., where they interview U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett. The trip feeds their maturity as young men as much as it does their growth as journalists, and they realize it's a life-changing occasion.
"All the way across the country," Nick says, as though he can't believe it.
"I've known these guys my whole life," adds Cody. "We're like brothers."
Before long, wrapped in their hastily purchased earmuffs on a cold February morning, they're on the National Mall, taking in the country's capital city and a world few of their peers get to experience. They're nervous as they roam the high-ceilinged government offices of the people they've come to see.
"There was a lot of rich people in there," Travis says as they reflect on a bench outside after one meeting, irritated and cold. "We were probably the only dark faces."
"We didn't fit in, because we didn't have suits on," Cody says.
Travis: "We felt out of the box."
Cody: "Yeah. Like we weren't supposed to be there or something."
But by the time they return home, they're comfortable being themselves in a place that's as far away from home as they could ever imagine, knowing they've achieved something even if they're not sure exactly what. "After we got back from D.C., a lot of things seemed the same," Nick says. "But we felt different."
Not long ago, the boys didn't like talking to anyone. Now they're doing interviews, pondering the environment and their place in it. Nick, who has his eye on the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M., talks of making a film about life in high school, where cultural differences and social ills create challenges for Native youth inside and outside the classroom.
"People are seeing them as storytellers," Silverstein says. More significant, she says, is that not only are all three on track to graduate high school in January, but that Cody and Nick intend to go to college.
"They're still trying to figure out what kind of lives they want to lead, how to stay on a clean and sober path. What has really changed is how they see themselves."
Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com
Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
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disturbing the comfortable
There really isn't a lot to say: it's all true, the world is all f--ked up, the bad guys are everywhere, and what else is new...
[www.livescience.com] Don't Freak Out: Paranoia Quite Common
By The Associated Press
posted: 12 November 2008 08:09 pm ET
LONDON (AP) _ If you think they're out to get you, you're not alone. Paranoia, once assumed to afflict only schizophrenics, may be a lot more common than previously thought.
According to British psychologist Daniel Freeman, nearly one in four Londoners regularly have paranoid thoughts. Freeman is a paranoia expert at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College and the author of a book on the subject.
Experts say there is a wide spectrum of paranoia, from the dangerous delusions that drive schizophrenics to violence, to the irrational fears many people have daily.
"We are now starting to discover that madness is human and that we need to look at normal people to understand it," said Dr. Jim van Os, a professor of psychiatry at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Van Os was not connected to Freeman's studies.
Paranoia is defined as the exaggerated or unfounded fear that others are trying to hurt you. That includes thoughts that other people are trying to upset or annoy you, for example, by staring, laughing, or making unfriendly gestures.
Surveys of several thousands of people in Britain, the United States and elsewhere have found that rates of paranoia are slowly rising, although researchers' estimates of how many of us have paranoid thoughts varies widely, from 5 percent to 50 percent.
A British survey of more than 8,500 adults found that 21 percent of people thought there had been times when others were acting against them. Another survey of about 1,000 adults in New York found that nearly 11 percent thought other people were following or spying on them.
Dennis Combs, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Tyler, has been studying paranoia for about a decade. When he first started conducting paranoia studies, mostly in college students, he found that about 5 percent of them had paranoid thoughts. In recent years, that has tripled to about 15 percent, he said.
In a small experiment in London, Freeman concluded that a quarter of people riding the subway in the capital probably have regular thoughts that qualify as paranoia. In the study, 200 randomly selected people (those with a history of mental problems were excluded) took a virtual reality train ride. They recorded their reactions to computerized passengers programmed to be neutral.
More than 40 percent of study participants had at least some paranoid thoughts. Some felt intimidated by the computer passengers, claiming they were aggressive, had made obscene gestures, or tried to start a fight.
Freeman said that in big cities, many ambiguous events can lead to paranoid thoughts. Because we constantly make snap judgments based on limited information, like which street to take or whether or not strangers are dangerous, the decision-making process is prone to error.
Van Os said Freeman's virtual reality experiment was solid and confirmed previous research. Experts say not everyone with paranoid thoughts needs professional help. It all depends on how disturbing the thoughts are and if they disrupt your life.
"People walk around with odd thoughts all the time," said David Penn, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina. "The question is if that translates into real behavior."
Van Os recalled a delusional patient who was convinced that the French singer Charles Aznavour was in love with her, and had been whispering to her before she went to sleep every night for more than two decades.
"You could call it a psychotic experience, but she was very happy about it," van Os said. "There isn't always a need for care when there's an instance of psychosis."
He hoped that being able to identify milder delusional symptoms in people could help doctors intervene earlier to prevent more serious cases.
The post-Sept. 11 atmosphere and the war on terror also have increased levels of paranoia in the West, some experts said.
"We are bombarded with information about our alert status and we're told to report suspicious-looking characters," Penn said. "That primes people to be more paranoid."
Traumatic events can make people more vulnerable to having paranoid thoughts. Since the attacks, Penn said Americans have been conditioned to be more vigilant of anything out of the ordinary.
While heightened awareness may be good thing, Penn said it can also lead to false accusations and an atmosphere where strangers are negatively viewed.
That can result in more social isolation, hostility, and possibly even crime. And it can take a toll on physical health. More paranoia means more stress, a known risk factor for heart disease and strokes.
Still, some experts said that a little bit of paranoia could be helpful.
"In a world full of threat, it may be kind of beneficial for people to be on guard. It's good to be looking around and see who's following you and what's happening," Combs said. "Not everybody is trying to get you, but some people may be."
Why We Are All Insane
By Robin Nixon, Special to LiveScience
posted: 26 August 2008 01:04 am ET
Natural selection wants us to be crazy — at least a little bit. While true debilitating insanity is not nature's intention, many mental health issues may be byproducts of the over-functional human brain, some researchers claim.
As humans improved their gathering, hunting and cooking techniques, population size increased and resources became more limited (in part because we hunted or ate some species to extinction). As a result, not everyone could get enough to eat. Cooperative relationships were critical to ensuring access to food, whether through farming or more strategic hunting, and those with blunt social skills were unlikely to survive, explained David C. Geary, author of "The Origin of Mind" (APA, 2004), and a researcher at the University of Missouri.
And thus, a diversity of new mental abilities, and disabilities, unfurled.
The Nature of joy
It might seem as though modern man should have evolved to be happy and harmonious. But nature cares about genes, not joy, Geary said.
Mental illnesses hinder one in every four adults in America every year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. And this doesn’t count those of us with more moderate mood swings.
To explain our susceptibility to poor mental health, Randolph Nesse in "The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology" (Wiley, 2005) compares the human brain with race horses: Just as horse breeding has selected for long thin legs that increase speed but are prone to fracture, cognitive advances also increase fitness — to a point.
Let's take common mental conditions one-by-one.
People with aggressive and narcissistic personalities are the easiest to understand evolutionarily; they look out for number one. But even if 16 million men today can trace their genes to Genghis Khan (nature's definition of uber-success can be measured by his prolific paternity), very few potential despots achieve such heights. Perhaps to check selfish urges, in favor of more probable means to biological success, social lubricants such as empathy, guilt and mild anxiety arose.
For example, the first of our ancestors to empathize and read facial expressions had a striking advantage. They could confirm their own social status and convince others to share food and shelter. But too much emotional acuity — when individuals overanalyze every grimace — can cause a motivational nervousness about one's social value to morph into a relentless handicapping anxiety.
Pondering the future
Another cognitive innovation made it possible to compare potential futures. While other animals focus on the present, only humans, said Geary, "sit and worry about what will happen three years from now if I do that or this." Our ability to think things over, and over, can be counterproductive and lead to obsessive tendencies.
Certain types of depression, however, Geary continued, may be advantageous. The lethargy and disrupted mental state can help us disengage from unattainable goals — whether it is an unrequited love or an exalted social position. Evolution likely favored individuals who pause and reassess ambitions, instead of wasting energy being blindly optimistic.
Natural selection also likely held the door open for disorders such as attention deficit. Quickly abandoning a low stimulus situation was more helpful for male hunters than female gatherers, writes Nesse, which may explain why boys are five times more likely than girls to be hyperactive.
Similarly, in its mildest form, bipolar disorder can increase productivity and creativity. Bipolar individuals (and their relatives) also often have more sex than average people, Geary noted.
Sex, and survival of one's kids, is the whole point — as far as nature is concerned. Sometimes unpleasant mental states lead to greater reproductive success, said Geary, "so these genes stay in the gene pool."
© Imaginova Corp. All rights reserved.
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disturbing the comfortable
Every time I hear one of Sarah Palin's sound bytes or one of John McCain's little folksy talks to the old guys at the Legion Hall, I wonder what happened to the Republicans. Once upon a time they had articulate and thoughtful members; back then, even though the speeches might not resonate with me, I could usually come away with something to think about. There would be points for consideration or reconsideration. Not any more.
It's like they all decided to read the sports' pages and get their ideas from Bill O'.
t_omni_site = "pi" t_omni_path = "pi|tools|printthis" t_omni_pagename = "pi|tools|printthis|print view" t_omni_pagetype = "print view" t_omni_sagepath = "pi|tools" t_omni_events="PrintThis" t_omni_evars="eVar31|pi_art_387928"
[seattlepi.nwsource.com] The dumbing down of the GOP Last updated November 14, 2008 4:24 p.m. PT
THE ECONOMIST
John Stuart Mill once dismissed the British Conservative Party as the stupid party. Today the Conservative Party is run by Oxford-educated high-fliers who are busy reinventing conservatism for a new era.
As The Economist's pundit Lexington sees it, the title of the "stupid party" now belongs to the Tories' transatlantic cousins, the Republicans.
There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party's defeat. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains.
Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000 -- many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases -- by six points.
John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.
The GOP lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than the battle for educated votes, marching into the election with nothing more than slogans.
Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantanamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be waterboarding.
The Republican Party's divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Bush preferred listening to his "heart" rather than his "head." He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael "heck-of-a-job" Brown.
McCain, once the chattering classes' favorite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. In a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism and was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.
Republicanism's anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. Its electoral success from 1980 on was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn.
The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, which emphasized entrepreneurialism, law and order and American pride. It provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.
This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty percent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16 percent in 1996.
The Republican Party's current "redneck strategy" will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate.
Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds. Many conservatives -- particularly lower-income ones -- are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders.
They take their opinions from talk radio and regard Palin's apparent ignorance as a badge of honor.
Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes and incapable of adjusting to a changed world.
The movement has little to say about pressing problems and expends too much energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.
Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs, the treason of the learned.
They have fallen into constructing cartoon images of "real Americans," with their "volkish" wisdom and charming habit of dropping their "g's."
How likely is it that the Republican Party will come to its senses? There are glimmers of hope. Business conservatives worry that the party has lost the business vote. Moderates complain that the Republicans are becoming the party of "white-trash pride."
One of the most encouraging signs is the support for giving the chairmanship of the party to John Sununu, a sensible and clever man who has the added advantage of coming from the Northeast.
But the odds in favor of an imminent renaissance look long. Richard Weaver, a founder of modern conservatism, once wrote a book titled "Ideas have Consequences"; unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too.
From The Economist magazine. Copyright 2008 Economist Newspaper Ltd.
� 1998-2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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disturbing the comfortable
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that people are not out to get you. Two news stories, today, connected by a theme. The theme is government surveillance of groups deemed “suspicious,” and what can happen when government agencies—soldiers and/or cops—decide to do what they think needs to be done... Of course, it could never happen here...
Victims of Philippines dirty war
www.independent.co.uk
Unarmed students, farmers, even priests are being executed in a brutal campaign to silence opposition. Evan Williams reports
Thursday, 13 November 2008
It was 2am when Karen Empeno, 24, and Sherlyn Kadapan, 23, were dragged from their beds by armed men. They were tied up and thrown into the back of a jeep. That was on 26 June 2006. The girls' families have not seen them since.
Karen and Sherlyn were university students who had been interviewing peasant farmers for a thesis on social conditions. They had also been campaigning against government corruption. Witnesses have testified in court that the men who abducted them were Filipino soldiers.
Their families believe the girls are among the 199 people who have been "disappeared" and the 933 who have been killed in extrajudicial executions over the past seven years in a secret war. Human rights groups say the battle is being waged by the armed forces of the Philippines against left-wing organisations.
...
"Once you are an organiser, once you are an activist, they call you a communist," Karen's father, Oscar, said. "Once you are a communist, that means you are an enemy of the state and once you are an enemy of the state they can abduct you, they can harass you, they can kill you, anything. That's the killing machine of the President, of the military."
Maddow: New rule kicks Patriot Act foes 'right in the teeth'
11/12/2008 @ 8:47 am
Filed by David Edwards and Muriel Kane
The Bush administration has been planning since last spring to issue a final burst of federal regulations just before leaving office. ...
Although many of the regulations have to do with energy and the environment, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow noted on Tuesday that there's also "one that'll kick opponents of the Patriot Act right in the teeth."
The proposed regulation "would allow state and local law enforcement agencies to collect intelligence on individuals and organizations even if the information is unrelated to any criminal matter," Maddow explained. She added, "Even if they weren't already watching you -- they soon could be."
Maddow was joined by the Nation's sports correspondent, Dave Zirin, who began by complaining about Bush...
Zirin described how he had been involved in an episode where "the Maryland State Police sent people to infiltrate meetings I was in -- a very seditious organization called the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, where we planned such horrifying acts like tabling at the local farmer's market or planning rallies."
"Why were they spying on us?" Zirin continued. "Because the governor at the time, Bob Ehrlich -- a right-wing Republican who makes Sarah Palin look like Emma Goldman -- I mean, he's somebody who saw us as political opponents. He was for the death penalty, we were against the death penalty, therefore in his mind we deserved to be spied upon."
"We were entered into a database the heading of which was 'Terrorists/Anti-Government,'" Zirin noted angrily. "The person who organized all of this, the head of the Maryland State Police ... called us 'fringe people' in the hearings. He said we deserved it because we were fringe people.'"
...
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disturbing the comfortable
Sometimes I write letters to the editor of our local paper. Problem is, they only let you publish once a month. Some thirty-day periods are dry for me, other times I have a half-dozen topics. What usually seems to happen is that right after I get a letter in the paper, something really outrageous gets published and I'm out of action.
I just sent one off about the neo-con pundits claiming this is a center-right country. The problem is that we didn't elect the center-right candidate, we elected the center left candidate...
Today some of us were talking about the bruhaha over gay marriage. The opposition to same sex marriages comes not from legal scholars, but from the churches...
Marriage is a civil contract between two people. At least that’s where it starts. In many countries, if people want to get married they have a civil ceremony, then they have a church wedding—a blessing, really—if they want to submit to the protocols of a particular religious sect. Otherwise, how churches define marriage has nothing to do with the actual legal act of getting married or being married. That’s the way it should be.
The opposition to “gay marriage” comes from churches, as I said. If marriage was recognized as a civil commitment above all, then churches that are opposed to same-sex unions, simply wouldn’t perform them. It’s simple. America is a secular society; religion and state are two different things. That’s pretty much what the founders of this country had in mind.
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disturbing the comfortable
The Idiot Season never ends—at least not in our fabled bastion of feudalism, the South. I thought that senator from Oklahoma was whacked—the one who claimed that raging lesbians were chasing innocent high school students into school bathrooms, but this guy has a considerable problem with reality, himself.
What is it, down there? The mildew from too much humidity? Aligator farts? Inbreeding? The bible? All of the above, I guess. Lincoln made a major mistake when he insisted the southern states should remain in the Union. I seriously think we would have been better off without them. By now the slaves would have revolted and offed the peckerwoods, and perhaps we could talk of reunification.
Georgia congressman warns of Obama dictatorship By BEN EVANS
Associated Press Writer
A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist dictatorship.
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Over on FDL, there are comments about the Secret Service declaring Sarah Palin’s denunciations of Obama led to an increase in death threats against the president-elect.
This isn’t surprising. The name of game, as the neo-fasicsts see it, is “N****r-Knocking,” also affectionately known as race-baiting. The Rethugnicans, ever since Nixon, have catered to the unreconstructed suthrun racists. It’s shameful. What was once the patrician party has become the gathering point for s--t-kickers. The GOP would rather you didn’t have a Confederate flag on your pickup truck, but, hey, it’s a big tent...
And Sarah Palin was the side-show barker. She called them in like hogs. Worried that somebody’s gonna take away your phallic-symbol AK-47? Come on in! Afraid some black guy’s out to marry your sister (and take her away from you)? Hey, look what we got!
This campaign finished John McCain, at least for me. He supported those attacks. Silence equals complicity—or fear. I know he’s generally a pretty nice guy. I’d probably like knowing him. But, my liking someone doesn’t mean they’re, say, a good mechanic or an accomplished artist or angler or a good president. F--k him.
And Sarah Palin? Don’t let the door hit you....
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Ah.
Years ago, a famous member of Alcoholics Anonymous, Chuck C., wrote a book titled "A New Pair of Glasses." It was about seeing the world from a sober viewpoint; a new way of looking at reality. I presume it's still in print (AA has never been known to rush into anything nor to let go of very much...it's kind of a contradiction). Rumor has it that ol' Chuck helped a lot of people get sober. A sidebar is that his son, whom we'll call Richard C., a semi-famous TV actor, happens to be gay. Chuck didn't like gay people (what he apparently really liked was groping younger women). But, as fortune would have it, many gay men flocked to Chuck C. hoping for his help in getting sober. Chuck's gone on to the great Twelve-Step Meeting in The Sky, so none of us know how he resolved his conflicts about sobriety and homosexuals...
The point of this is that since the election, a lot of people have begun looking around the country through a metaphorical new pair of glasses. Obama has won, and things look brighter than they have since the election of Jack Kennedy. It's about time, yes.
However, stupidity continues. Right: the conservatives believe Islam to be a religion of war and hate. Presumably, right-wingers believe the opposite about Christianity. Their brand of Christianity, anyhow. The truth is that any organized religion claiming a direct line to god believes other sects/belief systems/cults are crazed and wrong.
MATTI FRIEDMAN | November 9, 2008 12:06 PM EST | AP
JERUSALEM — Israeli police rushed into one of Christianity's holiest churches Sunday and arrested two clergyman after an argument between monks erupted into a brawl next to the site of Jesus' tomb.
The clash between Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks broke out in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, revered as the site of Jesus' crucifixion, burial and resurrection.
The brawling began during a procession of Armenian clergymen commemorating the 4th-century discovery of the cross believed to have been used to crucify Jesus.
The Greeks objected to the march without one of their monks present, fearing that otherwise, the procession would subvert their own claim to the Edicule _ the ancient structure built on what is believed to be the tomb of Jesus _ and give the Armenians a claim to the site.
The Armenians refused, and when they tried to march the Greek Orthodox monks blocked their way, sparking the brawl.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police were forced to intervene after fighting was reported. They arrested two monks, one from each side, he said.
A bearded Armenian monk in a red-and-pink robe and a black-clad Greek Orthodox monk with a bloody gash on his forehead were both taken away in handcuffs after scuffling with dozens of riot police.
Six Christian sects divide control of the ancient church. They regularly fight over turf and influence, and Israeli police are occasionally forced to intervene.
Story continues below
"We were keeping resistance so that the procession could not pass through ... and establish a right that they don't have," said a young Greek Orthodox monk with a cut next to his left eye.
The monk, who gave his name as Serafim, said he sustained the wound when an Armenian punched him from behind and broke his glasses.
Father Pakrat of the Armenian Patriarchate said the Greek demand was "against the status quo arrangement and against the internal arrangement of the Holy Sepulcher." He said the Greeks attacked first.
Archbishop Aristarchos, the chief secretary of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate, denied his monks initiated the violence.
After the brawl, the church was crowded with Israeli riot police holding assault rifles, standing beside Golgotha, where Jesus is believed to have been crucified, and the long smooth stone marking the place where tradition holds his body was laid out.
The feud is only one of a bewildering array of rivalries among churchmen in the Holy Sepulcher.
The Israeli government has long wanted to build a fire exit in the church, which regularly fills with thousands of pilgrims and has only one main door, but the sects cannot agree where the exit will be built.
A ladder placed on a ledge over the entrance sometime in the 19th century has remained there ever since because of a dispute over who has the authority to take it down.
More recently, a spat between Ethiopian and Coptic Christians is delaying badly needed renovations to a rooftop monastery that engineers say could collapse.
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16:25
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disturbing the comfortable
This came around in e-mail. I think it's well-done. Brings up thoughts like, "we should have let the South split off, way back then."
Dear Red States:
We've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan , Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.
To sum up briefly: You get Texas , Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole Miss. We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue; you get to make the red states pay their fair share. Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.
Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq , and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.
With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines, 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT. With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.
Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals than we lefties.
Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that ditch weed they grow in Mexico.
Peace out,
Blue States
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16:08
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disturbing the comfortable
So, how high a pile of $1.00 bills would $14.83 Billion be?
Damned high, yeah. It's the biggest quarterly profit of any, repeat, ANY corporation, ever. Guess who? Exxon-Mobile. That profit came from the quarter where we were wondering if we'd ever be able to again fill up a gas tank. The same quarter that saw the economy start to crumble. The almost last quarter of George II's regime.
The mortgage game had it's covers yanked, and the U.S. taxpayers went in the hole for the bail-out. The world economy, thanks to the "free market," is lurching around like a blind cyclops, and we all hope to hell it doesn't step off the edge of the cliff. Some October surprise!
John McCain is throwing everything he can scrape up at Obama—including some of John's own personal stink, I believe. The comic strip "Candorville" has been running a story line about some embedded reporters searching Hanoi for McCain's lost Honor. That's about it: McCain has given up any pretense of honorable behavior in his panic-y old man efforts to get elected president. It's sad and disgusting at the same time: I bounce back and forth the two positions. There's something ghastly about his attempts to smear Obama with anything he can find. It's demented.
And so's Sarah Palin, yeah: demented. She is the Manchurian Candidate of the Christian Fascists. I don't know if she invented herself or is a product of the labs at Dobson's Focus on the Family. She's kind of like Hitler: a joke if she wasn't for real. I think, to maybe take the load off her, she's maybe just not too bright and attention-starved, so she's been listening to the wrong people. No, God is not going to bless her into office as the savior of America. No, we are not the chosen people and, no, there is no New-New Covenant between God and America. However, we are f--ked.
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15:27
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disturbing the comfortable
Interesting, yeah. According to some “conservatives,” Colin Powell endorses Obama because of race. Jesus.
Now that we can see the finish line and see that Obama is a lot closer to it than is McCain, the final suicidal charge of the Republican Machine hurls skin color at us. Race, yup. At least they’re consistent. From Nixon’s recruiting southern whites to the Republican party to this, they are consistent. Got to give them credit for that. What value that credit has, though, is dubious. Playing to racial fears is about as valuable as dumping dog s--t on the sidewalk.
Through it all, though, our own, good, stalwart, daily paper maintains it’s Republican bias. They came out today and endorsed McCranky and Sarah Barracuda. McCain, the Bulletin noted, has a more responsible health plan and his tax policy is more sensible. Sure: let the concentration of wealth increase. Let the insurance company donors make greater profits off human misery. Wolves need to be killed. Polar bears are not important and neither are beluga whales. Indians are mukluks. Bomb bomb bomb Iran.
What happened to this country? I know. Nothing has happened—it’s the same ol’ same ol’. Anti-Indian, anti-Black, anti-Mexican, anti- everybody who isn’t white and protestant and on the make. F--k nature. Jesus, again.
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18:11
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disturbing the comfortable
Remember way back when some of the radicals talked about not voting for Tweedledum or Tweedledee? (they wanted us vote for Eldrige Cleaver or Tim Leary or some such citizen.) That's pretty much what it amounts to; both candidates are centrists, both statists. One's slightly to the left and one's slightly to the right. McCain is a not-too-bright and not-too-ethical Republican, and Obama is bright, but super-ambitious and a Democrat out of the Illinois Democratic Machine (which has never won any awards for ethics or particularly high moral standards—Christ, it gave us Mayor Dailey, back in the old days and what a creep he was). The howls that Obama is a “crypto-Marxist” or a “crypto-Muslim” completely ignore the political machines of America: no Marxist and, these days, definitely no Muslim is going anywhere. These guys are regular old politicians. Neither one will do anything unusually radical nor unusually reactionary.The line to remember is, "If voting could change the system it would be against the law."
I've cast a lot of protest votes—very few people I've voted for have ever won any election—and when I do that I feel a little less dirty, I'm not sure that it does much good in the long run. It's a problem. For me, just for me, the Constitution Party seems about as bad as Sarah Palin or Jerry Falwell. Ralph Nader should take up tinkering with antique watches in his old age and leave the rest of us alone. Marxist parties and libertarian free-market parties are delusional—they both have great theories, wonderful ideas, but theories and realities are quite different. They only way those ideas can be tested, it seems, is by killing everyone who doesn't want to play that game—Cuba and Chile are good examples. Cuba tried to force Marxism and Chile tried to force free-market capitalism and the results were awful in both cases. China and Laos, the current mess in South Africa...ideologues are dangerous people.
On the up side, only three weeks to go before they shut up and leave us alone for a while.
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16:11
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disturbing the comfortable
Voting is a really good idea. Duh. We need to ask, though, what exactly we hope to accomplish with our votes on November 4th. Do we think we can change the system, seriously change it? No. I'm not even sure we can do anything about the economic mess we're in. Most people I talk to are dubiously hopeful that things will get better. Sort of, I guess, like a patient with a terminal illness is hopeful of a miracle cure or a sudden medical break-through. But...yeah, sometimes these things happen.
Naomi Wolf is a woman I sometimes confuse with Naomi Klein. I'm sorry; it's an odd first name, for an old fart—I couldn't have met more than two or three in my entire life. I think Naomi K. is brilliant: brilliant and beautiful, sigh. I don't know that much about Naomi Wolf, other than she's brilliant, too, in a different area. This is the Age of the Woman Intellectual. Yeah, it's about time.
Now, here's something to consider. It seems like our votes may not matter all that much...
Thousands of Troops Are Deployed on U.S. Streets Ready to Carry Out "Crowd Control" By Naomi Wolf, AlterNet
Posted on October 8, 2008, Printed on October 8, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/101958/
Background: the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, three to four thousand soldiers, has been deployed in the United States as of October 1. Their stated mission is the form of crowd control they practiced in Iraq, subduing "unruly individuals," and the management of a national emergency. I am in Seattle and heard from the brother of one of the soldiers that they are engaged in exercises now. Amy Goodman reported that an Army spokesperson confirmed that they will have access to lethal and non lethal crowd control technologies and tanks.
George Bush struck down Posse">[en.wikipedia.org] Comitatus, thus making it legal for military to patrol the U.S. He has also legally established that in the "War on Terror," the U.S. is at war around the globe and thus the whole world is a battlefield. Thus the U.S. is also a battlefield.
He also led change to the 1807 Insurrection Act to give him far broader powers in the event of a loosely defined "insurrection" or many other "conditions" he has the power to identify. The Constitution allows the suspension of habeas corpus -- habeas corpus prevents us from being seized by the state and held without trial -- in the event of an "insurrection." With his own army force now, his power to call a group of protesters or angry voters "insurgents" staging an "insurrection" is strengthened.
U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman of California said to Congress, captured on C-Span and viewable on YouTube, that individual members of the House were threatened with martial law within a week if they did not pass the bailout bill:
"The only way they can pass this bill is by creating and sustaining a panic atmosphere. … Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day and a couple of thousand on the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no."
If this is true and Rep. Sherman is not delusional, I ask you to consider that if they are willing to threaten martial law now, it is foolish to assume they will never use that threat again. It is also foolish to trust in an orderly election process to resolve this threat. And why deploy the First Brigade? One thing the deployment accomplishes is to put teeth into such a threat.
I interviewed Vietnam veteran, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel and patriot David Antoon for clarification:
"If the President directed the First Brigade to arrest Congress, what could stop him?"
"Nothing. Their only recourse is to cut off funding. The Congress would be at the mercy of military leaders to go to them and ask them not to obey illegal orders."
"But these orders are now legal?'"
"Correct."
"If the President directs the First Brigade to arrest a bunch of voters, what would stop him?"
"Nothing. It would end up in courts but the action would have been taken."
"If the President directs the First Brigade to kill civilians, what would stop him?"
"Nothing."
"What would prevent him from sending the First Brigade to arrest the editor of the Washington Post?"
"Nothing. He could do what he did in Iraq -- send a tank down a street in Washington and fire a shell into the Washington Post as they did into Al Jazeera, and claim they were firing at something else."
"What happens to members of the First Brigade who refuse to take up arms against U.S. citizens?"
"They'd probably be treated as deserters as in Iraq: arrested, detained and facing five years in prison. In Iraq a study by Ann Wright shows that deserters -- reservists who refused to go back to Iraq -- got longer sentences than war criminals."
"Does Congress have any military of their own?"
"No. Congress has no direct control of any military units. The Governors have the National Guard but they report to the President in an emergency that he declares."
"Who can arrest the President?"
"The Attorney General can arrest the President after he leaves or after impeachment."
[Note: Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has asserted it is possible for District Attorneys around the country to charge President Bush with murder if they represent districts where one or more military members who have been killed in Iraq formerly resided.]
"Given the danger do you advocate impeachment?"
"Yes. President Bush struck down Posse Comitatus -- which has prevented, with a penalty of two years in prison, U.S. leaders since after the Civil War from sending military forces into our streets -- with a 'signing statement.' He should be impeached immediately in a bipartisan process to prevent the use of military forces and mercenary forces against U.S. citizens"
"Should Americans call on senior leaders in the Military to break publicly with this action and call on their own men and women to disobey these orders?"
"Every senior military officer's loyalty should ultimately be to the Constitution. Every officer should publicly break with any illegal order, even from the President."
"But if these are now legal. If they say, 'Don't obey the Commander in Chief,' what happens to the military?"
"Perhaps they would be arrested and prosecuted as those who refuse to participate in the current illegal war. That's what would be considered a coup."
"But it's a coup already."
"Yes."
Naomi Wolf is the author of Give Me Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2008), the sequel to the New York Times best-seller The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green, 2007).
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
[www.alternet.org]
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17:24
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disturbing the comfortable
Beth said, appropos of the campaign, "All those Republican statements are built on fear. They just want everyone to be afraid."
Bringing up a vague association with someone like Bill Ayers is, a) a remarkable piece of mud-slinging, and b) an attempt to tie someone's demented actions of forty years ago with someone else's character today... Jesus. Several people have commented than when Ayers was running off the deep end, Obama was eight years old; since then Ayers apparently got his head on straight and has been leading a quiet life, quite seperate from Obama's. This weird guilt by association riff is also hyped by the woman who accused the Democrats of always looking backward. Jesus, again. In fact, Jesus F--king Christ! On a crutch.
I have fairly good memories of the McCarthy period. My grandfather hung out with some proto-John Birch types, and some actual Birchers fifty, sixty years ago. I even met Walter Knott, of Knott's Berry Farm and heard him rant about the communists. I can guarantee that hearing that, or from a dozen other people who thought Hitler wasn't altogether that bad, that I am in no way a neo-McCarthy-ite, nor a neo-Nazi, nor an anti-Semite, nor... Of course, if I ran into an unreconstructed loony left over from the Sixties, I might be accused of that. But that's what Ms Palin is doing. That's what the Republicans are doing with this whole f--king campaign: they're appealing to the public's incredibly deep-seated fears and convoluted emotional associations to destroy Obama.
Do the Republican strategists actually believe that Obama is some sort of covert Muslim terrorist/traitor? That's hard for me to believe, but not as hard as it is to believe that Palin and McCain are so...let me rephrase that. If the Republican strategists believe that bizarre domestic terror threat, they're as crazy as s--thouse rats (as my old friend Edd Whittaker would say); if they don't believe the line they're laying down, they're about as honest as a used-car salesman's "this car was owned by a little old lady..."
Obviously, a terrorist strike here in the USA would be the best thing for the McCain-Palin ticket. I'm praying it won't happen.
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19:19
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disturbing the comfortable
There’s more than enough disassembling of Sarah Palin: she’s deconstructing faster than all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put her back together again. I almost feel sorry for the woman. She’s sort of...well, like a Hollywood product: cute, somewhat capable, but over-hyped. Essentially, somebody pointed out, a Barbie on steroids. But—
But. What if she’s the Manchurian Candidate of the Christian Right? John McCain’s OK, like most people are OK (except for the ones who are Not OK). Nothing special, a rich and not too bright old guy who likes playing politics. He’d probably be a good city councilman or member of a school board. Maybe even a decent member of the Arizona Legislature.
We know the Christian Right wants to take over the country, so they can save our souls and please God. It's for our own Good. They believe the world is going to end, soon. The righteous will go to Heaven and the rest will go in the wood pile. The faster they can help this come about the better it will be. They also know they can’t win an election because of their own popularity. Satan has his hooks everywhere, right? John McCain could, possibly, win this election with a little help from his friends in the Republican Machine. If he does win it...
Well, he is a Beloved American Patriot (and, did you know, an Ex-POW?). Satan, as mentioned, has his hooks everywhere. Some poor deluded drug-addled liberal coward might decide to whack this Beloved American Patriot-Now-President. We’d have a good stand up Hockey-Mom-Six-Pack-ette to take his place. A good glamorous-but-demure Christian Woman.
Who happens to believe in the return of Jesus in her life-time.
Reversing Roe v. Wade would be the least damage she could do.
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14:29
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disturbing the comfortable
Obviously, I'm not optimistic about the way things have been going in this country. It's been gradual, and there are nearly as many carrots as there are sticks. We're well-paid to be acquiescent in the on-going destruction.
Last night I watched a documentary about two Indigenous tribes in Baja California, the Kuwilas and the Cucupas, and their struggles to survive as any sort of community-based groups. The Indians in the U.S. have it bad, very bad, but not as bad as those groups do. And even the homeless here in the States have some services available, off and on, to them. The middle class is well-paid to continue a way of life that's ultimately going to kill the planet. And the government propaganda machine (otherwise known as the media, just like the government is simply a machine, anymore, of the capitalist business world) continues to peddle the good times illusion—kind of like the way the movies of the mid 1930s emphasized glamour and glitz as being right out there, just, just, just a tad out of reach...
All the years, now, we've had of bulls--t about the glories of capitalism as an economic system, about god's love for this country, our mission to save the world, about how ambition is the highest quality of humanity, has led us to this point. We have two candidates for president who really don't represent anything different—one will maintain a few government services as long as possible—maybe even expand health care, and the other will space-out and let the whole thing go in the toilet or into war.
No, I'm not optimistic.
The Plot Against Liberal America By Thomas Frank, The New Statesman
Posted on August 18, 2008, Printed on August 18, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/95372/
The most cherished dream of conservative Washington is that liberalism can somehow be defeated, finally and irreversibly, in the way that armies are beaten and pests are exterminated. Electoral victories by Republicans are just part of the story. The larger vision is of a future in which liberalism is physically barred from the control room -- of an "end of history" in which taxes and onerous regulation will never be allowed to threaten the fortunes private individuals make for themselves. This is the longing behind the former White House aide Karl Rove's talk of "permanent majority" and, 20 years previously, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's declaration to the Republican convention that it's "the job of all revolutions to make permanent their gains."
When I first moved to contemplate this peculiar utopian vision, I was struck by its apparent futility. What I did not understand was that beating liberal ideas was not the goal. The Washington conservatives aim to make liberalism irrelevant not by debating, but by erasing it. Building a majority coalition has always been a part of the program, and conservatives have enjoyed remarkable success at it for more than 30 years. But winning elections was not a bid for permanence by itself. It was only a means.
The end was capturing the state, and using it to destroy liberalism as a practical alternative. The pattern was set by Margaret Thatcher, who used state power of the heaviest-handed sort to implant permanently the anti-state ideology.
"Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul," she said, echoing Stalin. In the 34 years before she became prime minister, Britain rode a see-saw of nationalization, privatization and renationalization; Thatcher set out to end the game for good. Her plan for privatising council housing was designed not only to enthrone the market, but to encourage an ownership mentality and "change the soul" of an entire class of voters. When she sold off nationally owned industries, she took steps to ensure that workers received shares at below-market rates, leading hopefully to the same soul transformation. Her brutal suppression of the miners' strike in 1984 showed what now awaited those who resisted the new order. As a Business Week reporter summarized it in 1987: "She sees her mission as nothing less than eradicating Labour Party socialism as a political alternative."
In their own pursuit of the free-market utopia, America's right-wingers did not have as far to travel as their British cousins, and they have never needed to use their state power so ruthlessly. But the pattern is the same: scatter the left's constituencies, hack open the liberal state and reward friendly businesses with the loot.
Grover Norquist, one of the most influential conservatives in Washington and the "field marshal of the Bush plan," according to the Nation magazine, has been most blunt about using the power of the state "to crush the structures of the left." He has outlined the plan countless times in countless venues: the liberal movement is supported by a number of "pillars," each of which can be toppled by conservatives when in power. Among Norquist's suggestions has been the undermining of defense lawyers -- who in the US give millions of dollars to liberal causes -- with measures "potentially costing [them] billions of dollars of lost income." Conservatives could also "crush labour unions as a political entity" by forcing unions to get annual written approval from every member before spending union funds on political activities. His coup de grace is that the Democratic Party in its entirety would become "a dead man walking" with the privatization of social security.
Much of this program has already been accomplished, if not on the precise terms Norquist suggested. The shimmering dream of privatizing social security, though, remains the great unreachable right-wing prize, and the right persists in the campaign, regardless of the measure's unpopularity or the number of political careers it costs. President Bush announced privatisation to be his top priority on the day after his re-election in 2004, although he had not emphasized this issue during the campaign. He proceeded to chase it deep into the land of political unpopularity, a region from which he never really returned.
He did this because the potential rewards of privatizing social security justify any political cost. At one stroke, it would both de-fund the operations of government and utterly reconfigure the way Americans interact with the state. It would be irreversible, too; the "transition costs" in any scheme to convert social security are so vast that no country can consider incurring them twice. Once the deal has been done and the trillions of dollars that pass through social security have been diverted from the US Treasury to stocks in private companies, the effects would be locked in for good. First, there would be an immediate flood of money into Wall Street; second, there would be an equivalent flow of money out of government accounts, immediately propelling the federal deficit up into the stratosphere and de-funding a huge part of the federal activity.
Business elites
The overall effect for the nation's politics would be to elevate for ever the rationale of the financial markets over such vague liberalisms as "the common good" and "the public interest." The practical results of such a titanic redirection of the state are easy to predict, given the persistent political demands of Wall Street: low wage growth, even weaker labour organisations, a free hand for management in downsizing, in polluting, and so on.
The longing for permanent victory over liberalism is not unique to the west. In country after country, business elites have come up with ingenious ways to limit the public's political choices. One of the most effective of these has been massive public debt. Naomi Klein has pointed out, in case after case, that the burden of debt has forced democratic countries to accept a laissez-faire system that they find deeply distasteful. Regardless of who borrowed the money, these debts must be repaid -- and repaying them, in turn, means that a nation must agree to restructure its economy the way bankers bid: by deregulating, privatizing and cutting spending.
Republicans have ridden to power again and again promising balanced budgets -- government debt was "mortgaging our future," Ronald Reagan admonished in his inaugural address -- but once in office they proceed, with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, to inflate the federal deficit to levels far beyond those reached by their supposedly open-handed liberal rivals. The formal justification is one of the all-time great hoaxes. By cutting taxes, it is said, you will unleash such economic growth that federal revenues will actually increase, so all the additional government spending will be paid for.
Even the theory's proponents don't really believe it. David Stockman, the libertarian budget director of the first Reagan administration, did the maths in 1980 and realised it would not rescue the government; it would wreck the government. This is the point where most people would walk away. Instead, Stockman decided it had medicinal value. He realized that with their government brought to the brink of fiscal collapse, the liberals would either have to acquiesce in the reconfiguration of the state or else see the country destroyed. Stockman was candid about this: the left would "have to dismantle [the government's] bloated, wasteful, and unjust spending enterprises -- or risk national ruin."
This is government-by-sabotage: deficits were a way to smash a liberal state. The Reagan deficits did precisely this. When Reagan took over in 1981, he inherited an annual deficit of $59bn and a national debt of $914bn; by the time he and his successor George Bush had finished their work, they had quintupled the deficit and pumped the debt up to more than $3trn. Bill Clinton called the deficit "Stockman's Revenge" -- and it dominated all other topics within his administration's economic teams. With the chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan himself speaking of "financial catastrophe" unless steps were taken to control Reagan's deficit, Clinton was soon a convert. He got tough with the federal workforce.
So-called virtues
George W Bush proceeded to plunge the budget into deficit again. Indeed, after seeing how the Reagan deficit had forced Clinton's hand, it would have been foolish for a conservative not to spend his way back into the hole as rapidly as possible. "It's perfectly fine for them to waste money," says Robert Reich, a former labour secretary to Bill Clinton, summarizing the conservative viewpoint. "If the public thinks government is wasteful, that's fine. That reduces public faith in government, which is precisely what the Republicans want."
In 1964, the political theorist James Burnham diagnosed liberalism as "the ideology of western suicide." What Burnham meant by this was that liberalism's so-called virtues -- its openness and its insistence on equal rights for everyone -- made it vulnerable to any party that refuses to play by the rules. The "suicide" that all of this was meant to describe was liberalism's inevitable destruction at the hands of communism, a movement in whose ranks Burnham had once marched himself. But his theory seems more accurately to describe the stratagems of its fans on the American right. And the correct term for the disasters that have disabled the liberal state is not suicide, but vandalism. Loot the Treasury, dynamite the dam, take a crowbar to the monument and throw a wrench into the gears. Slam the locomotive into reverse, toss something heavy on the throttle, and jump for it.
Mainstream American political commentary customarily assumes that the two political parties do whatever they do as mirror images of each other; that if one is guilty of some misstep, the other is equally culpable. But there is no symmetry. Liberalism, as we know it, arose out of a compromise between left-wing social movements and business interests. It depends on the efficient functioning of certain organs of the state; it does not call for all-out war on private industry.
Conservatism, on the other hand, speaks not of compromise, but of removing its adversaries from the field altogether. While no one dreams of sawing off those branches of the state that protect conservatism's constituents -- the military, the police, legal privileges granted to corporations -- conservatives openly fantasize about doing away with the bits of "big government" that serve liberal ends. While de-funding the left is the north star of the conservative project, there is no comparable campaign to "de-fund the right"; indeed, it would be difficult to imagine one.
"Over the past 30 years, American politics has become more money-centered at exactly the same time that American society has grown more unequal," the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written. The resources and organizational heft of the well-off and hyper-conservative have exploded. But the organizational resources of middle-income Americans ... have atrophied. The resulting inequality has greatly benefited the Republican Party while drawing it closer to its most affluent and extreme supporters."
In this sense, conservative Washington is a botch that keeps on working, constructing an imbalance that will tilt our politics rightward for years, a plutocracy that will stand, regardless of who wins the next few elections. And as American inequality widens, the clout of money will only grow more powerful.
As I write this, the lobbyist-fuelled conservative boom of the past ten years is being supplanted by a distinct conservative bust: like the real-estate speculators who are dumping properties all over the country, conservative senators and representatives are heading for the revolving door in record numbers.
Plutocracy
The Democrats who have taken their place are an improvement, certainly, but for the party's more entrepreneurial leaders electoral success in 2006 was merely an opportunity to accelerate their own courtship of Washington's lobbyists, think-tanks and pressure groups staked out on K Street. Democratic leaders have proved themselves the Republicans' equals in circumvention of campaign finance laws.
Throwing the rascals out is no longer enough. The problem is structural; it is inscribed on the map; it glows from the illuminated logos on the contractors' office buildings; it is built into the systems of governance themselves. A friend of mine summarized this concisely as we were lunching in one of those restaurants where the suits and the soldiers get together. Sweeping his hand so as to take in our fellow diners and all the contractors' offices beyond, he said, "So you think all of this is just going to go away if Obama gets in?" This whole economy, all these profits?
He's right, of course; maybe even righter than he realized. It would be nice if electing Democrats was all that was required to resuscitate the America that the right flattened, but it will take far more than that. A century ago, an epidemic of public theft persisted, despite a long string of reformers in the White House, Republicans and Democrats, each promising to clean the place up. Nothing worked, and for this simple reason: democracy cannot work when wealth is distributed as lopsidedly as theirs was-and as ours is. The inevitable consequence of plutocracy, then and now, is bought government.
Thomas Frank is the author of "The Wrecking Crew."
© 2008 The New Statesman All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
[www.alternet.org]
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20:10
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disturbing the comfortable
Nothing like coming back after having been away and find out that the old crises haven't been resolved—they just get shoved to the rear by new crises. When I heard that Georgia had been invaded by Russia, I hoped they would invade Alabama and Mississippi, too. Let the Russians have those feudal marches!
Now there's new war alarms and threats and counter-threats. I wonder if Cheney cooked this up with Putin as a way of distracting everyone from the fiascos in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, and the Republican election campaign. Nothing like an old war horse like McCain to ride to the hilltop to send the Light Brigade to glory—and death. Assuming he can ride a horse, that is. However, on the "left," things aren't too cool, either. Obama is becoming to appear as more and more of a political adventurer—a nicely constructed conservative Democrat—well, maybe more of a political android, constructed and programmed by the Dems.
From here it's looking like national health care is the most we dare hope for, if Obama wins. If McSame wins, it's time to publish a scholarly work on the Sagas and move to Iceland. Or maybe Pitcairn Island...k
What a fraud this whole thing is! Creationism, unrestricted oil drilling, Intelligent Design, the latest Paris Hilton frolic, who's who in scandal-landia—Henry Miller was right: this is the Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
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17:23
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disturbing the comfortable
Something else on the “war effort” or the campaign or both. John McCain, other than being as charismatic as a wet rag, is being heralded as a “war hero.” I don’t know what that means, in his case. Because he was imprisoned after being captured dropping bombs? That might mean someone like a Luftwaffe pilot in World War Two could be considered a war hero if he had been shot down over London, captured, and interned.
Wes Clark was right: dropping bombs does not make someone presidential. Not any more than using the racist term “gooks” makes someone presidential. Jesus: let’s get real, here, folks, McCain was a jet jock who had to pay some dues, no more no less. And his imprisonment doesn’t trump his current crop of f--kups, like the Pakistan-Iraq border, the famous references to the long-gone “Czechoslovakia,” or his waltzes with various lobbyists... And, I just don’t think there’s anyone completely at home inside his head...
Published on The Smirking Chimp (
[www.smirkingchimp.com] )
War Zero: Nothing Honorable About the Vietnam War
By Ted Rall
Created Jul 18 2008 - 10:21am
[www.smirkingchimp.com] NEW YORK--Every presidential candidacy relies on a myth. Reagan was a great communicator; Clinton felt your pain. Both storylines were ridiculous. But rarely are the constructs used to market a party nominee as transparent or as fictional as those we're being asked to swallow in 2008.
Still more laughable than the notion of Obama as the second coming of JFK is the founding myth of the McCain campaign: (a) he is a war hero, and (b) said heroism increases his credibility on national security issues. "A Vietnam hero and national security pro," The New York Times calls him in a typical media blandishment.
John McCain fought in Vietnam. There was nothing noble, much less heroic, about fighting in that war.
Some Americans may be suffering another of the periodic attacks of national amnesia that prevent us from honestly assessing our place in the world and its history, but others recall the truth about Vietnam: it was a disastrous, unjustifiable mess that anyone with an ounce of sense was against at the time.
Between one and two million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were sent to their deaths by a succession of presidents and Congresses--fed to the flames of greed, hubris, and stupidity. The event used to justify starting the war--the Tonkin Gulf "incident"--never happened. The Vietnam War's ideological foundation, the mantra cited to keep it going, was disproved after we lost. No Southeast Asian "dominos" fell to communism. To the contrary, the effect of the U.S. withdrawal was increased stability. When genocide broke out in neighboring Cambodia in the late 1970s, it was not the U.S., but a unified Vietnamese army--the evil communists--who stopped it.
Not even General Wesley Clark, shot four times in Vietnam, is allowed to question the McCain-as-war-hero narrative. "Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president," he argued. The Obama campaign, which sells its surrogates down the river with alarming regularity, promptly hung the former NATO commander out to dry: "Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain's service, and of course he rejects yesterday's statement by General Clark."
Even in an article criticizing the media for repeatedly framing McCain as a war hero, the liberal website Media Matters concedes: "McCain is, after all, a war hero; everybody agrees about that."
Not everyone.
I was 12 when the last U.S. occupation troops fled Saigon. I remember how I--and most Americans--felt at the time.
We were relieved.
By the end of Nixon's first term most people had turned against the war. Gallup polls taken in 1971 found that about 70 percent of Americans thought sending troops to Vietnam had been a mistake. Some believed it was immoral; others considered it unwinnable.
Since then, the political center has shifted right. We've seen the Reagan Revolution, Clinton's Democratic centrism, and Bush's post-9/11 flirtation with neo-McCarthyite fascism. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Americans--including Republicans--still think we should never have fought the Vietnam War.
"After the war's 1975 conclusion," Michael Tomasky wrote in The American Prospect in 2004, "Gallup has asked the question ("Did the U.S. make a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam?") five times, in 1985, 1990, 1993, 1995, and 2000. All five times...respondents were consistent in calling the war a mistake by a margin of more than 2 to 1: by 74 percent to 22 percent in 1990, for example, and by 69 percent to 24 percent in 2000."
Moreover, Tomasky continued, "vast majorities continue to call the war 'unjust.'" Even in 2004, after 9/11, 62 percent considered the war unjust. Only 33 percent still thought it was morally justified.
Vietnam was an illegal, undeclared war of aggression. Can those who fought in that immoral war really be heroes? This question appeared settled after Reagan visited a cemetery for Nazi soldiers, including members of the SS, at Bitburg, West Germany in 1985. "Those young men," claimed Reagan, "are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps."
Americans didn't buy it. Reagan's poll numbers, typically between 60 and 65 percent at the time, plunged to 41 percent after the visit. Those who fight for an evil cause receive no praise.
So why is the McCain-as-war-hero myth so hard to unravel? By most accounts, John McCain demonstrated courage as a P.O.W., most notably by refusing his captors' offer of early release. But that doesn't make him a hero.
Hell, McCain isn't even a victim.
At a time when more than a fourth of all combat troops in Vietnam were forcibly drafted (the actual victims), McCain volunteered to drop napalm on "gooks" (his term, not mine). He could have waited to see if his number came up in the draft lottery. Like Bush, he could have used family connections to weasel out of it. Finally, he could have joined the 100,000 draft-eligible males--true heroes, to a man--who went to Canada rather than kill people in a war that was plainly wrong.
When McCain was shot down during his 23rd bombing sortie, he was happily shooting up a civilian neighborhood in the middle of a major city. Vietnamese locals beat him when they pulled him out of a local lake; yeah, that must have sucked. But I can't help think of what would have happened to Mohammed Atta had he somehow wound up alive on a lower Manhattan street on 9/11. How long would he have lasted?
Maybe he would have made it. I don't know. But I do know this: no one would ever have considered him a war hero.
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17:05
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disturbing the comfortable
We need to admit that what makes America special is getting less and less.
We’ve seen the erosion of traditional historic rights since the administration has figured out an end run around habeas corpus. The “preemptive war” against Iraq, as well as the continued occupation, violated America ideals, even if the record does show some wars and invasions with very dubious justifications. Torture and indefinite imprisonment without trial are now at the discretion of the commander-in-chief. Increased restrictions have applied to Americans traveling out of the country. The military is increasingly involved in domestic police activities—in fact the only way to tell the difference between cops and soldiers, often, is by the color of the uniforms.
And, on top of that, come revelations that, yeah, we have an enormous secret police presence. Millions and millions of names are on a database known as "Main Core"—and that’s in addition to the infamous “Do Not Fly” lists. Secret police, yeah: people snooping into the lives of American citizens whether or not those citizens have ever been arrested or charged with crimes. They might be thinking about overthrowing the government appears to be the justification for this snooping. It goes with “preemptive war,” doesn’t it? Preventive detention, preventive spying through the keyholes, preventive wiretaps and intercepts...just in case.
It’s f--king crazy. F--king paranoid crazy. None of us have any idea nor do we have any way to find out if we’re in any of these databases. If we are, well, too bad. But national security trumps civil and legal rights.
Know how to get into one off these databases? Just like in the old McCarthy times: have a few people tip off the FBI or the NSA or even your local cops that you might be a subversive or a terrorist or something like that. “...that you might be” is the kicker. No evidence is needed, thank you. Classic.
You know, the way the Nazis, the Gestapo, managed to be so effective at spreading terror was because people were encouraged to inform on their neighbors. Have a grudge against the old guy across the street? Report you heard him talking about making pipe bombs, or expressing support for the Taliban. That’ll do it. Hell, tell the cops you saw him making eyes at little kids. The important thing is to turn people in. It’s patriotic.
Here’s a link to an article from Salon:
[www.salon.com] It’ll send you to the bottle of anti-anxiety meds...
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14:08
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disturbing the comfortable
I don't know, of course, how many people read The Guardian or read this blog. I presume that of those that do, almost none of them are Republican/Conservative. That's too bad, because the "free market" approach to medical care and life expectancies fails as much as the same approach does to petroleum prices. Big time.
There's no excuse, no ideological justification for the erosion of quality of life in America that this article documents. None.
Development: US fails to measure up on 'human index'
· Nation slumps from 2nd to 12th in global table
· Richest fifth take home $168,000, poorest $11,000
Despite spending $230m (£115m) an hour on healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed country. And while it has the second-highest income per head in the world, the United States ranks 42nd in terms of life expectancy.
These are some of the startling conclusions from a major new report which attempts to explain why the world's number-one economy has slipped to 12th place - from 2nd in 1990- in terms of human development.
The American Human Development Report, which applies rankings of health, education and income to the US, paints a surprising picture of a country that spends well over $5bn each day on healthcare - more per person than any other country.
The report, Measure of America, was funded by Oxfam America, the Conrad Hilton Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. It shows each of the 11 countries that rank higher than the US in human development has a lower per-capita income.
Those countries score better on the health and knowledge indices that make up the overall human development index (HDI), which is calculated each year by the United Nations Development Programme.
And each has achieved better outcomes in areas such as infant mortality and longevity, with less spending per head.
Japanese, for example, can expect to outlive Americans, on average, by more than four years. In fact, citizens of Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica, South Korea and every western European and Nordic country save one can expect to live longer than Americans.
There are also wider differences, the report shows. The average Asian woman, for example, lives for almost 89 years, while African-American women live until 76. For men of the same groups, the difference is 14 years.
One of the main problems faced by the US, says the report, is that one in six Americans, or about 47 million people, are not covered by health insurance and so have limited access to healthcare.
As a result, the US is ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in terms of infants surviving to age one. The US infant mortality rate is on a par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia and Poland. If the US could match top-ranked Sweden, about 20,000 more American babies a year would live to their first birthday.
"Human development is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it," said the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, who developed the HDI in 1990.
"We get in this report ... an evaluation of what the limitations of human development are in the US but also ... how the relative place of America has been slipping in comparison with other countries over recent years."
The US has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's richest countries.
In fact, the report shows that 15% of American children - 10.7 million - live in families with incomes of less than $1,500 per month.
It also reveals 14% of the population - some 40 million Americans - lack the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks such as understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.
And while in much of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia, levels of enrolment of three and four-year-olds in pre-school are running at about 75%, in the US it is little more than 50%.
The report not only highlights the differences between the US and other countries, it also picks up on the huge discrepancies between states, the country's 436 congressional districts and between ethnic groups.
"The Measure of America reveals huge gaps among some groups in our country to access opportunity and reach their potential," said the report's co-author, Sarah Burd-Sharps. "Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and standard of living.
"For example, the state human development index shows that people in last-ranked Mississippi are living 30 years behind those in first-ranked Connecticut."
Inequality remains stark. The richest fifth of Americans earn on average $168,170 a year, almost 15 times the average of the lowest fifth, who make do with $11,352.
The US is far behind many other countries in the support given to working families, particularly in terms of family leave, sick leave and childcare. The country has no federally mandated maternity leave.
The US also ranks first among the 30 rich countries of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of the number of people in prison, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total population.
It has 5% of the world's people but 24% of its prisoners.
About this article
Close This article appeared in
the Guardian on
Thursday July 17 2008 on p29 of the
Financial section. It was last updated at 08:22 on July 17 2008.
- guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
// //
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19:52
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disturbing the comfortable
"Ve need to zee you papers, pleeze..."
The thing is, we're the smoothest dictatorship ever imagined. Congress still wobbles along; the courts make decisions, people complain all over the place... And the perks keep coming. Gas is expensive, yeah—but there's no rationing, other than economic rationing. Food is still available, and, for the most part, we can travel rather freely. However, the courts have allowed that the President can hold anybody he damned well wants to hold on charges of being an enemy combatant—and forget habeas on that one! No warrants necessary. Anytime you call or email anyone outside the country, your communications can be evesdropped. Assume that any call and email anywhere means someone, or some computer, is listening to what you say.
Get your name on a possible terrorist list and you'll have a terrible time getting off it. And you can get your name on it for writing a book that criticizes the president...
And the people go for it. Sure, make us safer! Sure, we have nothing to hide, watch us all the time—well, almost all the time. You know. We only use the missionary position, anyhow: we're good Americans. Just keep the gas coming, make sure we can get our Krap—er, Kraft foods in the super-market, and occasionally drop somebody into the gulag, we don't care.
So, that's exactly what's happening. Here's an editorial from the NY Times (yeah, yeah, it's a commie-symp-eco-islamo-illuminati rag).
The New York Times
July 13, 2008
Editorial
The Shame of Postville, Iowa
Anyone who has doubts that this country is abusing and terrorizing undocumented immigrant workers should read an essay by Erik Camayd-Freixas, a professor and Spanish-language court interpreter who witnessed the aftermath of a huge immigration workplace raid at a meatpacking plant in Iowa.
The essay chillingly describes what Dr. Camayd-Freixas saw and heard as he translated for some of the nearly 400 undocumented workers who were seized by federal agents at the Agriprocessors kosher plant in Postville in May.
Under the old way of doing things, the workers, nearly all Guatemalans, would have been simply and swiftly deported. But in a twist of Dickensian cruelty, more than 260 were charged as serious criminals for using false Social Security numbers or residency papers, and most were sentenced to five months in prison.
What is worse, Dr. Camayd-Freixas wrote, is that the system was clearly rigged for the wholesale imposition of mass guilt. He said the court-appointed lawyers had little time in the raids’ hectic aftermath to meet with the workers, many of whom ended up waiving their rights and seemed not to understand the complicated charges against them.
Dr. Camayd-Freixas’s essay describes “the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see” — because cameras were forbidden.
“Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.”
He wrote that they had waived their rights in hopes of being quickly deported, “since they had families to support back home.” He said that they did not understand the charges they faced, adding, “and, frankly, neither could I.”
No one is denying that the workers were on the wrong side of the law. But there is a profound difference between stealing people’s identities to rob them of money and property, and using false papers to merely get a job. It is a distinction that the Bush administration, goaded by immigration extremists, has willfully ignored. Deporting unauthorized workers is one thing; sending desperate breadwinners to prison, and their families deeper into poverty, is another.
Court interpreters are normally impartial participants and keep their opinions to themselves. But Dr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, said he was so offended by the cruelty of the prosecutions that he felt compelled to break his silence. “A line was crossed at Postville,” he wrote.
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12:06
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disturbing the comfortable
Another week, another dozen or so national and international crises. Yup: that's the way it is. Always has been, probably always will be.
Went camping over the last week-end, up at one of the "Cascade Lakes." That is, one of the lakes along a highway on the east side of the Cascades. There're some pretty lakes back there; unfortunately, they are famous. Boats and more boats. Kayaks and more kayaks. Subarus and Volvos, big Dodge diesel pickups and big motorhomes. Not exactly the place to get away from "civilization." Well, it beat watching TV or going to a mall. Next time we'll go back, I hope, to the Ochoco Mountains, north east of here—no lakes to speak of. No ten thousand dollar boats...oh, hell, who cares. People want to spend a pile to go catch four or five planted trout, that's OK. I bother myself about them more than they bother me.
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17:41
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disturbing the comfortable
Here's some rather good news, for a change.
TUESDAY 8 JULY 2008
Plan Offered to Revamp War Powers Act Wednesday 09 July 2008
by: John M. Broder, The New York Times
Washington - Two former secretaries of state have declared the War Powers Resolution of 1973 obsolete and proposed a new system of closer consultation between the White House and Congress before American forces go into battle.
Their proposal would require the president to consult lawmakers before initiating combat lasting longer than a week except in rare cases requiring emergency action. Congress, for its part, would have 30 days to approve or disapprove of the military action.
The plan would create a new committee of Congressional leaders and relevant committee chairmen, with a full-time staff with access to military and intelligence material. The president would be required to consult with the group in advance of any extended strike.
Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and James A. Baker III oversaw a year-long study of the longstanding tension over war powers between the executive and legislative branches. In a report to be released on Tuesday, they concluded that the 1973 law, which was passed in the waning days of the Vietnam War and which aimed to limit the president's ability to commit American forces to war unilaterally, never served its intended function and must be replaced.
In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Tuesday,, Mr. Christopher, who served under former President Bill Clinton, and Mr. Baker, who served under the first President Bush, wrote that the 1973 act is "ineffective at best and unconstitutional at worst. No president has recognized its constitutionality, and Congress has never pressed the issue. Nor has the Supreme Court ever ruled on its constitutionality."
"As a consequence," they wrote, "the 1973 statute has been regularly ignored - a situation that undermines the rule of law, the centerpiece of American democracy."
Presidents since Jefferson have asserted the right to commit troops to battle when they deem it in the national interest. Congress has the power under the constitution to declare war and control spending on military actions, but it has seldom exercised it. The new legislation is designed to clarify when and for how long presidents can act unilaterally.
The question has arisen repeatedly in the context of the Iraq war. In 2002, President Bush sought and received Congressional authorization for military action to enforce United Nations weapons sanction. Since then, however, many members of Congress have claimed that he has exceeded that authority and have tried repeatedly to limit the scope of the war and impose a timetable for withdrawal of troops. All of those efforts have failed.
In 2007, several senators, including Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, tried to repeal the 2002 war authorization. They also fell short.
In a Republican presidential debate last October, Senator John McCain, the likely Republican presidential candidate, said he would take military action without going to Congress first, "if the situation is that it requires immediate action to ensure the security of the United States of America."
"That's what you take your oath to do when you're inaugurated as president," Mr. McCain said. But he also said that he would seek the approval of Congress if there were time to assess the threat and debate possible courses of action.
Mr. Baker and Mr. Christopher led a commission of former policymakers and constitutional experts to study the war powers question. The group included former Democratic Representative Lee Hamilton, who was a co-chairman with Mr. Baker of the Iraq Study Group in 2006, whose recommendations for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq were largely ignored by President Bush. Other members of the panel were former Republican Senator Slade Gorton of Washington, former Secretary of the Army John O. Marsh Jr., former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.
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17:17
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disturbing the comfortable
Moccasins. Stitching leather. Sewing them up is slow going. It doesn't seem to be real difficult—tedious, but not difficult. Easier than reading policy papers or listening to political speeches (which are two variations on the theme of bulls--t).
The political news, from the lefty news and commentary blogs, is repetitious and speculative. Who is in the running for VP for McSame? Who will be Obama's running dog-err mate? What is the meaning of the shift in McCain's/Obama's campaign staff ? What does it all mean, Mister Natural?
It really don't mean sheeit. It doesn't really mean much of anything. McCain is still out-of-it and Obama is another incarnation of Bill Clinton. The Republicans are still Republicans and the Democrats and still the Democrats and both parties are slightly seperated right-wing social democrats, no more no less. The Military Industrial Party has a big tent: both parties are under it's shelter. Well, it's more like a "big stable" than a "big tent." Like a pimp has a stable, yeah. This whole campaign is turning out to be a well-done, slick, expensive Hollywood movie, only without the sex. Although I read—somewhere–that Laura Bush is writing a book with sex in it. That's an interesting, if repulsive, thought. Not as bad As Mrs Cheney's books, though—couldn't be.
So, I have one moccasin nearly done. In less than an hour's work, it'll be finished. The sole for the other one is punched out and the top is ready to be sewn to it. It's minor stuff, but we need to be grateful for small things.
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19:09
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disturbing the comfortable
Thank god it's over: the Fourth. The best thing about it is that Jesse Helms decided to croak. One of the last big-time suthrun racist assholes has left the building. There's been a nauseating wave of eulogies for the old fart. Like instead of being an incredibly bigoted man he really was a great politician, a great conservative...well, hmm. He was a politician all right: he knew where the bodies were buried and he knew who buried them (along with the ones he'd planted...), and, yeah, he was a conservative. He was an unreconstructed Confederate, was what he was.
At least, a voice in the back of my mind says, he was up front about it. Yeah, he was that. But Hitler was upfront, too.
I've been working on a pair of new moccasins; Sun Dance is in less than three weeks and I want a new pair to wear. I'm not dancing—I just ain't got the stamina for it this year. With luck I can pull it off next year. So, I'll be a supporter. I'm looking forward to it: essentially a week with a focus on spirituality. I'm jonesing for it—a political junkie who needs to detox. Anyhow, the moccasins.
I bought the materials last year. The instructions I found are adequate and vague—sort of like they were written by someone who knows the English language better than how to actually make a pair of moccasins... There are many different styles of mocs, just like there are many different kinds of Indians and many different environments in North America. The kind I'm making are a hard-soled Plains' style: a sole of rawhide, and uppers of soft leather—something for hiking over rough ground, avoiding thorns and rocks. The Indians out here, at least the people up at Warm Springs, made one-piece moccasins, folded over and sewn along one side. They're pretty easy to make: sew them up inside out, and because the soles are soft, it's a simple matter to turn them right side out. The kits you see, and the kind that are commercially manufactured, the moccasins called "moccasins," are in the style of the upper midwest. Anyhow, I'm plodding along on them. I get arthritis in my wrists and hands and it's slow going. Hell, even typing is getting painful. Grumble.
However, life does go on, yup. And there are still those of us who hope for a better tomorrow. Still.
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19:00
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disturbing the comfortable
And on and on on and...
So Christopher Hitchens, noted commentator and potential wet-brain, gave himself up for water-boarding. That may be the most humane thing he’s done in years. He has a piece on it in and up-coming Vogue. Go find it on the web: it’s quite sober and sobering. The man is a fire-breather: about as far to the right as Michelle Malkin, only with talent and a certain sense of irony. Water-boarding he admits, is torture—no way around it. It has to be bad if he’d cop to his feelings about it.
Now, if only Dubya and Cheney and McCain would submit to it, for educational purposes, of course. Maybe Limbaugh and O’Reilly will volunteer, just to show that anyone who thinks it’s torture is a secret pinko closet pansy commie-symp.
So, the world lurches on. Since I spent a couple of days watching trees and chipmonks, butterflies, wild roses, yarrow, firs—you know, nature—the ghastliness of the current American scene is ever clearer. Sure, it’s as bad or worse in a lot of other places, but so what? If you have a painfully broken leg, it doesn’t hurt less because there’s someone with two broken legs. There’s perspective and there’s perspective. Obviously, the government of Sweden or The Netherlands isn’t imprisoning such a high percentage of populations, nor are they engaged in enthusiastic squashing of dissent. Yeah, and fewer babies die there than here, and people live longer, too. Once upon a time, the U.S.A. was the last best hope. It doesn’t seem to be, anymore.
The Demicans are all a-twitter because Obama has made a series of right turns: guns are good, the war funding is good, the war on terror is OK, “faith-based” groups are good, and so on. I’m wondering when he’s going to come out against abortion and anti-gay rights. He will, if his handlers think McLame is starting to make a stronger showing. Sort of like what the Clintons did with “health care” and “welfare reform.” Sure: the Democratic Machine isn’t going to let anybody rock the boat too much. But...what are you going to do? Well, my friend Phil, another friend, Jim, and assorted others (me, too) will hold our noses and vote for Obama, because no matter how much he’s a political adventurer, he’s better than the other guy. This is the way it is. We don’t vote for the best man, we vote for the lesser of two evils....
Bob Luthmers, a guy I used to know in Canada, had a poem/song that went
Gee but it’s great
accepting your fate
in the fascist state.
Yup.
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19:34
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disturbing the comfortable
We left last Thursday afternoon and drove about fifty miles n.e. of here, up into the foothills of the Ochoco Mountains. A nice campground on a lovely, noisy, clear little creek.
I spent one day just sitting and staring at the trees, the hillsides, the bushes, and the opportunistic and manic chipmonks. People pay a lot of money to get similar mood lifters. It cost B. and me $4 a night. Talking to chipmonks is very thereputic and so is watching the way crystal water tumbles over rocks. I have to admit, though, that part of that blissfulness came from accidentally doubling up my dosage of Citalopram. It was sort of like being stoned on opiates, but not quite as dreamy.
We read Louise Erdrich's A Plague of Doves over the week-end. She's one of the most optimistic, positive toward the world, novelists I know of—and she's funny, too. She writes about people moving through the cracks between the Euro-American and Indian worlds: there are spirits, no coincidences, and ultimately love keeps everything moving along. She deserves the widest audience she can get. The people who have been on Turtle Island for at least the last 15,000 years have a lot to show us, if we could just stop and stand still until we really see what's there.
That leads me to talking about s--t. Specifically, some 14,000+ year old human s--t found in some caves here in Oregon. That is really old, yeah. The scientists were able to get DNA out of it. And the DNA shows that the people of south central Oregon, the Klamaths as we call them, are the descendants of those early hunters and gatherers. The tribes talk about having been here since "time immemorial," and if 14,000 years' of oral history don't convince you of that, well, you ain't never going to get it, nope.
So much for Indians being the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes, or some late-comers who kicked somebody else's ass out of the place. No: the earliest people here were Indians, and they, despite everything that's been done to them, are still here. There is hope in that.
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19:32
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disturbing the comfortable
Ah, well, it's been nice to be away from the onrushing madness. Just for the hell of it, here's a nice piece from Newsweek about The Netherlands' latest experiment in sanity:
Sponsored By placeAd2('printthis','88x31',false,''); The Dutch Go To Pot America Takes A Hit In The Drug War As Legalized Grass Takes Root Across The European Continent BY ERIC PAPE AND ADAM PIORE NEWSWEEK Updated: 1:02 PM ET Oct 23, 2007
Paul van Hoorn, 71, suffers from chronic glaucoma. His wife, Jo, 70, has painful arthritis. So every few days, the two septuagenarians shuffle to their local "coffee shop," ever watchful for robbers, to buy a little marijuana. Last week Dutch authorities decided that the van Hoorns, among many others, should change their ways--by going to their local pharmacy. Effective immediately, the government will begin dealing in Nederwiet, or Netherweed--cannabis, by another name, grown in state-sanctioned greenhouses and sold by prescription with official government approval.
That may not be such a stretch in a country famous for its cutting-edge life-style, where cafes legally sell pot along with cappuccino. Still, not so long ago the Netherlands might have faced condemnation, not only from Washington but across Europe. This time, though, while American anti-drug crusaders shake their heads in angry consternation, many Europeans are thinking of following suit. Britain, Belgium and Luxembourg are preparing to emulate the Netherlands in decriminalizing marijuana possession for personal consumption--and they will be watching the prescription experiment closely. Nor is this the most controversial of Europe's new approaches to drugs. In Spain last week, 60 heroin junkies began a pilot program in which for the next nine months, they will receive twice-daily injections of heroin, supervised by a state hospital. Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland have already launched similar programs. It's a far cry from the era when President Ronald Reagan found willing partners for his "get tough" policies. When it comes to the problems of drugs and addiction, says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in New York, the United States these days is an "outlier," increasingly far from the European mainstream.
Actually, the Netherlands' new policy isn't as out-there as it might seem at first --glance. Official pot will be sold only for the alleviation of acute pain in the treatment of such diseases as cancer, AIDS and multiple sclerosis, as well as a handful of unusual ailments like Tourette's syndrome. No more than 15,000 patients are expected to receive the drug in the first year. Nonetheless, it's significant that nations that used to tailor their drug policies to U.S. concerns are today far less inclined to do so. Europeans are increasingly put off by what they see to be America's extremism--the stridency of the Bush administration's "zero tolerance" crime and anti-drug campaigns, its growing conservatism on social and cultural issues, its unilateralism in Iraq and go-it-alone unwillingness to abide by treaties and international norms held dear by Europeans, from environmental accords to agreements on international criminal justice. "People are saying, you can't hold us to some treaties and choose the ones you do and don't want to adhere to," says Eugene Oscapella, a lawyer in Ottawa who specializes in international drug issues. "There's a lot of skepticism about America," he adds, and it's spilling into other realms, including drug policies.
The zealous U.S. attorney general, John Ashcroft, embodies this ambivalence. Many Europeans see him as nothing short of a right-wing Jesus freak, a caricature of Europe's worst fears of the Ugly American. His Justice Department has overseen vigorous (some would say absurd) prosecutions of cases that mystify people on the other side of the Atlantic. Dozens of vendors of water pipes, sometimes used to smoke marijuana, have been indicted by the Justice Department, for example, even when no actual drugs are involved. The comedian and actor Tommy Chong--of Cheech & Chong fame--faces up to three years in prison for allowing his name to be used to sell "Chong's Bongs" online. Authorities have raided hospices for the sick and the dying in several California cities, even though California is one of 10 states, representing 20 percent of the nation's population, to have passed medical-marijuana initiatives--only to have them overturned by conservative judges. Says Oscapella: "It really is a crusade, pointing at drugs as the devil."
Not long ago, countries such as France could be counted on to follow the conservative U.S. line on drugs. No more. Though widely regarded in Europe as a hard-liner, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy recently helped find a site for a music festival attended by some 40,000 ravers. (He even promised funds for cleanup and damages, if needed.) By contrast, U.S. Justice Department attorneys have been using the newly enacted Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act--popularly known as "the Rave Act"--to crack down on institutions where drugs are consumed. Critics say that nightclubs, dance halls, sports arenas and possibly even hotels can be targeted under the legislation, which Europeans consider to be draconian and a potential threat to individual civil rights.
Nor is it just Europe that's scorning U.S. policies. Even neighboring Canada, traditionally far more in tune with America than Europe, is considering new laws that would decriminalize possession of as much as 15 grams of cannabis. Everyone from the U.S. drug czar, John Walters, to President George W. Bush himself has weighed in, threatening Canada with tighter border restrictions and possible trade penalties if its Parliament approves the measures. Yet that might only be the beginning of Canada's perfidy, at least as Washington sees it. Like the Netherlands, Ottawa has also begun a medical-marijuana program; like Spain and Germany, it's starting up a government-funded project to supervise injections for hard-drug addicts in Vancouver.
Should all this come to pass, whether in Canada or Europe, it will be a clear sign that key elements of America's once globally influential "drug war" are going up in smoke. Growing numbers of Europeans would say it's about time. Regardless of the merits, they will chalk it up as yet another defeat for Arrogant America.
URL:
[www.newsweek.com] © 2007
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14:13
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disturbing the comfortable
And that's just what we're going to do for a few days: head up into the Ochoco Mountains for some "quiet time." Last week-end we drove up into the Ochocos and found a nice place to camp; today we're going to take the van up and hang out. No Judge Judy, no People's Court, Larry King, not even Amy Goodman or Laura Flanders. Hopefull, birds, squirrels, peace, and quiet.
Let's see: Ralph Nader thinks Obama talks too white or something like that. The Texas Republicans think—well, no, they don't think. Never mind.
That's like saying the...well, f--k: we have arrived at the point of utter insanity. Oil, guns, wars, plasma screen TVs, traffic, cell phones, and it's all f--king stupid. I need a rest.
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14:33
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disturbing the comfortable
Sumer ist i-cummin in...It's here: the days are in the warm seventies and above, and the nights are pleasant. Yesterday we were up in the foothills of the Ochoco Mountains and the slopes were vivid with wildflowers. Hayfields in canyon bottoms were green and freshly mown. It was beautiful.
About time.
I've wallowed my way through Father's Day and my 70th birthday; neither event exactly inspired me. Father's Day I felt sad, as I have every Father's Day since my son died. It seems a reasonable response. Seventy years old is, well, another day. Birthdays aren't like sudden time-warps or earthquakes. Just another day like yesterday—except people are usually nicer to the person having a birthday. Presents are always nice, of course, and so's getting taken out to dinner. That's about it. There's no way to compare being seventy to being sixty-nine, really. That's good. Life is, after all, one schlep after another.
George Carlin died. That's too bad, I guess. He was an opponent of the status quo, the hypocritical, and the schlock. Sometimes he depressed me with his acidity and bleak view of life—at least of the official reality. But usually he was right on target. I'm grateful for all his insights. I think he was probably right about the futility of our political system and the hopes for political solutions. Things aren't getting better so much as we're getting more things. We're still gobbling up the world's resources, fouling our nests as fast as possible, and pretending the future is some magical space where Everything's OK.
Uh, folks, I don't think so...I think we're in big trouble. Certainly here in America we're in big trouble. We're rapidly achieving Most Hated Nation status. We get the goodies and the rest of the world gets AIDS, endless wars and Depleted Uranium, and the joy of being exploited by "the greatest country in the world," as Bill Clinton put it.
And, now, I think, I'll go to the library and hang out with some books for a while.
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18:20
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disturbing the comfortable
In my twenties and into my early thirties, I spent a lot of time in Mexico. In small towns around Jalisco and down on the coast in Nayarit. Things were way different, then.
Mexico’s war on drugs: Journey into a lawless land
With 1,400 dead this year alone, and gangs pinning up 'wanted' posters naming police they wish to see killed, Mexico's war on drugs is spiralling out of control. Richard Grant risked his life to travel through the mountains of the Sierra Madre – the most dangerous region of all – and witnessed the terrifying slide into anarchy
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Reuters
If someone had come up to me in my early twenties, when men are supposed to be at their most reckless, and offered me a fortune to go into a place like the Sierra Madre, I would have thought about it for about three seconds before saying no. But after years spent reporting gangs in South Central LA, where I had a gun pointed at me for the first time, the Zapatista uprising in southernmost Mexico, and riots in Haiti, my acceptable level of risk kept rising. I had begun to think the Sierra Madre would not be that dangerous, and besides, I was curious about the nature of anarchy. The forbidden mystique of the Sierra got the better of me.
The Sierra Madre Occidental, the Mother Mountain range of the Mexican West, begins just south of the Arizona border and extends for nearly 900 miles. It contains no cities or large towns, only two paved roads and almost nothing in the way of law and order. This rugged cordillera has always defied the efforts of governments – Aztec, Spanish and Mexican – to enforce control, and it is now one of the biggest production areas in the world for marijuana, opium and heroin, and a staging point for Colombian cocaine.
It is not the sort of place where you can just turn up without an introduction, and I spent years trying to make contacts who could take me in under their protection. Time and again, I was told that it was too dangerous to take a gringo into the mountains, because the drug lords were feuding, or battling the army. Finally, I found a way to get into the Sierra Madre, spent four months travelling down the range and was extremely lucky to escape from the mountains without getting killed.
Along the way, I glimpsed Mexico's future. In the past 18 months, and particularly in the last two weeks, the murderous narco-anarchy I saw in the Sierra Madre has gone nationwide. President Felipe Calderon has gone to war against Mexico's drug cartels, all of which were started by Sierra Madre clanfolk who came downhill – and he is now discovering that the Mexican state isn't strong enough to defeat them.
In Mexico City, cartel gunmen assassinated the nation's police commander in the grounds of his home. In the state of Chihuahua, drug gangs have, in the past fortnight, put up hit lists and wanted posters with names and photographs of police commanders, and offers of reward money for their deaths. In the border city of Juarez, the list was posted on a police memorial statue. No one dared take it down, and so far 17 names have been crossed off it – dead.
The narcos are also feuding with other, with 1,400 drug-related murders so far this year, and many towns and cities are under a virtual curfew. Several police departments have resigned en masse in terror, and three police commanders have fled to the United States requesting asylum. President Calderon is claiming signs of progress, but it looks like the whole nation is unravelling, turning feral, descending into lawlessness.
****
The morning I left for the Sierra Madre, the sun was shining brightly. With my guide, I crossed the border at Douglas, passed through two Mexican army checkpoints looking for guns and drugs, then entered the foothills. My grand adventure was under way at last.
Crossing the line into the state of Sonora, I made my first stop in the town of Yecora. A three-piece band was playing on a flatbed truck and a crowd of 30 or 40 people had gathered. I love norteño music.
I parked and rolled the window down. It was good, raw, soulful, caterwauling norteño. A hundred years ago, they sang corridos in the Sierra about famous bandits, outlaws, revolutionaries, or particularly bloody feuds and heroic-tragic deaths. Now they sing about the drug lords, who sometimes commission the songs out of vanity, and events both real and imagined from the lives of drug growers, local bosses, regional traffickers, smugglers, dealers, pilots, assassins. There's a great deal of macho bragging and posturing, and despite the accordions and polkas, the music form it most resembles is gangsta rap.
I walked over to the back of the crowd as the band was singing a narcocorrido about some drug lord who was the king of the Sierra, with many houses, fine women and impressive machine-guns.
The next song had hardly begun when three drunk men with twitching lips came up to me. They offered to sell me marijuana at $100 a kilo, premium quality, good price, "special for you". When I said I had just pulled over to hear the music they got very suspicious and accused me of working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency, which is something you never want to hear in the Sierra Madre. I laughed it off with as much casual disdain as I could muster, said that I was a British tourist, bid them a sudden farewell and concentrated on maintaining a relaxed and deceptively speedy gait as I walked back to my truck.
I drove all the way out of the mountains without stopping again. Late that night, with enormous relief, I collapsed at a motel. I was safe.
Soon afterwards, I arrived in the town of Alamos. It would take a while to find someone willing and able to take me deeper into the mountains from there. Crossing the Sierra on a paved and well-travelled highway was one thing, but going into the mountains above Alamos by myself was different.
I studied the calm, impassive expressions on the faces of the grandmothers sitting in their doorways, the young couples arm in arm, the off-duty drug dealers standing outside the cantina, wearing silk shirts decorated with pictures of roosters, scorpions, pick-up trucks, AK-47s and the Virgin of Guadalupe.
I went into a cantina called Casino Señorial, a big concrete barn with the walls painted Tecate red and gold, white plastic tables and chairs and a giant, pulsating, multicoloured jukebox in the corner. The place was three-quarters full with men, and I could tell from the hard faces, lean shanks and tyre-tread sandals that most of them had come down from the Sierra.
On the wall behind the bar was a stuffed mountain lion, caught in the act of tearing the throat out of a stuffed deer. Fake blood was smeared around the wound and splattered down the wall. I sat down at the bar and ordered a caguama, a giant sea-turtle, or in this case a quarter-gallon bottle of Tecate beer.
Three women appeared and paraded on the concrete floor on stiletto heels. The whores collected money from the bartender and fed it into the jukebox. The music was all narcocorridos – "I'm one of the players in the Sierra where the opium poppy grows... I like risky action, I like to do cocaine, I walk right behind death with a beautiful woman on each arm... I've got an AK-47 for anyone who wants to try me..."
A group of men beckoned me over to their table. One of them was clearly in charge, a big, paunchy man with a glassy-eyed smile and a magnificent Roman nose. The others called him El Pelicano, The Pelican, and warned me that he and the younger man next to him were cops from the region.
I pulled up a chair and sat down and The Pelican thumped his empty caguama on the plastic table. The bartender scurried over with a fresh one and The Pelican looked at me to pay. They all looked ripped on cocaine, including the two cops.
Their lips were writhing and they were chewing at their tongues and guzzling down beer at a crazy pace. Five minutes after it arrived, the caguama was empty and The Pelican thumped it down on the table. Again I paid and five minutes later I paid again, and so on for the next 20 minutes.
They started making motions, as if lifting a key or a spoon to their nostrils. "Do you like perico?" asked the younger cop. Cocaine was perico, parakeet, because it made you chatter without knowing what you were saying.
"Not now, thank you," I said. Call me paranoid, but the idea of doing cocaine with Mexican cops made me nervous.
I got up to go to the bathroom and the two cops followed me in there. Then The Pelican raised his forefinger to stop me leaving, took out a plastic bag of cocaine, scooped a little mound on the end of his pocket knife and offered it to me.
They wanted me to buy some, which looked like a classic Mexican set-up: I would buy the cocaine, the cops would bust me and extort a large bribe, which they would then spend on cocaine. My instincts were telling me to leave but I didn't know how. To leave a Mexican drinking session before it reaches its natural conclusion, which is absolute drunkenness, is considered rude and disrespectful, and in the rougher parts of the Sierra it is a frequent cause of homicide.
The Pelican thumped down another empty caguama and I pulled out my wallet again and found that it was empty. A godsend!
I showed it to everyone at the table, thanked them for their fine company and outstanding hospitality and assured them that my house was at their orders if they were ever in Tucson.
I got up to leave and The Pelican said: "No, we need more perico. We need more beer. You can get more money from the wall of the bank. We are friends. Or are you too proud to drink with Mexicans?"
"We are friends without doubt," I said. "And there are no better people in all the world to drink with than Mexicans. I will go to the bank and get money from the wall."
I made my reeling exit, and headed towards and into the welcoming darkness of my guest-house.
****
The old adobe town of Urique was founded by a gold prospector in 1690. The sun was behind the canyon wall and the long dusk had begun. Behind Rafael's restaurant was a garden with some fruit trees and white plastic tables and chairs. There, I met two young men called Pancho and José. They had gel-spiked hair and were wearing cargo pants and Nike trainers.
"You want to buy some?" said Pancho without further ado, referring to the local marijuana, "$100 a kilo."
"Ah, no thank you."
"How about grenades? I have some good grenades and a rocket for them."
"The rocket shoots the grenades?"
"Yes. It works very well, very strong." He held up his arm and slapped it.
"It's not my business, but why would anyone need rocket-propelled grenades in Urique Canyon?"
Pancho gave me the patient, pitying look. "Helicopters," he said. "Sometimes the army comes in helicopters. We used to string cables across the canyons to bring them down, but these work much better."
"But I don't need to shoot down any helicopters."
"Hombre, you can use them for anything you want. If there are bandits on the road ahead, you stop and – BOOM!"
"How about some parakeet?" chimed in José. "We can get some right now from Pancho's aunt."
"No thank you. But tell me, how are the police here? Do they make trouble?"
"There is no problem," said José. They both grinned. "My brother is a police officer and we are training to be police officers ourselves."
Not so long ago, the largest town in each municipio would have a single resident comisario, or police officer, and he was responsible for law and order over hundreds of square miles of rugged, roadless mountains. His only real work was to confiscate moonshine, then sell it back to the townsfolk out of his office. That was the extent of the law unless there was a killing and the killer was considered too dangerous or troublesome for the victim's family members to kill. In that case, the local people would send for the judiciales, the state police, and they would ride up into the Sierra on mules.
Now, there are stations of municipal police officers in places like Urique and Chinipas. Pancho and José would soon be joining their ranks. Once they had their badges, guns and the power of arrest, their potential earnings would increase. Units of the state police and AFI (Mexico's equivalent of the FBI) were stationed in the Sierra Madre now, too, but this didn't mean that law and order had arrived. It usually meant more armed, ruthless men in town looking for a piece of the drug action – and a rise in teenage pregnancies and drink-driving accidents.
Trying to distinguish between police officers and drug traffickers can be a futile exercise in Mexico. The traffickers don't just buy protection against arrest; they hire state and federal policemen to transport loads for them and carry out executions.
Where once there was a relatively simple form of lawlessness in the Sierra, now things are more complicated, based on shifting arrangements of corruption financed by organised crime, linked to global black markets and affected by national and international politics. There are enormous amounts of money at stake now, and this was what drew the law into the Sierra Madre and also made it imperative to co-opt the law and keep it at bay.
****
Baborigame was an ominous, grim-looking town in a wide valley with heavily logged mountains around it. When Randy, another of my guides, first came here in the early 1990s, there was no law and no electricity, and a killing almost every night. The arrival of the law had resulted in a decline in the murder rate in town, and an increase in the murder rate out in the ranches.
The torrent of drug money that had flowed through Baborigame in the 1980s and 1990s had left almost no trace. The streets were unpaved and potholed. The drains didn't work. Aside from a few "narco" houses with bright paint and fancy wrought-iron fences, people lived in squalid shacks and adobes.
By this point in my journey I was tired and run down and I had lost tolerance for machismo. It is the root of the worst evil in Mexico, the real reason why men kill each other and rape women in such horrifying numbers. Not that those numbers are available; according to The Washington Post, fewer than 1 per cent of rapes are reported in Mexico.
In the Sierra Madre the practice known as rapto – a man kidnapping a girl and forcing her to marry him – is commonplace. This is what happened to Chana, a woman I met. From Coloradas de la Virgen, she was now living in Baborigame. Raped at 15 and made pregnant, she had to marry the rapist so he could help her to raise the child. She had another child with her rapist husband and then he was murdered, leaving her with two children to raise. It happens to thousands of women like Chana every year. It is indefensible, but it is the code of the mountains.
Back near Alamos, I picked up another guide, Gustavo. One of his jobs was doing clerical and translating work for the municipio, or county police department, and this gave him access to the murder reports and crime statistics from the area. I started looking into the numbers.
The population of the municipio was approximately 23,000, with 9,000 in Alamos, 3,000 in San Bernardo and the rest scattered in small mountain villages and ranches. Gustavo said they were averaging 90 reported murders a year, and that it was safe to add at least another 20 unreported murders to that figure. Let's call it 100 murders a year, committed by a population of 23,000.
I knew that Mexico's overall murder rate was twice that of the United States, but here was a rural county with a murder rate eight times higher than the most homicidal US cities.
We drove into a village of about two dozen shacks, most of them built out of crudely woven sticks and dried mud with palm-thatch or corrugated tin roofs. More often than not, they also had a solar panel, a TV satellite dish and a big American pick-up parked out front.
"With the money from your first crop you buy clothes, jewellery and guns," said Gustavo. "I can assure you that every one of these huts has at least one pistol and one rifle inside. Then you buy your truck, your solar, your satellite and TV. The last thing you spend money on is the house."
We drove on to the next village, Aguacaliente. It looked deserted. We walked along the stream looking for the hot springs that gave the village its name. A middle-aged man appeared in a blue shirt and white hat and walked down the banks holding a bucket. "That's a woman's job," said Gustavo. "He was sent down here to see what we're doing."
The man introduced himself as Señor Espinoza and we all shook hands. Gustavo ran through his clan credentials. With no prompting, Señor Espinoza started talking about the soldiers. "We had a nice crop growing in the hills and we were ready to pick it when the army came with planes and helicopters and a captain that could not be fixed."
"It is these new college-educated army officers," said Gustavo.
"There are a couple of them near Alamos who can't be fixed. They are not reasonable men," said Espinoza. "We used to grow a lot of opium here and the army have stopped that too. It makes no sense. The army and the federales were getting their share, the politicians were getting their share from the mafia, the gringos were getting their drugs and the people here were able to make a living. It was a good system for everybody and now it is broken. Even if we get a reasonable captain during the next harvest, we have no money now and will not be able to fix things with him."
He bid us a courteous farewell, apparently satisfied that we were harmless. We walked back to the truck and sat in the cab making peanut butter sandwiches.
"Gustavo," I said, looking in the rear-view mirror. It didn't look good. There were two young men leading horses directly towards us and they had very hard stares on their faces. Gustavo looked over his shoulder. Two more men appeared and then all four of them pulled down their hats, and when Gustavo saw that, with a piece of bread half-smeared with peanut butter on his knee, he said, "Go, go, go! Go now! Go!"
I started the engine and slewed out of there, fish-tailing in the sand.
****
The largest component of Mexico's economy is still drug trafficking, estimated at about $50bn. According to a leaked study conducted in 2001 by Mexico's internal security agency CISEN, if the drug business was somehow wiped out, Mexico's economy would shrink by 63 per cent.
As Gustavo pointed out, the drug business was not a healthy occupation or a good influence on society. It makes boys neglect their schooling and any other ambitions they might harbour. It causes men to die young and violently and worsens corruption.
Coming back across the Cuchujaqui river in the gathering dark, tired and beaten up from a long day on bad roads, Gustavo spoke. "The thing about Mexico is that everyone is out to get everyone else, except within your family and very closest friends. We live with our senses and suspicions on full alert. Maybe someone thinks your wife is prettier than his so he whispers something to the police, or the mafia, and the next thing the police are planting drugs in your truck and you're going to jail for 10 years, or there's a bullet in your head and you may never know why."
He paused a moment and let out a long sigh: "I don't know if you can understand what it is like to live this way."
© Richard Grant 2008. Extracted from Bandit Roads, to be published tomorrow (Little, Brown, £16.99). To order the book for the special price of £15.99 (inc P&P), call Independent Books Direct on 0870 079 8897
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13:16
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disturbing the comfortable
After the scandals about prisoner torture broke, I wrote one of my senators, Ron Wyden, about investigating and prosecuting those responsible for it. Good ol' Ron wrote me back, assuring me he'd work diligently to find out exactly who ordered the torture and would make sure those reponsible would be held responsible.
I wish I still had the letter.
We sure have a good idea of who OKed—hell, ordered—the torture. Not just us, but most of the world knows who ordered it: the White House. Our country is run by war criminals. They have about 90% of the Republican party behind them, too. Defending things like "extraordinary rendition," waterboarding, anything short of actually torturing the prisoners to death...although that probably happened, too—well, accidentally, no doubt.
I don't think anybody really gives a s--t, though. I don't even believe they have any outrage left at the bulls--t way we got into this war, either. Maybe it's scandal-fatigue. Or PTSD.
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13:03
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disturbing the comfortable
...Anyhow, from the front in the other War, the War On Drugs, comes familar news: we ain't winning. For years and years, Mexico has provided kajillions of tons of drugs to the U.S., as well as, probably, Canada. The corruption goes clear to the top in Mexico.
Yeah, I know it does here, too, but in a more legalistic way. I'm not saying that drug money does not penetrate our legislative and judicial branches of government. I'm saying that America's main form of corruption is about business—which means it isn't quite as bloody as drug money—except, say, in Iraq or Afghanistan...
Back when the U.S. government cracked down on the sale of ingredients used to manufacture "meth," it was obvious the Mexican drug cartels would take up the slack. If I was super-paranoid instead of kinda-paranoid I might suggest that allowing Mexico to find another profitable drug to traffic was the way it was planned. Domestic meth production is way down, but there's no scarcity of the drug. Some statistics I've seen indicate that heroin use is up. Maybe that's Afghanistan developing a robust market economy...
Mexicans believe drug gangs winning war with gov't
REUTERS
Reuters US Online Report World News
Jun 01, 2008 13:40 EST
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A majority of Mexicans believe
violent drug gangs are winning a war with President Felipe
Calderon's government after one of the worst months on record
for killings, Reforma newspaper reported on Sunday.
According to a poll by the newspaper, 53 percent of
Mexicans think that drug traffickers hold the upper hand
against government forces which are trying to clamp down on
cartels that ship drugs to the United States.
Only 24 percent said they believed the government was
winning the battle. The remaining 23 percent gave no opinion.
May was one of the most violent months on record for drug
killings, both between gangs and targeting federal forces.
Calderon has sent thousands of troops onto the streets in a bid
to stop cartels from operating.
Close to 500 people were slain in May -- including a wave
against police chiefs -- the highest number of killings since
Calderon took office in December 2006, according to a tally
kept by Milenio newspaper.
Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said last month that
4,152 drug-related killings have been registered in Calderon's
administration, 450 of them police, military or government
officials.
Calderon, however, kept up his approval rating in the
Reforma poll. Some 64 percent approved his work as president,
up from 63 percent in March. A year ago his rating was 65
percent.
The poll was carried out among 1,515 people nationwide on
May 23-25 and had a margin or error of plus or minus 2.5
percent, Reforma said.
(Reporting by Chris Aspin; Editing by Eric Beech)
Source:
Reuters US Online Report World News
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17:25
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disturbing the comfortable
I was right: even though I've refrained from commenting on the social and political lunacies of our time—at least for the last couple of months I've held off—they continue at about their usual pace.
I have been, on the other hand, exercising four days a week at our local pool-fitness center and working on our camper van. I haven't played handy-person in...well, years. It's taken me a while to get used to it. I'm still not too good, but at least I know when to get help.
We bought the van last fall; an '83 Chevy half-ton van. A conversion van, which in those days meant hokey wood-paneling, lots of shag carpet, a couch across the back that let down into a bed big enough for comfortable screwing—all it needed was one of those multi-mirrored disco lights mounted in the ceiling. Thank god it didn't have one of those. We built a four-foot wide bed over the couch. I want to remove the couch completely and free up a bunch of storage space. Beth doesn't want me to. We bought the van from her Aunt Lydia and Lydia doesn't want me to, either. Women often have their ways with me.
I've been replacing the bayonet-based interior lights with super-duper l.e.d.s from China. This has required me re-learning how to do 12-volt wiring. And soldering. And improvising—I didn't have to re-learn how to improvise, to be honest. It's something I have a black belt in. The wiring is slow, but it works. Each lamp is done a little faster, a little more slicker. The bayonet-bulbs, which are like the ones in an automobile's back-up lights, are bright, but they draw quite a bit of electricity off the "house battery" I installed. The l.e.d.s require maybe one-fourth as much electricity. This means we can have lights for several days. The only other use for the electrical system is to power a laptop so I can write and, if the mood strikes us, we can watch DVDs. However...
...Why do we go camping? Well, one reason is to get out in nature. That's like psychotherapy. A campfire, woodsmoke, simple food, evening silences, calm slow mornings...That's healthy. Life gets reduced to the essentials: food, fire, water. This is wonderfully calming to my mind. Maybe a little reading, but lots of staring off, studying the rocks, the creeks, all that stuff. It's great.
So that's been one of my preoccupations. I can think over each little project for hours and hours. I can research information on the Web. And, finally, I can actually go do it.What a nice feeling.
Sidebar. At the pool today, several of us were relaxing in the hot tub. We agreed on how nice it would be to see Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on trial in The Hague, for war crimes. I don't think it'll happen, because ultimately politicians protect each other. They're sort of like Marines. They might duke it out among themselves, but when the s--t hits the fan, they band together. Like Watergate. It was a matter of tidying up a mess rather than actually making anybody pay for the crimes committed. That's probably all we can hope for this time around.
Later, 'gator.
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16:59
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disturbing the comfortable
So there's a comment on yesterday's entry from someone who's named "Anonymous," that maybe I'd be happier up in Canada. Years ago I remember John Birch/redneck/KKK types telling me I should move to Russia because it would be more to my liking. No more USSR, so now the evil place is Canada. Canada? Give me a break!
The right-wingnuts aren't too hip about politics, nope. Maybe about brands of beer or bible verses or what Rush said last night, but they don't know s--t about political systems. If someone criticizes the US then that person is disloyal—subversive, say, in the good ol' Tailgunner Joe McCarthy sense of the word. These days, according to some wingnut spokespeople, that means "lynchable." Because they know that anyone who says anything other than what Bill-O or Rush or Ann says is...er, "a commie." My grandfather used to curse out "Dirty atheistic red commie bastards both black and white and the white are worse than the black because they choose to be with the blacks." Honest, that's how he put it. That really isn't too different, though, than the language we can hear on talk radio or Fox News. "Secularists" has replace "atheists," and "red commies" has been replaced by "socialists," but it's the same ol' same ol'.
The sociologists say the neander-mentalists crop up when society is in change, and modernity is powerful. That's like the "debate" over evolution, or the fear of sexuality in teenagers, or Support Our Troops (let them be in hopeless war scenes, but support them by keeping them under fire).
Forty or fifty years ago, there were plenty of places where we could suggest the wingnuts go hang out: Paraguay, Argentina, South Africa, Rhodesia, Nicaragua, the P.I., Spain, Portugal—you know, our allies. They were dictatorships, sure, but they were on our side. Birds of a feather, maybe? I don't know what countries to suggest to the neo-paranoid-conservatives anymore. Israel, I guess, but even though it supports ethnic cleansing and a permanent state of siege, it has some domestic policies more liberal than here. Hmm. I guess for starters they could pull their own heads out of their asses, and then check out a good world almanac...
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16:15
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disturbing the comfortable
I'll tell you: I can't do the political side of blogging the way I did. It was making me absolutely crazy. Depressed, paranoid, awful. I'll say that again: AWFUL.
The world is all messed up. So is our country. We're in a war we can't...we're in a war that shouldn't have happened. We invaded Iraq on false pretenses, simply. It was as fraudulent as Germany's attack on Poland, as the Spanish-American War, as the invasion(s) of Mexico. Invading Iraq was not the first time the United States moved in on a sovereign country—Jesus, just look at the "Indian Wars." We've done it many times. Most big nations have, but that doesn't make it OK. Nor does the halo America tries to wear around the world. Anyhow—
—it's all whacked. The problem is maintaining enough sanity to help change things. I'm not really certain things can be changed, but we have to try. People are hungry, sick, wounded, freaked-out. Not just in war zones: right here in what Bill Clinton once asked "Is this a great nation or what?" It's an "or what," Bill.
I'm not sure where the moral superiority went, assuming we actually had any. The Jews fleeing the Nazis didn't find very large welcome mats at American docks. We held Africans in slavery for generations, claiming they were sub-human, or at least retarded. We committed what was, effectively, genocide against American Indians. How many civilians died in Viet Nam? We don't even have solid data—at least for domestic consumption—on the number of Iraqi civilians who have died since the invasion and occupation.
What I do worry about is karma. I believe there's a national karma, retribution. The problem with karma on a national level is that it's an equal opportunity s--t-storm. There were good-intentioned people in Nazi Germany. They were steam-rollered by the closing weeks of World War II. There were good white people in South Africa, back in the bad old days. Their fates are still uncertain. England is getting a major pay-back from it's colonial policies. Americans are simply out-numbered in the world. These days the country isn't looked upon favorably by millions in Africa, Asia, Latin America. We've taken and taken everything we could grab. America is going to have to pay for that behavior. All of us, I'm afraid.
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18:06
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disturbing the comfortable
Finally. A little truth about biological reality instead of more crap about idealized religious beliefs.
I’m not much of a biologist or zoologist, but I do spend a lot of time watching nature. Monogamy, for the most part, seems to be a bizarre human aberration in the great scheme of things.
I appreciated the reference to the royal swans of England...
Want a man, or a worm?
Among mammals, expecting monogamy tends to run against the grain of nature.
By David P. Barash
[www.latimes.com] March 12, 2008
As an evolutionary biologist, I look at New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's now-public sexual indiscretions and feel justified in saying, "I told you so."
One of the most startling discoveries of the last 15 years has been the extent of sexual infidelity (scientists call it "extra-pair copulations" or EPCs) among animals long thought to be monogamous. It's clear that social monogamy -- physical association and child rearing between a male and a female -- and sexual monogamy are very different things. The former is common; the latter is rare.
At one point in the movie "Heartburn," Nora Ephron's barely fictionalized account of her marriage to reporter Carl Bernstein, the heroine tearfully tells her father about her husband's infidelities, only to be advised, "You want monogamy? Marry a swan." Yet thanks to DNA evidence, we know now that even those famously loyal swans aren't sexually monogamous.
One species that is, and, significantly, perhaps the only one that could be reliably designated as such, is Diplozöon paradoxum, a parasitic worm that inhabits the intestines of fish. Among these animals, male and female pair up while adolescents; their bodies literally fuse together, whereupon they remain sexually faithful until death does not them part.
One of the most important insights of modern evolutionary biology has been an enhanced understanding of male-female differences, deriving especially from the production of sperm versus eggs. Because sperm are produced in vast numbers, with little if any required parental follow-through, males of most species are aggressive sexual adventurers, inclined to engage in sex with multiple partners when they can. Males who succeed in doing so leave more descendants.
A story is told in New Zealand about the early 19th century visit of an Episcopal bishop to an isolated Maori village. As everyone was about to retire after an evening of high-spirited feasting and dancing, the village headman -- wanting to show sincere hospitality to his honored guest -- called out, "A woman for the bishop." Seeing a scowl of disapproval on the prelate's face, the host roared even louder, "Two women for the bishop!"
On balance, the Maori headman had an acute understanding of men. He also reflected a powerful cross-cultural universal: Around the world, high-ranking men have long enjoyed sexual access to comparatively large numbers of women, typically young and attractive. Moreover, women have by and large found such men appealing beyond what may be predicted from their immediate physical traits. "Power," wrote Henry Kissinger, "is the ultimate aphrodisiac."
Power-as-pheromone is pretty much the default among mammals. Elk, elephant seal, baboon or chimpanzee, in a wide array of species, females eagerly mate with dominant males while disdaining subordinates. And they do so, more or less, in harems.
Not surprisingly, before the homogenization of cultures that resulted from Western colonialism, more than 85% of human societies unabashedly favored polygamy. In such societies, men who accumulate power, wealth and status gain additional wives and consorts. In avowedly monogamous cultures, successful males accumulate a wife and often additional girlfriends. Even if, thanks to birth control technology, they do not actually reproduce as a result (and thus enhance their evolutionary "fitness"), they are responding to the biological pressures that whisper within men.
Part of being successful, moreover, is a tendency to feel entitled and often to be uninhibited -- in part because one outcome of our species-wide polygamous history is that successful men have been those who took risks, which paid off. The losers were mostly found among the unsuccessful bachelors who, by definition, did not contribute very much to succeeding generations of men, or to their inclinations.
All of which contributes to the apparent sex appeal of such less-than-stunning physical specimens as Kissinger, Woody Allen and Bill Clinton, not to mention the persistence of sex scandals among the popular and powerful across the political and ideological spectrum, including Thomas Jefferson, JFK, Hugh Grant, Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig and a long list, receding almost to the infinite past as well as likely into the indefinite future. For men at the top -- rock stars, successful athletes, politicians, wealthy CEOs, the jet-set glitterati -- such opportunities are exceedingly numerous, not so much because they have insatiable sex drives but because they are dominant males in a biologically randy species.
Some readers may bridle at this characterization of Homo sapiens as EPC-inclined, but the evidence is overwhelming. That doesn't justify adultery, by either sex, especially because human beings -- even those burdened by a Y chromosome and suffering from testosterone poisoning -- are presumed capable of exercising control over their impulses. Especially if, via wedding vows, they have promised to do so. After all, "doing what comes naturally" is what nonhuman animals do. People, most of us like to think, have the unique capacity to act contrary to their biologically given inclinations. Maybe, in fact, it is what makes us human.
But even a smidgen of evolutionary insight suggests that maleness plus money plus political power isn't likely to add up to the kind of sexual restraint that the public expects. A concluding word, therefore, to the outraged voters of New York state: You want monogamy? Elect a swan. Or better yet, a Diplozöon paradoxum.
David P. Barash, an evolutionary biologist, is professor of psychology at the University of Washington.
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21:22
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disturbing the comfortable
No, I haven't much, lately. It's f--king overwhelming: Afghanistan, Iraq, Florida, Texas, D.C., and parts best left alone. It isn't just the geography or the geo-politics, either. I seriously doubt there's much hope. Even the people are nuttier than usual.
However, we can always count on that s--thead in the White House to liven things up, can't we?
Bush says if younger, he would work in Afghanistan Fri Mar 14, 2008 3:02am IST
[in.reuters.com] By Tabassum Zakaria
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush got an earful on Thursday about problems and progress in Afghanistan where a war has dragged on for more than six years but been largely eclipsed by Iraq.
In a videoconference, Bush heard from U.S. military and civilian personnel about the challenges ranging from fighting local government and police corruption to persuading farmers to abandon a lucrative poppy drug trade for other crops.
Bush heard tales of all-night tea drinking sessions to coax local residents into cooperating, and of tribesmen crossing mountains to attend government meetings seen as building blocks for the country's democracy-in-the-making.
"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines..."
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15:29
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disturbing the comfortable
Off the AP: after seven years, we ain’t exactly winning in Afghanistan. Only about thirteen years to go and we’ll be in that country as long as the Russians were. We aren’t losing the number of helicopters and tanks they did, and our troops are getting horribly mutilated when captured, but...
What the hell ARE we doing there? It’s pretty obvious we’re about as welcome there as bacon sandwiches are. Opium production is more than ever, the country has even become a major exporter of marijuana, and dog-fights are still a popular past-time. So, apparently is child rape.
Karzai only controls 1/3 of Afghanistan
President Hamid Karzai Controls Just 30 Percent of Afghanistan, Top U.S. Official Says
PAMELA HESS
AP News
Feb 27, 2008 21:29 EST
More than six years after the U.S. invaded to establish a stable central regime in Afghanistan, the Kabul government under President Hamid Karzai controls just 30 percent of the country, the top U.S. intelligence official said Wednesday.
National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the resurgent Taliban controls 10 percent to 11 percent of the country and Karzai's government controls 30 percent to 31 percent. The majority of Afghanistan's population and territory remains under local tribal control, he said.
Underscoring the problems facing the Kabul government, a roadside bomb in Paktika province killed two Polish soldiers who are part of the NATO force in the country and opium worth $400 million was seized in the southern part of Afghanistan. That brought the number of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan to 21 this year, according to an Associated Press tally.
In 2007, insurgency-related violence killed more than 6,500 people, including 222 foreign troops. Last year was the deadliest yet since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
Officials estimate that up to 40 percent of proceeds from Afghanistan's drug trade — an amount worth tens of millions of dollars — is used to fund the insurgency.
Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, the Defense Intelligence Agency director, told the committee at the same hearing that the Pakistan government is trying to crack down on the lawless tribal area along the Afghan border area where Taliban and al-Qaida are believed to be training, and from which they launch attacks in Afghanistan. But neither the Pakistani military nor the tribal Frontier Corps is trained or equipped to fight, he said.
Maples said it would take three to five years to address those deficiencies and see a difference in their ability to fight effectively in the tribal areas.
"Pakistani military operations in the (region) have not fundamentally damaged al-Qaida's position. ... The tribal areas remain largely ungovernable and, as such, they will continue to provide vital sanctuary to al-Qaida, the Taliban and regional extremism more broadly," Maples said.
Under questioning from committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., Maples also said he considers the harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding to be inhumane. That would put it outside the bounds of U.S. law, which since late 2005 has prohibited cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees.
The Bush administration has refused to rule on whether waterboarding is torture. Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world.
Waterboarding remains among the interrogation methods potentially available to the CIA but its use must be approved on a case-by-case basis by the attorney general and the president.
The U.S. military specifically prohibited waterboarding in 2006. Maples said the 19 other interrogation techniques allowed under military rules are effective.
"We have recently confirmed that with those who are using those tools on operations," Maples said.
Earlier this month, Congress approved a bill that would limit the CIA to the military's interrogation techniques. The White House has threatened to veto that measure.
CIA Director Michael Hayden said in a statement to the Associated Press on Wednesday that other lawful, Geneva Convention-compliant interrogation techniques not in the Army Field Manual would also be outlawed.
"There will be no conditions of threat or danger that would cause us to make an exception. This is an important national decision and it will have a direct impact on our ability to gather intelligence and to detect and prevent future attacks."
Hayden told the House Intelligence Committee on Feb. 7 that he prohibited CIA operatives from using waterboarding in 2006 in the wake of a Supreme Court decision and new laws on the treatment of U.S. detainees. He said the agency has not used waterboarding for five years.
President Bush could authorize waterboarding for future terrorism suspects in certain situations, including "belief that an attack might be imminent," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Feb. 6. The president would consult with the attorney general and intelligence officials before authorizing its use, Fratto said.
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Source: AP News
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15:19
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disturbing the comfortable
The times have changed, all right.
America now has more people in prison, per capita, than any other country in the world. More than Russia, more than China, more than any ex-Soviet country. We’re the country that knows how. To lock people up, at least.
We don’t seem to have the longest life-expectancy anymore, however, nor the lowest infant-mortality rate. I saw a study the other day that said, technically, we’re no longer the richest political union—the European Union has a higher Gross National Product than the U.S..
To be fair, we spend way more than any other nation on military stuff and on health care.
Does anyone care anymore?
Report: 1 in every 100 Americans behind bars
02/28/2008 @ 12:35 pm
Filed by Associated Press
[rawstory.com] Report: 1 in every 100 Americans behind bars Total is far more than any other country in the world
By DAVID CRARY Associated Press
NEW YORK — For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report tracking the surge in inmate population and urging states to rein in corrections costs with alternative sentencing programs.
The report, released today by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.
Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 — one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world.
The steadily growing inmate population "is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime," said the report.
Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States, said budget woes are prompting officials in many states to consider new, cost-saving corrections policies that might have been shunned in the recent past for fear of appearing soft on crime.
"We're seeing more and more states being creative because of tight budgets," she said in an interview. "They want to be tough on crime, they want to be a law-and-order state — but they also want to save money, and they want to be effective."
The report cited Kansas and Texas as states which have acted decisively to slow the growth of their inmate population. Their actions include greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for ex-offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules.
"The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens," the report said.
While many state governments have shown bipartisan interest in curbing prison growth, there also are persistent calls to proceed cautiously.
"We need to be smarter," said David Muhlhausen, a criminal justice expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation. "We're not incarcerating all the people who commit serious crimes — but we're also probably incarcerating people who don't need to be."
According to the report, the inmate population increased last year in 36 states and the federal prison system.
The largest percentage increase — 12 percent — was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state's crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state's inmate population has increased by 600 percent.
The Pew report was compiled by the Center on the State's Public Safety Performance Project, which is working directly with 13 states on developing programs to divert offenders from prison without jeopardizing public safety.
"For all the money spent on corrections today, there hasn't been a clear and convincing return for public safety," said the project's director, Adam Gelb. "More and more states are beginning to rethink their reliance on prisons for lower-level offenders and finding strategies that are tough on crime without being so tough on taxpayers."
The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime or in the nation's overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as "three-strikes" laws, that result in longer prison stays.
"For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling," the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine."
The nationwide figures, as of Jan. 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails — a total 2,319,258 out of almost 230 million American adults.
The report said the United States is the world's incarceration leader, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.
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12:01
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disturbing the comfortable
One of the ongoing sources of wonder, to me, is the number of Republicans who take falls over sexual behavior. I almost said “misbehavior,” but it isn’t, really. If people do it, without any coaching or coercion, chances are a behavior is normal. The problem seems to be that for the last decade or so, the Republicans have boxed in the definition of “normal” sexual behavior so that almost anything beyond the missionary position, between a man and a woman who are married to each other, when they’re only trying to make children is considered abnormal—if not criminal.
So, being essentially normal human beings, the Republicans get caught when their hypocrisy is revealed. Serves them right, yeah.
AlterNet
Scandal-Ridden, Homophobic DA in Lawrence v. Texas Case Forced to Resign
By Pam Spaulding, Pam's House Blend
Posted on February 27, 2008, Printed on February 27, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.pamshouseblend.com//77963/
"I think that this Court having determined that there are certain kinds of conduct that it will accept and certain kinds of conduct it will not accept may draw the line at the bedroom door of the heterosexual married couple because of the interest that this Court has that this Nation has and certainly that the State of Texas has for the preservation of marriage, families and the procreation of children. "Even if you infer that various States acting through their legislative process have repealed sodomy laws, there is no protected right to engage in extrasexual - extramarital sexual relations, again, that can trace their roots to history or the traditions of this nation."
-- Houston District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, in arguments to the Supreme Court in 2002's 'Lawrence v. Texas' case.
Oopsie. Chuck unfortunately got into a bit of a hypocritical mess after the discovery of sexually explicit videos on his office computer, along with racist jokes and sexy emails to his executive secretary. (Newsweek):
Last December, as part of a federal civil rights lawsuit into how justice is meted out in the county, he turned over the (partial) contents of his government e-mail account. And what a batch of e-mails it was. Black ministers called for the Republican to resign because of racist material, including a cartoon depicting an African-American suffering from a "fatal overdose" of watermelon and fried chicken. There were adult video clips and love notes from Rosenthal to his secretary, his mistress during a previous marriage. "I love you so much," Rosenthal says in one. "I want to kiss you behind your right ear," he says in another. "Go spend time with your family," she admonishes him back.
Now listen up you Republican Sexual Hypocrites out there -- when you get busted doing hanky panky on the office PC, you can't delete the contents -- they are subject to e-discovery. Hand Rosenthal the Royal Duncecap, since he thought his massive e-deletions were not going to be detected, then he lied about it. So he's out of a job AND faces going the clink. So sorry...
In the wake of the e-mail revelations, local GOP leaders forced him to abort his re-election bid. Then, on Feb. 15, after Lloyd Kelley, the attorney in the civil rights case, brought a lawsuit accusing him of drinking on the job and "incompetence, or official misconduct," Rosenthal resigned. But his problems may not be over. As eye-opening as his e-mails were, it's the ones that disappeared that might cause him more trouble yet. Rosenthal deleted thousands of e-mails (even going so far as to delete them from the trash folder) that investigators in the civil rights case wanted; his actions could lead to obstruction of justice charges (the messages were destroyed after he had received a subpoena for them, he admitted in court). And during a contempt of court hearing earlier this month, Rosenthal appeared to contradict his sworn statements about the e-mails, leaving him open to perjury charges. The hearing was abruptly adjourned at the request of his lawyer and is scheduled to resume March 14. If found in contempt, the former top prosecutor could wind up in jail.
How do you think Rosenthal explained his behavior? It sounds all too familiar...
In an earlier statement to the press about the content of the e-mails, Rosenthal said, "I deeply regret having said those things ... This event has served as a wake-up call to me to get my house in order both literally and figuratively." On Feb. 15, in response to the new lawsuit, he blamed a combination of prescription drugs for causing "some impairment" of his judgment.
Hat tip, Dan
Pam Spaulding blogs at Pam's House Blend.
© 2008 Pam's House Blend All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
[www.alternet.org]
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16:56
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disturbing the comfortable
Decades ago, Barry Goldwater’s prime speechwriter, a guy named Hess, predicted the reason capitalism would outlast and overpower communism was because capitalism was utterly without principles—it’s totally amoral.
Communism and socialism, of course, have strong principles, and while Soviet Communism was also quite amoral, it kept trying to shoehorn itself into a Marxist belief system. This of course made it go crazy and collapse. Capitalism is still around. Sigh. So, here’s the latest example:
Do You Want Fries With That Zen? California McDonald's Aims to Boost Sales With Feng Shui
[www.rawstory.com] DAISY NGUYEN
AP News
Feb 24, 2008 14:16 EST
The only familiar signs at the McDonald's in this large Asian community are the golden arches, the drive-through and the menu. Gone are the plastic furniture, Ronald McDonald and the red and yellow palette that has defined the world's largest hamburger chain. Leather seats, earth tones, bamboo plants and water trickling down glass panels have taken their place.
The makeover elements are meant to help diners achieve happiness and fortune — whether they realize it or not.
That's because the restaurant was redesigned using the principles of feng shui, the ancient Chinese practice of arranging objects and numbers to promote health, harmony and prosperity.
The concept is an unlikely fit with fast food. But the restaurant's owners say the designs are aimed at creating a soothing setting that will encourage diners to linger over their burgers and fries, and come back again.
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20:01
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disturbing the comfortable
Here. How this country is supposed to be run is, of course, always at a distance from how it actually is. Ask any non-white person if you don't believe that.
This op-ed piece outlines the true state of things in this nation.
There are powers in force, held by the federal government, to lock up anyone they want. And to deny those locked up any sort of legal protection. This is a real problem and it’s as immediate as a coiled rattlesnake.
SFGate
Rule by fear or rule by law?
Lewis Seiler,Dan Hamburg
Monday, February 4, 2008
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
- Winston Churchill, Nov. 21, 1943
Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and noncitizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of "an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs."
Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.
According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists."
Fraud-busters such as Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, have complained about these contracts, saying that more taxpayer dollars should not go to taxpayer-gouging Halliburton. But the real question is: What kind of "new programs" require the construction and refurbishment of detention facilities in nearly every state of the union with the capacity to house perhaps millions of people?
Sect. 1042 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," gives the executive the power to invoke martial law. For the first time in more than a century, the president is now authorized to use the military in response to "a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or any other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order."
The Military Commissions Act of 2006, rammed through Congress just before the 2006 midterm elections, allows for the indefinite imprisonment of anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on a list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies. The law calls for secret trials for citizens and noncitizens alike.
Also in 2007, the White House quietly issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51), to ensure "continuity of government" in the event of what the document vaguely calls a "catastrophic emergency." Should the president determine that such an emergency has occurred, he and he alone is empowered to do whatever he deems necessary to ensure "continuity of government." This could include everything from canceling elections to suspending the Constitution to launching a nuclear attack. Congress has yet to hold a single hearing on NSPD-51.
U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Venice (Los Angeles County) has come up with a new way to expand the domestic "war on terror." Her Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (HR1955), which passed the House by the lopsided vote of 404-6, would set up a commission to "examine and report upon the facts and causes" of so-called violent radicalism and extremist ideology, then make legislative recommendations on combatting it.
According to commentary in the Baltimore Sun, Rep. Harman and her colleagues from both sides of the aisle believe the country faces a native brand of terrorism, and needs a commission with sweeping investigative power to combat it.
A clue as to where Harman's commission might be aiming is the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law that labels those who "engage in sit-ins, civil disobedience, trespass, or any other crime in the name of animal rights" as terrorists. Other groups in the crosshairs could be anti-abortion protesters, anti-tax agitators, immigration activists, environmentalists, peace demonstrators, Second Amendment rights supporters ... the list goes on and on. According to author Naomi Wolf, the National Counterterrorism Center holds the names of roughly 775,000 "terror suspects" with the number increasing by 20,000 per month.
What could the government be contemplating that leads it to make contingency plans to detain without recourse millions of its own citizens?
The Constitution does not allow the executive to have unchecked power under any circumstances. The people must not allow the president to use the war on terrorism to rule by fear instead of by law.
Lewis Seiler is the president of Voice of the Environment, Inc. Dan Hamburg, a former congressman, is executive director.
[sfgate.com] This article appeared on page B - 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2008 Hearst Communications Inc. | Privacy Policy | Feedback | RSS Feeds | FAQ | Site Index | Contact
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19:56
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disturbing the comfortable
Sometimes, things are so damn’ heartwarming I just have to sit on them for a little while before I post about them.
Chicago: the more it changes the more it remains the same.
Voters are told pen had 'invisible ink'
BLANK BALLOTS | Staffers try to reach 20 who thought they'd voted
[www.suntimes.com] February 6, 2008
BY ANNIE SWEENEY Staff Reporter/asweeney@suntimes.com
When it comes to election shenanigans, Chicago has been accused of just about everything.
But invisible ink?
Twenty voters at a Far North Side precinct who found their ink pens not working were told by election judges not to worry.
It's invisible ink, officials said. The scanner will count it.
But their votes weren't recorded after all.
"Part of me was thinking it does sound stupid enough to be true,'' said Amy Carlton, who had serious doubts but went ahead and voted anyway.
As it turns out, Carlton was one of 20 voters at the precinct who were given the wrong pen to use. They were also then told, apparently by a misinformed judge, that the pens have invisible ink, elections officials said.
As a result, the votes were not counted. But officials insisted there were no dirty tricks involved.
"This one defies logic,'' said Jim Allen, a spokesman for the Chicago Board of Elections. "You try to anticipate everything. But certain things just ... they go beyond any kind of planning you can perform.''
By late afternoon, five voters had been contacted and told to come back to the polling place to vote again. And elections staff had left messages at the homes of the rest, Allen said.
Carlton and Angela Burkhardt, another voter who was told the same invisible ink story, spent a good part of the day calling and e-mailing the Board of Elections to get answers.
"I am furious and devastated and I just feel stupid,'' Carlton said. "I feel so angry.''
Both women agreed that this election meant a lot. They had spent a good deal of time researching candidates.
"I have been voting since I was 18,'' said Carlton, 38. "This is the most important election of my life so far.''
Burkhardt planned to go back to vote late Tuesday. She worried about those who might not be able to return.
"I worry about the other people who were there,'' she said. "Maybe [they] can't get off work. I am a person of privilege. I can go back. What if you couldn't?"
© Copyright 2008 Digital Chicago, Inc.
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19:53
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disturbing the comfortable
The writer’s strike is over. But Nader is in re-runs. He’s older than John McCain, for god’s sake! I voted for him as opposed to Bush, back when Dumbya first went for power. Now...no. I’d rather vote for a vegan than anyone who...oh, is he a vegan? I’ll vote for somebody else before I’ll vote for Nader. But I’m glad the idealists/purists have somewhere to go.
Nader Announces Third-Party Run for President
The Associated Press
[www.truthout.org] Sunday 24 February 2008
Washington - Ralph Nader said Sunday he will run for president as a third-party candidate, criticizing the top White House contenders as too close to big business and pledging to repeat a bid that will "shift the power from the few to the many."
Nader, 73, said most people are disenchanted with the Democratic and Republican parties due to a prolonged Iraq war and a shaky economy. The consumer advocate also blamed tax and other corporate-friendly policies under the Bush administration that he said have left many lower- and middle-class people in debt.
"You take that framework of people feeling locked out, shut out, marginalized and disrespected," he said. "You go from Iraq, to Palestine to Israel, from Enron to Wall Street, from Katrina to the bumbling of the Bush administration, to the complicity of the Democrats in not stopping him on the war, stopping him on the tax cuts."
"In that context, I have decided to run for president," Nader told NBC's "Meet the Press."
Nader also criticized Republican candidate John McCain and Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton for failing to support full Medicare for all or cracking down on Pentagon waste and a "bloated military budget. He blamed that on corporate lobbyists and special interests, which he said dominate Washington, D.C., and pledged in his third-party campaign to accept donations only from individuals.
"The issue is do they have the moral courage, do they have the fortitude to stand up to corporate powers and get things done for the American people," Nader said. "We have to shift the power from the few to the many."
Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, speaking shortly before Nader's announcement, said Nader's past runs have shown that he usually pulls votes from the Democratic nominee. "So naturally, Republicans would welcome his entry into the race," the former Arkansas governor said on CNN.
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13:53
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disturbing the comfortable
The rule of law? Justice? Stalin is laughing in his grave.
latimes.com
[www.latimes.com] From the Los Angeles Times
AWOL military justice
Why the former chief prosecutor for the Office of Military Commissions resigned his post.
By Morris D. Davis
December 10, 2007
Iwas the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until Oct. 4, the day I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system. I resigned on that day because I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively or responsibly.
In my view -- and I think most lawyers would agree -- it is absolutely critical to the legitimacy of the military commissions that they be conducted in an atmosphere of honesty and impartiality. Yet the political appointee known as the "convening authority" -- a title with no counterpart in civilian courts -- was not living up to that obligation.
In a nutshell, the convening authority is supposed to be objective -- not predisposed for the prosecution or defense -- and gets to make important decisions at various stages in the process. The convening authority decides which charges filed by the prosecution go to trial and which are dismissed, chooses who serves on the jury, decides whether to approve requests for experts and reassesses findings of guilt and sentences, among other things.
Earlier this year, Susan Crawford was appointed by the secretary of Defense to replace Maj. Gen. John Altenburg as the convening authority. Altenburg's staff had kept its distance from the prosecution to preserve its impartiality. Crawford, on the other hand, had her staff assessing evidence before the filing of charges, directing the prosecution's pretrial preparation of cases (which began while I was on medical leave), drafting charges against those who were accused and assigning prosecutors to cases, among other things.
How can you direct someone to do something -- use specific evidence to bring specific charges against a specific person at a specific time, for instance -- and later make an impartial assessment of whether they behaved properly? Intermingling convening authority and prosecutor roles perpetuates the perception of a rigged process stacked against the accused.
The second reason I resigned is that I believe even the most perfect trial in history will be viewed with skepticism if it is conducted behind closed doors. Telling the world, "Trust me, you would have been impressed if only you could have seen what we did in the courtroom" will not bolster our standing as defenders of justice. Getting evidence through the classification review process to allow its use in open hearings is time-consuming, but it is time well spent.
Crawford, however, thought it unnecessary to wait because the rules permit closed proceedings. There is no doubt that some portions of some trials have to be closed to protect classified information, but that should be the last option after exhausting all reasonable alternatives. Transparency is critical.
Finally, I resigned because of two memos signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England that placed the chief prosecutor -- that was me -- in a chain of command under Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes. Haynes was a controversial nominee for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, but his nomination died in January 2007, in part because of his role in authorizing the use of the aggressive interrogation techniques some call torture.
I had instructed the prosecutors in September 2005 that we would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the administration has sanctioned. Haynes and I have different perspectives and support different agendas, and the decision to give him command over the chief prosecutor's office, in my view, cast a shadow over the integrity of military commissions. I resigned a few hours after I was informed of Haynes' place in my chain of command.
The Military Commissions Act provides a foundation for fair trials, but some changes are clearly necessary. I was confident in full, fair and open trials when Gen. Altenburg was the convening authority and Brig. Gen. Tom Hemingway was his legal advisor. Collectively, they spent nearly 65 years in active duty, and they were committed to ensuring the integrity of military law. They acted on principle rather than politics.
The first step, if these truly are military commissions and not merely a political smoke screen, is to take control out of the hands of political appointees like Haynes and Crawford and give it back to the military.
The president first authorized military commissions in November 2001, more than six years ago, and the lack of progress is obvious. Only one war-crime case has been completed. It is time for the political appointees who created this quagmire to let go.
Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have said that how we treat the enemy says more about us than it does about him. If we want these military commissions to say anything good about us, it's time to take the politics out of military commissions, give the military control over the process and make the proceedings open and transparent.
Morris D. Davis is the former chief prosecutor for the Office of Military Commissions. The opinions expressed are his own and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the Department of the Air Force.
Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times |
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12:34
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disturbing the comfortable
Around here, Bend, golf is a sort of community obsession. With less than 100,000 people, Bend has over a dozen golf courses in the city limits. In the county there are, probably, another dozen more. Even the younger people play golf—at least the younger ones who aren’t so wealthy they still have to hold jobs. Even so, many of them play because of the “networking.”
There are many subdivisions like Broken Top, Sun River, Cross Waters, Widgi Creek, and who knows how many others with their own golf courses. People actually buy into them so they live next to a fairway. And watch golf balls shatter their windows, yes. A lot of the dwellings are only lived in part of the year, of course. In winter, with a foot or so of snow on the ground, the courses are deserted. The owners often rent out their homes through various agencies.
A golf course can absorb a million gallons off water on a hot day. In desert country, that seems extravagant. This is desert country.
But maybe the fad is passing. We can only hope.
The New York Times
February 21, 2008
More Americans Are Giving Up Golf
By PAUL VITELLO
[www.nytimes.com] HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. — The men gathered in a new golf clubhouse here a couple of weeks ago circled the problem from every angle, like caddies lining up a shot out of the rough.
“We have to change our mentality,” said Richard Rocchio, a public relations consultant.
“The problem is time,” offered Walter Hurney, a real estate developer. “There just isn’t enough time. Men won’t spend a whole day away from their family anymore.”
William A. Gatz, owner of the Long Island National Golf Club in Riverhead, said the problem was fundamental economics: too much supply, not enough demand.
The problem was not a game of golf. It was the game of golf itself.
Over the past decade, the leisure activity most closely associated with corporate success in America has been in a kind of recession.
The total number of people who play has declined or remained flat each year since 2000, dropping to about 26 million from 30 million, according to the National Golf Foundation and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association.
More troubling to golf boosters, the number of people who play 25 times a year or more fell to 4.6 million in 2005 from 6.9 million in 2000, a loss of about a third.
The industry now counts its core players as those who golf eight or more times a year. That number, too, has fallen, but more slowly: to 15 million in 2006 from 17.7 million in 2000, according to the National Golf Foundation.
The five men who met here at the Wind Watch Golf Club a couple of weeks ago, golf aficionados all, wondered out loud about the reasons. Was it the economy? Changing family dynamics? A glut of golf courses? A surfeit of etiquette rules — like not letting people use their cellphones for the four hours it typically takes to play a round of 18 holes?
Or was it just the four hours?
Here on Long Island, where there are more than 100 private courses, golf course owners have tried various strategies: coupons and trial memberships, aggressive marketing for corporate and charity tournaments, and even some forays into the wedding business.
Over coffee with a representative of the National Golf Course Owners Association, the owners of four golf courses discussed forming an owners’ cooperative to market golf on Long Island and, perhaps, to purchase staples like golf carts and fertilizer more cheaply.
They strategized about marketing to women, who make up about 25 percent of golfers nationally; recruiting young players with a high school tournament; attracting families with special rates; realigning courses to 6-hole rounds, instead of 9 or 18; and seeking tax breaks, on the premise that golf courses, even private ones, provide publicly beneficial open space.
“When the ship is sinking, it’s time to get creative,” said Mr. Hurney, a principal owner of the Great Rock Golf Club in Wading River, which last summer erected a 4,000-square-foot tent for social events, including weddings, christenings and communions.
The disappearance of golfers over the past several years is part of a broader decline in outdoor activities — including tennis, swimming, hiking, biking and downhill skiing — according to a number of academic and recreation industry studies.
A 2006 study by the United States Tennis Association, which has battled the trend somewhat successfully with a forceful campaign to recruit young players, found that punishing hurricane seasons factored into the decline of play in the South, while the soaring popularity of electronic games and newer sports like skateboarding was diminishing the number of new tennis players everywhere.
Rodney B. Warnick, a professor of recreation studies and tourism at the University of Massachusetts, said that the aging population of the United States was probably a part of the problem, too, and that “there is a younger generation that is just not as active.”
But golf, a sport of long-term investors — both those who buy the expensive equipment and those who build the princely estates on which it is played — has always seemed to exist in a world above the fray of shifting demographics. Not anymore.
Jim Kass, the research director of the National Golf Foundation, an industry group, said the gradual but prolonged slump in golf has defied the adage, “Once a golfer, always a golfer.” About three million golfers quit playing each year, and slightly fewer than that have been picking it up. A two-year campaign by the foundation to bring new players into the game, he said, “hasn’t shown much in the way of results.”
“The man in the street will tell you that golf is booming because he sees Tiger Woods on TV,” Mr. Kass said. “But we track the reality. The reality is, while we haven’t exactly tanked, the numbers have been disappointing for some time.”
Surveys sponsored by the foundation have asked players what keeps them away. “The answer is usually economic,” Mr. Kass said. “No time. Two jobs. Real wages not going up. Pensions going away. Corporate cutbacks in country club memberships — all that doom and gloom stuff.”
In many parts of the country, high expectations for a golf bonanza paralleling baby boomer retirements led to what is now considered a vast overbuilding of golf courses.
Between 1990 and 2003, developers built more than 3,000 new golf courses in the United States, bringing the total to about 16,000. Several hundred have closed in the last few years, most of them in Arizona, Florida, Michigan and South Carolina, according to the foundation.
(Scores more courses are listed for sale on the Web site of the National Golf Course Owners Association, which lists, for example, a North Carolina property described as “two 18-hole championship courses, great mountain locations, profitable, $1.5 million revenues, Bermuda fairways, bent grass, nice clubhouses, one at $5.5 million, other at $2.5 million — possible some owner financing.”)
At the meeting here, there was a consensus that changing family dynamics have had a profound effect on the sport.
“Years ago, men thought nothing of spending the whole day playing golf — maybe Saturday and Sunday both,” said Mr. Rocchio, the public relations consultant, who is also the New York regional director of the National Golf Course Owners Association. “Today, he is driving his kids to their soccer games. Maybe he’s playing a round early in the morning. But he has to get back home in time for lunch.”
Mr. Hurney, the real estate developer, chimed in, “Which is why if we don’t repackage our facilities to a more family orientation, we’re dead.”
To help keep the Great Rock Golf Club afloat, owners erected their large climate-controlled tent near the 18th green last summer. It sat next to the restaurant, Blackwell’s, already operating there. By most accounts, it has been a boon to the club — though perhaps not a hole in one.
Residents of the surrounding neighborhood have complained about party noise, and last year more than 40 signed a petition asking the town of Riverhead to intervene. Town officials are reviewing whether the tent meets local zoning regulations, but have not issued any noise summonses. Mr. Hurney told them he had purchased a decibel meter and would try to hire quieter entertainment.
One neighbor, Dominique Mendez, whose home is about 600 feet from the 18th hole, said, “We bought our house here because we wanted to live in a quiet place, and we thought a golf course would be nice to see from the window. Instead, people have to turn up their air conditioners or wear earplugs at night because of the music thumping.”
During weddings, she said: “you can hear the D.J., ‘We’re gonna do the garter!’ It’s a little much.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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12:21
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disturbing the comfortable
As a person with a chronic “illness”—although it’s a genetic mutation—I’ve always been involved with the relationship between this condition and the outside world. I mean, how much do people need to know about me? If I had an office job, I figured it was nobody’s business; in fact, as long as I could do what was in front of me, it wasn’t anybody’s business but mine. The same with being a recovering alcoholic and drug user—when I do cop to that, it’s after some consideration. Usually, I don’t.
Like when I broke my leg a year or so ago, I didn’t say anything about my time in 12-step programs. I had no intention of going through a lot of pain because some concerned doctor might worry about a relapse on my part. Gimme those pills! And, no, I didn’t relapse.
I know several people who have bi-polar disorders. One of them never mentions it and another one always does. It’s up to them, but I figure very little needs to be said about it, up front. Big f--king deal: everybody’s got something or other wrong with them. The probably isn’t our diagnoses, but what we do about them. I’m a lot more than what is “wrong” with me. In fact, there really isn’t anything “wrong” with me at all. I’m more than the sum of my parts... And, even so, sometimes there isn't anything wrong with "keeping secrets."
The New York Times
[www.nytimes.com] February 21, 2008
Life’s Work
I’m Ill, but Who Really Needs to Know?
By LISA BELKIN
ONE of the first decisions you make in the emotional hours after a scary diagnosis is whether to tell others. Most of us share the news with our loved ones, but what of the circles beyond, particularly those at work? Your boss?
At first, Richard M. Cohen, whose multiple sclerosis was diagnosed at 25, did not tell. Mr. Cohen — whose latest book, “Strong at the Broken Places,” recounts the stories of five patients with chronic illnesses — was starting what would become a hard-charging career as a television news producer when he learned of his condition. He feared he would be considered unfit. He kept his secret for years despite failing vision and shaky balance.
Marlene Kahan, in turn, disclosed her condition right away. Four years ago, when she learned she had Parkinson’s disease, she had been the executive director of the American Society of Magazine Editors for more than a decade. With that longevity came security, she hoped.
Ms. Kahan was also afraid that the mix of symptoms and side effects from the treatments would leave her at “less than 100 percent,” she said, making it seem as if she was either slacking or even sicker than she was. “I didn’t want people to wonder and jump to other conclusions,” she said.
Gayle Backstrom, whose fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition, was diagnosed decades ago, understands both paths. Still she advises to keep your condition to yourself for as long as possible, because that is safer.
The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits an employer from dismissing or failing to hire a chronically-ill employee on the basis of that disability “if they are able to do the job with reasonable accommodation,” she said. But in many cases, “reasonable” and “able” and even “job” all become open to interpretation, said Ms. Backstrom, the author of “I’d Rather Be Working” (Amacom, 2002).
An excellent resource for workers facing this choice, she said, is the Job Accommodation Network, a service of the federal Department of Labor. Most questions on its site, she said, come from workers, not management, and “they are looking for suggestions on how to do adjust their work without bringing it to the attention of their bosses,” she said. They buy themselves custom footstools and wrist-rests, and sneak off to restrooms to take medications. To hide their condition on the worst days, they call in sick, giving a reason other than their chronic illness.
Mr. Cohen did that for nearly 10 years. In “Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness,” he recalled an interview for a job as a producer on the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.” He asked a friend, Robert MacNeil, whether he should mention his multiple sclerosis. Recalling Mr. MacNeil’s answer, he wrote: “Say nothing. Your silence is an honorable dishonesty.”
Mr. Cohen got the job and was able to keep his secret with scrupulous attention to logistics, quietly using public transportation to conceal that he could not see well enough to drive. Years later, the executive who first hired him agreed that he had been wise to stay mum. “I am not proud to say this,” Mr. Cohen quoted the man as saying, “but I don’t think I would have hired you if I had known.”
Celeste Lee also chose to keep the details of her life from her employers for years. An autoimmune disease she developed in high school, 25 years ago, led to kidney failure. A transplant was initially successful, but eventually her body rejected the organ. That left her dependent on regular dialysis.
At first, she managed it on her own with a saline bag and an IV needle. She then worked as an administrator at a Boston law firm, and because the process took 15 minutes behind her closed office door, “it was something they didn’t really need to know,” she said of her employers and co-workers.
The timing was sometimes tricky, but life went on. She got her master’s degree, was promoted, married and had a son.
But after she moved to take a job at Duke University, the simpler form of treatment began to prove insufficient. She had to switch to hemodialysis, which required that she be hooked to a machine that cleaned her blood for three hours, three days a week.
Shortly after, she was offered her “dream job” as chief of staff to the chief executive of the Duke University Health System. The high-paced work would require 12- to 15-hour days. For the first time, she wondered whether her illness would hold her back.
She raised the issue in her interview. “At first they were uncomfortable because they thought that if they didn’t hire me I would accuse them of discrimination,” she said. “But I said: ‘No, we have to talk about this. It needs to be on the table.’ ”
She got the job. Now she is on the dialysis machine at the outpatient dialysis clinic at Duke by 7 a.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. On workdays she is at her desk by 10 a.m., respectable by most standards, but hours later than her arrival on nondialysis days. She also arrives feeling “hung over” from the six-pound weight loss post-treatment, she said, another reason why she felt she had to be upfront. “On Tuesdays and Thursdays, everyone knows that I can’t always be accountable for my personality,” she said.
Mr. Cohen eventually also revealed all once he had proved himself. He then went on to squint his way through the Solidarity protests in Poland and the violence in Beirut, once staring down Palestine Liberation Organization guards because he could not see the guns pointed at his head. Eventually he left breaking news for the slower pace of documentary television.
Now even writing books is increasingly difficult because of his worsening condition. He wrote most of “Strong at the Broken Places” with his left hand, because his right side doesn’t function well. The patients profiled in his book live nationwide, so he spent a lot of time in airports. “Picture it,” he said. “I am legally blind, I have trouble with mobility, I was constantly lost and under pressure to get from point A to point B. More than once I dropped everything I was carrying, because I do that, and I had tears in my eyes. I thought, ‘I can’t do this.’ ”
Yet he commutes daily to his office on the Upper West Side from Westchester, where he lives with his wife, Meredith Vieira, a host of “Today,” and their three children.
“Barbara Walters is always asking me, ‘Why do you do that?’ ” he said of his wife’s former colleague on “The View.” “Because I can. You do it until you can’t do it anymore.”
That is Ms. Lee’s mantra, too. In recent weeks her doctors have confirmed that she faces a new challenge: nephrogenic systemic fibrosing. It is essentially a thickening of the tissue or subcutaneous skin that can affect muscle and organ functions.
“At some point I have to consider whether I will have to bow out of this position,” she said. “But I want that to be my decision, and I won’t make it until I have to.”
E-mail:
[Belkin@nytimes.com] Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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17:45
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disturbing the comfortable
"...surrender to terror..."?
Who is this arrogant jerk? As Dave Neiwert pointed out over at Orcinus, the stab in the back scenario is alive and well. The conservatives have always loved this one, since they saw how well it worked for the Nazis. They've had the communists stabbing us in the back, the intellectuals, the students, liberals, everybody who hasn't marched lock-step with them on the War Road.
Every so often I get kind of sentimental toward the Mormons. After all, my mother's dad came from the Mormon church (actually, he came away from it) and one of my g-grandfathers—g-g-grandfather, I think it was—was a Mormon lad who rode for the Pony Express. And translated for the Indians. And so on. Pretty romantic stuff. But.
Back when the LDS successfully campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment, I started feeling, well, cynical about them. It isn't just their personal belief system: it's what they'd like to impose on the rest of us. And, apparently, Mitt Romney would like us all to believe that the Democrats are hand-in-hand with Islamic terrorists. What a crock of s--t.
Arrogant ass.
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13:58
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disturbing the comfortable
Published on The Smirking Chimp (
[www.smirkingchimp.com] )
Rule by Fear or Rule by Law?
By Dan Hamburg
Created Feb 3 2008 - 10:58am
by Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg
[This essay will appear in the February 4 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.]
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
-- Winston Churchill, November 21, 1943
Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the US government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and non-citizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse.
Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States in the event of "an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs."1 The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.2
According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists."3
Fraud-busters like Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) have complained about these contracts, saying that more taxpayer dollars shouldn't go taxpayer-gouging Halliburton.4 But the real question is: what kind of "new programs" require the construction and refurbishment of detention facilities in nearly every state of the Union with the capacity to house perhaps millions of people? According to whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, "Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Middle Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters."5
Section 1042 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," gives the executive the power to invoke martial law. For the first time in more than a century, the president is now authorized to use the military in response to "a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or any other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order."6
The NDAA signifies a continuation of the process of dismantling legal barriers to unrestrained executive power. In 2002, the government created the Northern Command, the first time since the Civil War that the military has been given an operational command inside the continental United States. In 2005, the Washington Post reported that Northcom had developed battle plans for martial law in the U.S., envisioning 15 different scenarios for its imposition.7
The Military Commissions Act of 2006, rammed through Congress just before the 2006 midterm elections, allows for the indefinite imprisonment of anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on a list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies. The law calls for secret trials for citizens and non-citizens alike.8
In 2007, President Bush tightened the noose by issuing an executive order that authorizes seizure of the property of anyone who "threatens stabilization efforts" in Iraq.9 The government's own Justice Department decides what constitutes such efforts.
Also in 2007, the White House quietly issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51), to ensure "continuity of government" in the event of what the document vaguely calls a "catastrophic emergency." Should the president determine that such an emergency has occurred, he and he alone is empowered to do whatever he deems necessary to ensure "continuity of government."10 This could include everything from canceling elections to suspending the Constitution to launching a nuclear attack. Congress has yet to hold a single hearing on NSPD-51.
California Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-Venice) has come up with a new way to expand the domestic "war on terror." Her Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (HR 1955), which recently passed the House by the lopsided vote of 404-6, would set up a Commission to "examine and report upon the facts and causes" of so-called violent radicalism and extremist ideology, then make legislative recommendations on combating it.11
According to a recent article in the Baltimore Sun, Rep. Harman and her colleagues from both sides of the aisle believe the country faces a native brand of terrorism, and needs a commission with sweeping investigative power to combat it. The commission would have the power to hold hearings, take testimony and administer oaths. Individual members of the commission--"little Joe McCarthys"--would be allowed to tour the country holding their own hearings in order to "expose native terrorism."12
Rep. Harman's bill also includes an attack on the Internet, claiming it provides Americans with "access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda," and further legalizes the infiltration of a wide array of organizations.13
A clue as to where Harman's commission might be aiming is the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law that labels those who "engage in sit-ins, civil disobedience, trespass, or any other crime in the name of animal rights" as terrorists.14 Other groups in the crosshairs could be anti-abortion protesters, anti-tax agitators, immigration activists, environmentalists, peace demonstrators, second amendment rights supporters...the list goes on and on. According to author Naomi Wolf, the National Counterterrorism Center currently holds the names of roughly 775,000 "terror suspects" with the number increasing by 20,000 per month.15
Add to these facts the inception of the world's largest mercenary army (Blackwater USA) and the sale of the United States Investigative Service (USIS) to the notorious Carlyle Group, placing the relevant information of every American citizen in private hands, and presto! All the essential elements for the transformation of our constitutional democracy into an American form of fascism are in place.16
What could the government be contemplating that leads it to make contingency plans to detain without recourse millions of its own citizens?
The Constitution does not allow the executive to have unchecked power. The people must not allow the president to use the war on terror to rule by fear instead of by law.
Lewis Seiler is the president of Voice of the Environment, Inc. Dan Hamburg, a former congressman, is executive director.
* * *
Notes:
1. Press release posted on the Halliburton website.
2. "Fear the Coming Train," Lost Bleu, Portland Independent Media Center, October 18, 2004.
3. "10-Year US Strategic Plan for Detention Camps Revives Proposals from Oliver North," Peter Dale Scott, New America Media, Feb. 21, 2006.
4. "Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs,' Nat Parry, Consortium News, Feb. 21, 2006.
5. ibid.
6. "Bush Paves the Way for Martial Law [1]," March 22, 2007.
7. ibid.
8. "Who Is 'Any Person' in Tribunal Law?", Robert Parry, Consortium News, Oct. 19, 2006.
9.
[www.whitehouse.gov] [2].
10. "Who Will Rule Us After the Next 9/11?", Ron Rosenbaum, Slate, Oct. 19, 2007.
11. "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act," Huffington Post, Philip Giraldi, Nov. 26, 2007
12. "Here come the thought police," Ralph E. Shaffer and R. William Robinson, Baltimore Sun, Nov. 19, 2007.
13. ibid.
14. "Battle of the Beagles," Nick Cooney, Z Magazine, May, 2007.
15. Naomi Wolf interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, Nov. 28, 2007.
16. "When War Is Swell: Bush's Crusades and the Carlyle Group," Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch, May 22/23, 2004.
_______
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13:40
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disturbing the comfortable
This is one of those stories that isn’t too good to be true. It’s almost too bad to be true. It’s like the bigwig TV evangelist caught f--king his secretary, or the rightwing politician picked up for giving blowjobs to teen-age boys.
A guy like this should go to work for the Bush-Cheney Junta.
DVD Sanitizer Accused of X-Rated Behavior
[reporter.blogs.com] Posted by Eriq Gardner
Cleanflicks Remember Clean Flix? It's the Utah-based DVD business that was a favorite of conservative politicians and an anathema to the studios because it edited feature films to remove or alter content deemed inappropriate.
The company's activities sparked a number of lawsuits, including one huge one filed by 16 prominent directors, including Steven Spielberg and Robert Redford, and entertainment studios such as Disney, Sony, Universal, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox. In 2006, Hollywood won its copyright claims against Clean Flix and the company recently shut down, supposedly due to the industry's legal force.
Well, cover your eyes for this story. Clean Flix founder Daniel Thompson has just been arrested and is accused of having sex with underaged girls. And according to the Salt Lake Tribune, the "booking documents state Thompson told the 14-year-olds that his film sanitizing business was a cover for a pornography studio." Police found a "large quantity" of porno movies inside the business, "along with a keg of beer, painkillers and two cameras hooked up to a television." Thompson has been released after posting $30,000 bail.
We wish we could edit that story out of our heads.
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13:33
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disturbing the comfortable
Dave Niewert's blog,
"Orcinus" is having a fundraising. Dave Niewert is an excellent observer of the right wing in America—and I mean the moonbat, wingnut, neo-fascist right wing. The ones who are running this country as well as the ones standing in the background, itching to whack some liberals.
Dave Niewert deserves donations as much as, say, Free Speech TV, and a lot more than your local PBS station (but, then, hey, so do I—send me some money, too). Check out Orcinus. You'll like it.
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13:23
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disturbing the comfortable
Reuters says that Monday night—tomorrow, the remaining members of the Grateful Dead will play a concert to support Obama's campaign. The least politically-outspoken rock band of all comes full circle (OK, so that's hyperbole: who cares).
Obviously Obama is seen as an outsider (even if he is from one of the most politically corrupt states of all...yeah, that's saying something) who's...what? Kennedy-esque? I guess. I can't remember any candidate with such wide-spread support on the left side of the hall. No, I'm not saying he's a lefty, not at all. He's so mainstream he gives me a headache. But what he has is a huge appeal to the young and to those who feels politics are a mistake. That may be what it takes. I mean there hasn't been an insider since JFK who's fired up younger voters like Obama has. An insider, I said—not McCarthy, who was automatically forced outside the mainstream Democratic Party, not RFK, either, since the machine would have stopped him one way or the other.
So, sometimes the light's all shining on me, yeah, but: other times I can barely see....
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12:30
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disturbing the comfortable
Revision time: the editor at our paper didn't like the use of the word "lies" to describe the bulls--t the Administration shoveled on us to justify invading Iraq. He pointed out, correctly, yeah, that the reports compiling the misinformation referred to "false statements" rather than lies. OK. My 9th New Collegiate defines a lie as essentially a false statement—something that doesn't conform with the truth.
The Administration wouldn't tell the truth if it rose up like an erupting volcano. They'd deny the lava descending on us—them (I hope there's some justice left and it will get them instead of me).
There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam did not put the hi-jackers up to 9/11. It was not a cakewalk. We have not been greeted as liberators in Iraq. And, those who disagree with the brains behind this horrible mistake are not traitors. Jesus Christ on crank!
And I do believe that, thinking of justice, Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rove, all of those f--kers ought to be prosecuted for international crimes against humanity.
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18:32
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disturbing the comfortable
Two recent yet independent studies have come out, analyzing statements made by the Bush Administration in the lead-up to war after 9/11. These studies document over 500 lies by America’s leaders. Five hundred lies repeated countless times.
These lies led us into the war and occupation of Iraq. They led us, so far, to nearly 4,000 American deaths, numerous British losses, and unknown numbers of Iraqis killed. Beyond these deaths are countless maimed and emotionally devastated people, both military and civilian—on all sides. Our economy is shattered and scandals thrive like weeds.
Lies. The president, the vice-president, secretary of state—and their mouthpieces—sanctimoniously lied through their polished teeth. They claimed evidence of weapons of mass destruction, that Americans would be welcomed and honored by Iraqis, and that Iraq had subsidized and helped train the hijackers of 9/11. They hinted that Americans who dissented from the administration’s party line were flirting with treason. These lies have been—and are—spread widely and elaborated on by cadres of conservative commentators.
We were lied into a disastrous war. We are still being fed lies. Those who got us into this war should be removed from office and prosecuted for war crimes.
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15:31
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disturbing the comfortable
History doesn't repeat itself—but people do. Particularly when they're utterly crooked and self-deluded.
White House Tape Recycling May Have Erased Controversial E-MailsBy Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 16, 2008; 2:17 PM
The White House has acknowledged in a new court filing that it routinely recycled computer backup tapes containing its e-mail records until October 2003, a practice that could mean that many electronic messages from the first two years of the Bush administration are lost forever.
The disclosure raises the possibility that the White House effectively erased e-mail related to some of the biggest controversies of the Bush administration, including the leak of a CIA officer's name, the start of the Iraq war and the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes.
The White House's electronic record-keeping system has come under increasing scrutiny from Democrats in Congress and is the subject of a lawsuit by two advocacy groups. The administration previously has acknowledged problems with its archiving systems, but had not disclosed its practice of overwriting backup tapes.
The backups are meant to preserve records in case of a disaster. They also serve a role in ensuring that federal record-keeping laws are met, according to administration officials and records management experts. Two separate statutes require the White House to preserve federal or presidential records.
The prospects for recovering data that has been overwritten is uncertain, especially if the tapes were re-recorded numerous times, technology experts say.
In a court affidavit filed shortly before midnight yesterday, the official in charge of overseeing White House computer systems said that recycling, or overwriting, the backup tapes was "consistent with industry best practices related to tape media management."
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15:11
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disturbing the comfortable
No, not too much to say until today. Or maybe too much and not feeling quite up to organizing how I was going to say it...
Kucinich: kept out of the last Demican debate by a decision of one of our corporate masters, NBC. And the courts let them get away with it. WTF? It was for the four leading candidates; Richardson was placing fourth and he dropped out, therefore—Kucinich, the only avowed progressive candidate, was booted. In Nevada, yeah, where GE and their connections to the Yucca Mountain project are powerful, and, of course, where Harry Reid...and the Democratic National Committee didn't let out a peep... Hey, if voting could change the system it would be against the law, yup. And the system is, if it is anything, self-preserving. The system doesn't have room for people like Kucinich. Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, sure. But nobody who's going to shake things up—or even talk about shaking things up.
That's also why Paul and Huckabee are ultimately out of the loop. The electoral system works by hammering down anyone who sticks their head up too far.
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14:03
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disturbing the comfortable
One of the truly maddening trends in radical/left "journalism" is the compulsion to clutch at straws. Back in December, Russ Means and two other members of the Lakota nation decided they were able to speak for the "real" Lakota and because of that they could announce the Lakota were pulling out of any treaty agreements with the U.S.. Various radical web sites jumped up like they'd just heard weed had been legalized on a federal and state level. News! Big news! Only...well, a slight problem...
'No treaty withdrawal', says Lakota elder From Wikinews, the free news source you can write! Jump to:
navigation,
search January 12, 2008
The Lakota Freedom Delegation announcing their withdrawal on December 19.
Image: Naomi Archer.
The Lakota Freedom Delegation, which in December declared that the Lakota people were withdrawing from their treaties with the United States and reasserting their sovereignty as an independent state, is acting without the support of the Treaty Council, the traditional government of the Lakota, Wikinews has learned.
Wikinews spoke with Floyd Looks-For-Buffalo Hand, an Oglala Lakota Treaty Delegate and Elder, also an author and a spiritual leader in the indigenous Lakota religion, and who is also blood uncle to Lakota Freedom Delegation member Canupa Gluha Mani.
The Lakota Freedom Delegation has claimed that, while the BIA-recognized tribal governments of the Lakota have not supported them, the Lakota Freedom Delegation's authority extends from support by the Treaty Council of the Elders of Lakota as well as from the 1974 International Indian Treaty Council.
"There was no treaty withdrawal. It was three people."
"Russell Means and Duane Martin [Canupa Gluha Mani] and that lady [Phyllis Young], they do not speak for the nation. You've got to have consensus" among the eight tribes of the Lakota, he said, which the Lakota Freedom Delegation has not obtained. Mr. Hand stated that he was speaking as a tribal delegate with the consensus of the Oglala Treaty Delegation and his chief, Oliver Red Cloud.
The Lakota independence movement claims large portions of the
Great Plains region of the United States
Hand furthermore called the treaty withdrawal event a "publicity stunt" and that furthermore the 1974 meeting was not authorization to act on behalf of the Lakota people. While Means, Canupa Gluha Mani, and the rest of the delegation "have free speech" and can do as they wish, he said, the Elders of Lakota "stated that they should remove themselves from treaty territory," that is, the Reservations inhabited by the Lakota. But "they're still living here" (Canupa Gluha Mani has been residing in Asheville, North Carolina since the treaty withdrawal press conference on 19 December).
When asked if the above decisions represented the consensus of the whole Treaty Council, Hand stated, "we all do the same because we're all fullbloods. We all speak our own language."
Hand went on to explain, though, that the Treaty Council was planning to reconsider the Lakota's arrangement with the United States government. The Treaty Council of all eight Lakota tribes, which will meet on 28-30 January 2008, will consider whether to "sit down to negotiate" with the federal government. Members of the Lakota Freedom Delegation are expected to take part in that meeting. European-Americans, Hand said, are "not honoring" the 1851 and 1868 treaties which connected the Lakota to the United States, and noted that the Lakota were the only people to "conquer" the United States during the Indian Wars of the 19th century.
The arrangement with the United States, which he called a "contract", "handcuffs us through the federal programs". On their own, Hand said, "if we rely on a sovereign nation as a nation, relating to other nations with our economic development I think we can survive." Hand noted that one possibility under consideration was asserting the right to negotiate independently of the US government with foreign powers in areas such as airport access rights. The Lakota, he said, would charge foreign airlines half what the United States charges to make use of airports on Lakota soil. "We can be well off," he argued.
In another contradiction of the Lakota Freedom Delegation's program, Hand said that the Treaty Delegations "don't want technology on our reservation". One of his concerns was environmentalism. People of European descent are "taking too much out of Mother Earth", he said, making reference to ongoing environmental effects of uranium mining which has long been a contentious issue on the Lakota reservations. The Treaty Delegation's goal, he said, is "preserving the land and animals and letting the water remain free."
However, one of the plans of the Lakota Freedom Delegation is to install renewable energy technology on tribal land, such as solar and wind farms. This follows projects in the past, whereby wind turbines were erected on the Rosebud Reservation. Such projects would lessen dependence on foreign energy sources, as well as coincide with the Lakota's traditional respect for the environment.
Hand also expressed hope for ethnic solidarity among the non-European peoples of the world. "All the people of color in this world will go for unity and understanding and peace" if they overthrow the Europeans and establish their own governments, he said.
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17:11
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disturbing the comfortable
More info, from London’s Financial Times and Reuters, on the dreadful state of health care in America. Out of 19 industrialized nations—the usual suspects, Japan, UK, Eire, France, Portugal, Australia, and others—we’re number 19.
That’s shameful.
U.S. HAS WORST RECORD OF DEATH FROM TREATABLE DISEASE
By Nicholas Timmins
Financial Times (London)
January 8, 2008
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/72a80b76-bd8b-11dc-b7e6-0000779fd2ac.html More U.S. patients die from diseases that could be treated by timely
intervention than in any other leading industrialized country, a study
by top health academics showed yesterday.
A decade ago, the U.S. had the fourth worst record among a group of 19
industrialized co untries in terms of deaths per 100,000 people from
diseases that are amenable to treatment. These include infections,
treatable cancers, diabetes, and heart and vascular disease, according
to Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine.
Over the succeeding five years, the number of such deaths in the U.S.
fell from 115 per 100,000 to 110. But other countries improved
faster, leaving the U.S. with the worst record, behind Portugal,
Ireland, and the UK, where the preventable death rate runs at 103 or
104 per 100,000.
"If the U.S. performed as well as the top three countries in the
study" -- France, with 65 deaths per 100,000, and Japan and Australia,
both with 71 per 100,000 -- "there would have been 101,000 fewer
deaths per year," the authors write in the journal *Health Affairs*.
The study looks at preventable deaths below the age of 75 and found
that while most countries had made big strides in reducing them over
the past decade, with an average fall of 17 per cent, the U.S.
experienced only a 4 per cent decline.
With the rising cost of healthcare and numbers of uninsured becoming
issues in the U.S. presidential campaign, the authors say it is
"difficult to disregard the observation" that the slow fall in the
U.S. preventable death rate "has coincided with an increase in the
uninsured population."
Cathy Schoen, senior vice-president of the Commonwealth Fund, which
supported the research, said: "It is starting to see the U.S. falling
even further behind on this crucial indicator."
2.
FRANCE BEST, U.S. WORST IN PREVENTABLE DEATH RANKING
By Will Dunham
Reuters
January 8, 2008
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN07651650 WASHINGTON -- France, Japan, and Australia rated best and the United
States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to
treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers
said on Tuesday.
If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top
three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United
States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal
*Health Affairs*.
Researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracked deaths that they deemed could
have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care, and
ranked nations on how they did.
They called such deaths an important way to gauge the performance of a
country's health care system.
Nolte said the large number of Americans who lack any type of health
insurance -- about 47 million people in a country of about 300
million, according to U.S. government estimates -- probably was a key
factor in the poor showing of the United States compar ed to other
industrialized nations in the study.
"I wouldn't say it (the last-place ranking) is a condemnation, because
I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access.
But if you don't, I think that's the main problem, isn't it?" Nolte
said in a telephone interview.
In establishing their rankings, the researchers considered deaths
before age 75 from numerous causes, including heart disease, stroke,
certain cancers, diabetes, certain bacterial infections, and
complications of common surgical procedures.
Such deaths accounted for 23 percent of overall deaths in men and 32
percent of deaths in women, the researchers said.
France did best -- with 64.8 deaths deemed preventable by timely and
effective health care per 100,000 people, in the study period of 2002
and 2003. Japan had 71.2 and Australia had 71.3 such deaths per
100,000 people. The United States had 109.7 such deaths per 100,000
people, the researchers said.
After the top three, Spain was fourth best, followed in order by
Italy, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, Austria,
Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Britain, Ireland and Portugal,
with the United States last.
PREVIOUS RANKINGS
The researchers compared these rankings with rankings for the same 19
countries covering the period of 1997 and 1998. France and Japan also
were first and second in those rankings, while the United States was
15th, meaning it fell four places in the latest rankings.
All the countries made progress in reducing preventable deaths from
these earlier rankings, the researchers said. These types of deaths
dropped by an average of 16 percent for the nations in the study, but
the U.S. decline was only 4 percent.
The research was backed by the Commonwealth Fund, a private New
York-based health policy foundation.
"It is startling t o see the U.S. falling even farther behind on this
crucial indicator of health system performance," Commonwealth Fund
Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen said.
"The fact that other countries are reducing these preventable deaths
more rapidly, yet spending far less, indicates that policy, goals and
efforts to improve health systems make a difference," Schoen added in
a statement.
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15:17
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disturbing the comfortable
There's a comment, after my last post, from something or someone called The Tulsa Atlas. It defends Ron Paul and says the story I quoted has been refuted. That's entirely possible, because there isn't any statement that can't, one way or the other, be "refuted." It's a matter of quality, when you get down to it. Like the creationists refute evolution—only their refutations are shallow, silly, and dishonest.
The point in the article I cited is that Ron Paul is not a libertarian so much as a far far FAR right wing populist, appealing to the paranoid white folk around the country. That's why the militias, the so-called "Patriot Movement," the survivalists, and the white racists are supporting him, yeah. Why?
Look: the man's against income taxes and believes the IRS is illegal; he supports a Constitutional amendment to ban abortions, he wants Christian Protestant God messages displayed in public schools, he favors the quarantine of AIDS patients and believes the virus can be spread by saliva (and he's a doctor, yet!), and he believes we should go back on the gold standard. He also thinks the law is skewed in favor of black people over white people. Jesus.
The man may not wear a white sheet—or camos—but, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck...
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13:52
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disturbing the comfortable
Ron Paul is, for a lot of people, a romantic character. He’s another political Don Quixote—we’ve had quite a few of them. This time, the Mench from La Mancha is a Texas reactionary, though. He claims to be a libertarian, a term that doesn’t seem as bad as “conservative,” but is so into laissez faire capitalism it’s more like laissez aller—totally unrestrained. The capitalism of uncontrolled grabbing.
The libertarians have had a free ride for a long time, especially from the Left. Maybe it’s because the libertarians are against the anti-dope laws. But they’re also against all the other laws: like health laws, and anti-pollution, anti-abuse, any kinds of protections of the public. They’ve ended up as a theoretical wing of conservatism, kind of intellectual reactionaries.
But, Ron Paul takes into the closet, as it were, of conservative and libertarian thought: the paranoias about race and sex, the fears, and the rage... In other words, if politics do make strange bedfellows, the right wing has taken bundling into orgy-porgy neo-nazi politics...
[www.tnr.com] This is from a long and thorough piece by James Kirchick, The New Republic, Published: Tuesday, January 08, 2008
***
Paul's newsletters have carried different titles over the years--Ron Paul's Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report--but they generally seem to have been published on a monthly basis since at least 1978. (Paul, an OB-GYN and former U.S. Army surgeon, was first elected to Congress in 1976.) During some periods, the newsletters were published by the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, a nonprofit Paul founded in 1976; at other times, they were published by Ron Paul & Associates, a now-defunct entity in which Paul owned a minority stake, according to his campaign spokesman. The Freedom Report claimed to have over 100,000 readers in 1984. At one point, Ron Paul & Associates also put out a monthly publication called The Ron Paul Investment Letter.
***
the newsletters ... reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.
To understand Paul's philosophy, the best place to start is probably the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Auburn, Alabama. The institute is named for a libertarian Austrian economist, but it was founded by a man named Lew Rockwell, who also served as Paul's congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982. Paul has had a long and prominent association with the institute, teaching at its seminars and serving as a "distinguished counselor." The institute has also published his books.
The politics of the organization are complicated--its philosophy derives largely from the work of the late Murray Rothbard, a Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and a self-described "anarcho-capitalist" who viewed the state as nothing more than "a criminal gang"--but one aspect of the institute's worldview stands out as particularly disturbing: its attachment to the Confederacy. Thomas E. Woods Jr., a member of the institute's senior faculty, is a founder of the League of the South, a secessionist group, and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, a pro-Confederate, revisionist tract published in 2004. Paul enthusiastically blurbed Woods's book, saying that it "heroically rescues real history from the politically correct memory hole." Thomas DiLorenzo, another senior faculty member and author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, refers to the Civil War as the "War for Southern Independence" and attacks "Lincoln cultists"; Paul endorsed the book on MSNBC last month in a debate over whether the Civil War was necessary (Paul thinks it was not). In April 1995, the institute hosted a conference on secession at which Paul spoke; previewing the event, Rockwell wrote to supporters, "We'll explore what causes [secession] and how to promote it." Paul's newsletters have themselves repeatedly expressed sympathy for the general concept of secession. In 1992, for instance, the Survival Report argued that "the right of secession should be ingrained in a free society" and that "there is nothing wrong with loosely banding together small units of government. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we too should consider it."
***
Paul's alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race. Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began," read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with "'civil rights,' quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda." It also denounced "the media" for believing that "America's number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks." To be fair, the newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were "the only people to act like real Americans," it explained, "mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England."
This "Special Issue on Racial Terrorism" was hardly the first time one of Paul's publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled "What To Expect for the 1990s," predicted that "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves.'" Two months later, a newsletter warned of "The Coming Race War," and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, "If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it." In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo." "This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s," the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter's author--presumably Paul--wrote, "I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming." That same year, a newsletter described the aftermath of a basketball game in which "blacks poured into the streets of Chicago in celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows of stores to loot." The newsletter inveighed against liberals who "want to keep white America from taking action against black crime and welfare," adding, "Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems."
***
Martin Luther King Jr. earned special ire from Paul's newsletters, which attacked the civil rights leader frequently, often to justify opposition to the federal holiday named after him. ("What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved it!" one newsletter complained in 1990. "We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.") In the early 1990s, a newsletter attacked the "X-Rated Martin Luther King" as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours," "seduced underage girls and boys," and "made a pass at" fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One newsletter ridiculed black activists who wanted to rename New York City after King, suggesting that "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown," "Dirtburg," and "Lazyopolis" were better alternatives. The same year, King was described as "a comsymp, if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration."
While bashing King, the newsletters had kind words for the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. In a passage titled "The Duke's Victory," a newsletter celebrated Duke's 44 percent showing in the 1990 Louisiana Republican Senate primary. "Duke lost the election," it said, "but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment." In 1991, a newsletter asked, "Is David Duke's new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?" The conclusion was that "our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom." Duke is now returning the favor, telling me that, while he will not formally endorse any candidate, he has made information about Ron Paul available on his website.
Like blacks, gays earn plenty of animus in Paul's newsletters. They frequently quoted Paul's "old colleague," Representative William Dannemeyer--who advocated quarantining people with AIDS--praising him for "speak[ing] out fearlessly despite the organized power of the gay lobby." In 1990, one newsletter mentioned a reporter from a gay magazine "who certainly had an axe to grind, and that's not easy with a limp wrist." In an item titled, "The Pink House?" the author of a newsletter--again, presumably Paul--complained about President George H.W. Bush's decision to sign a hate crimes bill and invite "the heads of homosexual lobbying groups to the White House for the ceremony," adding, "I miss the closet." "Homosexuals," it said, "not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities." When Marvin Liebman, a founder of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom and a longtime political activist, announced that he was gay in the pages of National Review, a Paul newsletter implored, "Bring Back the Closet!" Surprisingly, one item expressed ambivalence about the contentious issue of gays in the military, but ultimately concluded, "Homosexuals, if admitted, should be put in a special category and not allowed in close physical contact with heterosexuals."
The newsletters were particularly obsessed with AIDS, "a politically protected disease thanks to payola and the influence of the homosexual lobby," and used it as a rhetorical club to beat gay people in general. In 1990, one newsletter approvingly quoted "a well-known Libertarian editor" as saying, "The ACT-UP slogan, on stickers plastered all over Manhattan, is 'Silence = Death.' But shouldn't it be 'Sodomy = Death'?" Readers were warned to avoid blood transfusions because gays were trying to "poison the blood supply." "Am I the only one sick of hearing about the 'rights' of AIDS carriers?" a newsletter asked in 1990. That same year, citing a Christian-right fringe publication, an item suggested that "the AIDS patient" should not be allowed to eat in restaurants and that "AIDS can be transmitted by saliva," which is false. Paul's newsletters advertised a book, Surviving the AIDS Plague--also based upon the casual-transmission thesis--and defended "parents who worry about sending their healthy kids to school with AIDS victims." Commenting on a rise in AIDS infections, one newsletter said that "gays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good sense," adding: "[T]hese men don't really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners." Also, "they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."
The rhetoric when it came to Jews was little better. The newsletters display an obsession with Israel; no other country is mentioned more often in the editions I saw, or with more vitriol. A 1987 issue of Paul's Investment Letter called Israel "an aggressive, national socialist state," and a 1990 newsletter discussed the "tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the Mossad in their area of expertise." Of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a newsletter said, "Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little."
Paul's newsletters didn't just contain bigotry. They also contained paranoia--specifically, the brand of anti-government paranoia that festered among right-wing militia groups during the 1980s and '90s. Indeed, the newsletters seemed to hint that armed revolution against the federal government would be justified. In January 1995, three months before right-wing militants bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a newsletter listed "Ten Militia Commandments," describing "the 1,500 local militias now training to defend liberty" as "one of the most encouraging developments in America." It warned militia members that they were "possibly under BATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] or other totalitarian federal surveillance" and printed bits of advice from the Sons of Liberty, an anti-government militia based in Alabama--among them, "You can't kill a Hydra by cutting off its head," "Keep the group size down," "Keep quiet and you're harder to find," "Leave no clues," "Avoid the phone as much as possible," and "Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."
The newsletters are chock-full of shopworn conspiracies, reflecting Paul's obsession with the "industrial-banking-political elite" and promoting his distrust of a federally regulated monetary system utilizing paper bills. They contain frequent and bristling references to the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations--organizations that conspiracy theorists have long accused of seeking world domination. In 1978, a newsletter blamed David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission, and "fascist-oriented, international banking and business interests" for the Panama Canal Treaty, which it called "one of the saddest events in the history of the United States." A 1988 newsletter cited a doctor who believed that AIDS was created in a World Health Organization laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland. In addition, Ron Paul & Associates sold a video about Waco produced by "patriotic Indiana lawyer Linda Thompson"--as one of the newsletters called her--who maintained that Waco was a conspiracy to kill ATF agents who had previously worked for President Clinton as bodyguards. As with many of the more outlandish theories the newsletters cited over the years, the video received a qualified endorsement: "I can't vouch for every single judgment by the narrator, but the film does show the depths of government perfidy, and the national police's tricks and crimes," the newsletter said, adding, "Send your check for $24.95 to our Houston office, or charge the tape to your credit card at 1-800-RON-PAUL."
***
In other words, Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically--or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point--over the course of decades--he would have done something about it.
What's more, Paul's connections to extremism go beyond the newsletters. He has given extensive interviews to the magazine of the John Birch Society, and has frequently been a guest of Alex Jones, a radio host and perhaps the most famous conspiracy theorist in America. Jones--whose recent documentary, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, details the plans of George Pataki, David Rockefeller, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, among others, to exterminate most of humanity and develop themselves into "superhuman" computer hybrids able to "travel throughout the cosmos"--estimates that Paul has appeared on his radio program about 40 times over the past twelve years.
Then there is Gary North, who has worked on Paul's congressional staff. North is a central figure in Christian Reconstructionism, which advocates the implementation of Biblical law in modern society. Christian Reconstructionists share common ground with libertarians, since both groups dislike the central government. North has advocated the execution of women who have abortions and people who curse their parents. In a 1986 book, North argued for stoning as a form of capital punishment--because "the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost." North is perhaps best known for Gary North's Remnant Review, a "Christian and pro free-market" newsletter. In a 1983 letter Paul wrote on behalf of an organization called the Committee to Stop the Bail-Out of Multinational Banks (known by the acronym CSBOMB), he bragged, "Perhaps you already read in Gary North's Remnant Review about my exposes of government abuse."
Ron Paul is not going to be president. But, as his campaign has gathered steam, he has found himself increasingly permitted inside the boundaries of respectable debate. He sat for an extensive interview with Tim Russert recently. He has raised almost $20 million in just three months, much of it online. And he received nearly three times as many votes as erstwhile front-runner Rudy Giuliani in last week's Iowa caucus. All the while he has generally been portrayed by the media as principled and serious, while garnering praise for being a "straight-talker."
From his newsletters, however, a different picture of Paul emerges--that of someone who is either himself deeply embittered or, for a long time, allowed others to write bitterly on his behalf. His adversaries are often described in harsh terms: Barbara Jordan is called "Barbara Morondon," Eleanor Holmes Norton is a "black pinko," Donna Shalala is a "short lesbian," Ron Brown is a "racial victimologist," and Roberta Achtenberg, the first openly gay public official confirmed by the United States Senate, is a "far-left, normal-hating lesbian activist." Maybe such outbursts mean Ron Paul really is a straight-talker. Or maybe they just mean he is a man filled with hate.
James Kirchick is an assistant editor at The New Republic.
Copyright © 2007 The New Republic. All rights reserved.
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12:47
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disturbing the comfortable
Jesus Christ on crank: I'm so f--king tired, already, of the candidates blathering at the TV cameras. No, I didn't watch the debates. F--k the debates. They aren't debates, really: they're just set pieces, advertising bites. There's as much truth in them as there is in a car salesperson's pitch for a slightly used 1995 Oldsmobile Turtle. You can't even trust the price.
Romney. Obama. Clinton. Huckabee, oh god, Huckabee. Romney rushing to reassure us that he believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ. There will be no religious test for office, my ass! The Protestants have taken over the country and we better get used to it. Obama, the cool kid on the make, charismatic but what's in there? We know what's in Hillary Clinton: she's like a walking computer. McCain? Well, he's at least got a steady personality that he lets hang out. Huckabee is just f--king scarey. He's the really really nice guy who'll do whatever it takes to you to save your soul, including burning you at the stake to get you to recant.
F--k. It's no worse, I guess, than having Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson running against each other. If you add Cotton Mather and William Jennings Bryan and George Custer into the race.
What you see up there on the dais really isn't what you get, except in terms of shallowness and mendacity. And what you hear isn't important.
What is important is the war against Islam. The economy, it's been on steroids so long it's about to collapse. Corruption in D.C.—but, enough of that! Let's get to something really important, like John Edwards' hair!!
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19:19
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disturbing the comfortable
According to semi-reliable sources (CNN), Obama and Huckabee have won the Demican and Republicrat caucuses in Iowa. Whoop-de-do.
I'm going to make a prediction: the Republicans will lose the presidency; Obama will win, but mainly because he will take a brave stand firmly in the center of absolutely every f--king thing you can think of. I think the Republicans will go down to a serious defeat; but it'll be their own fault. The Democrats will win through no credit to their own positions (assuming that not having a position equals having a position). There will be nothing earth-shaking or truly innovative from the Democrats. They're worse than a bunch of social workers...
I mean Obama may not be the Democratic candidate; maybe it'll be Clinton, maybe Edwards. It doesn't matter: nothing will change too much. None of the campaign donors will find anything to be offended by. There'll be no nationalization of health care nor phone companies nor oil companies. The profit-motive, "free market capitalism," and corporate take-over will continue. Only the style will change.
Yawn.
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19:14
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disturbing the comfortable
I’m just amazed by the Ron Paul scene. The man isn’t really bright. He’s not even bright. He’s a dim bulb.
But a lot of people seem to believe he’s the, ahhh, great white hope of Republican politics. Yeah, it’s a bad pun. Paul is a bad joke.
The gold standard. A sales tax. No welfare. No abortions. No public education. I mean...hell, he isn’t even Jeffersonian. He’s cracked.
This is from the Huffington Post.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Ron Paul is Scary, But Those That Cheer Him Are Even Scarier
[www.huffingtonpost.com] Posted January 3, 2008 | 10:57 AM (EST)
The scariest thing about Paul is that even though only a few hard core Paul backers will waste a vote on him, millions more seem to agree that his off beat views, especially on race matters, make sense. They even stand logic as high as it get can go on its head to defend their leader against all comers. That's especially true when it comes to Paul's views on race and ethnic politics. That's not a small point given the open but more often sneaky role that race and ethnicity will increasingly play in the presidential derby. Democratic presidential contenders Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Bill Richardson have pulled out all stops to woo and court blacks, Latinos and Asian voters. They have made poverty, affordable health care, immigration reform, and job protections the linchpins of their campaigns.
Paul and the GOP candidates have done just the opposite. They duck, dodge, and deny racial issues. The only departure from their racial blind eye is to fan anti-immigrant flames. Paul has gone one better. In an ad, he demanded that students from alleged terrorist countries should be denied visas into the U.S. Paul offered not a shred of proof that there are hordes of students pouring into America to commit terrorist acts. The ad was more than just a cheap ploy to fan terrorism fears. This reinforced the worst in racial and religious stereotyping and negative typecasting. The stereotype is that any one in America with a non-white face and is a Muslim is a terrorist.
Then there's Paul's now infamous slavery quip that he made on Meet the Press. Paul claimed the Civil War was an unnecessary bloodbath that could and should have been avoided. All Lincoln had to do was buy the slaves. Other slave promoting countries, asserts Paul, didn't fight wars and they ended slavery peacefully. Paul's historical dumbness would have been laughable except for four things. One, he was dead wrong. Lincoln twice made offers to the slave owners to buy the slaves. They turned him down flat. The countries that freed the slaves without war, presumably France and England, unlike the U.S., did not practice slavery in their countries. And France did fight a war-- Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of Haiti to put down the slave revolt there.
Two, he's running for president and has a national platform to spout his wrong-headed views (Meet the Press!). Three, he's done and said stuff like this many times before. Among the choice Paulisms are that blacks are criminally inclined, political dumb bells, and chronic welfare deadbeats. There was also the alleged Paul hobnob with a noted white supremacist. Here's what Paul on his campaign website ronpaul2008.com has to say about race. In fact he even highlights this as "Issue: Racism" on the site. "Government as an institution is particularly ill-suited to combat bigotry." In other words, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of education school desegregation decision, the 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and legions of court decisions and state laws that bar discrimination are worthless. Worse, says Paul, they actually promote bigotry by dividing Americans into race and class.
Paul's cure for racial bigotry is to change people's hearts. Whew!! The ghosts of Barry Goldwater, Strom Thurmond, the unreconstructed George Wallace, and packs of Southern States Righters and Citizens Councils big shots would lustily cheer Paul on that one. They railed for decades against the federal government's lift of even the tiniest finger to protect black rights and lives. Their stock line was that race relations can only change when hearts change. If we waited for that to happen the "whites only" signs would still be dangling prominently from every toilet and school house door in the South.
Paul's views are a corn ball blend of libertarianism, know-nothing Americanism, and ultra conservative laissez faire limited government. This marks him as a type A American political quirk.
Now there's the fourth reason not to laugh at Paul. And this is really what makes him scary. There are apparently millions that don't see a darn thing wrong with any of this and pillory anyone who does. They are even scarier than him. Maybe ABC and Fox should let Paul crash the New Hampshire debate. It's always good to see an extremist publicly confirm just how scary he and those that cheer him on really are.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February, 2007).
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18:36
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disturbing the comfortable
One of the loops in my intellectual life contains the fight between members of the American Indian Movement and the Federal bureau of Investigation.
The most famous round in the fight is the one where two FBI agents were killed on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. There are a dozen or so books about it, movies, and on-going reporting. Who killed them? Leonard Peltier is doing life in prison for it. His trial was a farce. It was as lame as the OJ Simpson trial, and if there had been as many Indians on the jury as there were black people on the Simpson jury, Peltier probably would have have walked.
I don’t know if Peltier is “innocent”; two other men charged with the same murders were found not guilty by reason of self-defense. All three were present when the agents were killed. The government’s prosecution, though, was shameful.
There’s more, though. Anna Mae Aquash, a member of the American Indian Movement and a tireless organizer was shot and killed on the Reservation, twenty-some years ago. One man was just found guilty and another man is awaiting trial. The scenario presented to us is that the leadership of the American Indian Movement thought she was a snitch and ordered her killed.
The movement, AIM for short, has hung on over the years. Most of the original members are still around: Russ Means, Dennis Banks, John Trudell, Russ Redner, Dino Butler, Kenny LoudHawk. None of them have been directly implicated in Aquash’s murder. That the movement has endured is a thorn in the government’s paw—particularly the FBI’s paw.
But it seems like the Indians are their own worst enemies. As the 2nd trial in Aquash’s death approaches, snitch labels are flying; the plot is complex and ugly. Old time members are turning on each other. Of course, the only beneficiary from this is the FBI, always eager to settle a cherished grudge. Hell, the Indians shot two agents and only one man went down for it: can’t let them off that easy.
It’s sad. I don’t know who killed the agents and I don’t know who killed Anna Mae Aquash (well, I’m sure that directly or indirectly the FBI killed her). I don’t think we’ll ever know. I know the FBI plays dirty, has played dirty, and will play dirty, the world without end, amen.
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18:41
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disturbing the comfortable
Obviously, I didn’t make a resolution to stay away from politics. Meet the New Year, same as the Old Year...
I found this story via a posting by Tristero on Digby—about how the Swift Boat folks are going after Romney, and trying to set up McCain to get the Repugnican nomination. I don’t know about the McCain part. I’ve stayed away from that kind of speculation. But I really do enjoy outrageous conspiracy rumoring. And the following piece is definitely outrageous. “Lunatic-ish” might be more descriptive... "Gutterball" just doesn't do it justice...
New anti-Romney mailer called 'gutterball politics'
By Thomas Burr
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 12/31/2007 03:03:59 PM MST
Updated: 2:52 PM-CLINTON, Iowa -- Another anti-Mormon mailer, this one alleging Mitt Romney is part of an LDS Church conspiracy to topple the government, has hit voters' mailboxes in Florida, continuing a string of attacks on the presidential candidates' faith days before the first primary contest.
The rambling letter, from an organization calling itself the Freedom Defense Advocates, alleges Romney is running for president at the bidding of church leaders and that Mormons are a violent people who want to overthrow the U.S. Constitution.
"Help me sound the alarm that one day the Mormon Church plans to replace the Constitution with a Mormon theocracy," reads the letter, signed by John Boyd.
"Mitt Romney's political success indicates this may be sooner than most have thought. Do you really want a president who believes he will someday become a god? Is that who you want occupying the most powerful position in the world ... the United States presidency?"
It was unclear Monday how many voters received the mailer, though the group said it was "widespread." The Romney camp said it had only heard of one recipient.
Boyd says he runs a political action committee, though no group by that name has registered with the Federal Elections Commission or the Internal Revenue Service.
The letter - which is also posted on
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the group's Web site and makes a plea for donations - is one of a string of attacks on Romney's Mormon faith in the last few months in the states with the earliest presidential primary balloting. South Carolina voters received a Christmas card raising the specter of plural marriage, and phone calls critical of the Mormon faith were reported in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Romney traveling press secretary Eric Fehnrstrom said the letter was a "contemptible piece of literature and whoever is behind it ought to be ashamed of themselves."
But Fehrnstrom said the campaign is not going to ask for an investigation and is focused on winning the early Iowa caucus and other primaries and not on the dirty politics going on under the radar.
"Is it a concern? Sure. Whenever people engage in this type of gutterball politics, that is a concern," Fehrnstrom said. "But the vast majority of people that we meet, either in South Carolina or other parts of the country, they don't look so much to what church Mitt Romney belongs to, but they look at the values that he shares with them. Mitt Romney's values are as American as you can find."
Boyd, from Lynchburg, Va., declined to say who belongs to his group or how many mailers went out and to where, but he said it is "widespread all over the U.S." and in the thousands.
He said he shipped out the letters "because Romney is a member of the Mormon cult" and people need to know his plans so he can be stopped. He accuses the campaign of a direct connection to the LDS Church, but offered no direct evidence.
"We just want to alert the voters in these early states, in these key states, the truth of what the church is," Boyd said. Asked what he thought of Romney's campaign response, he said, "It's not despicable. [But] if telling the truth is despicable, I guess we're guilty."
The St. Petersburg Times first reported the letter on Monday and noted that the group's Website was registered on Dec. 6, the day that Romney gave a much heralded speech in College Station, Texas, on the role his faith would play if elected.
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19:21
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disturbing the comfortable
Almost, repeat, almost, made it through another one. A few hours to go. Sure, if I go by reality, the new year happened a week or so ago, when the day became a bit longer than the one before it. But, we're obsessed by time and what-it-all-means.
I just looked at a rap about "Mayan prophecies" for the year 2012. That's sort of like the Millenium hoop-la eight years ao: like time has such magical qualities...No, time is just an arbitrary structure imposed by our European heritage. Other than that, it don't mean shee-itt, as Mr Natural used to say. OK: in 2012, something is going to happen at the equator of the Milky Way and that will have some vague cause and effect on life on earth—like the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, I suppose. Remember that one? Sure did change things, didn't it? Didn't it?
It could be argued that things have changed, for sure: for the worse. From Nixon to Bush, Viet Nam to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Columbia—the list is long and those names are enough. The empire shudders and cracks and lintels are collapsing and cornices crashing into the streets below, but still, America lurches along, an ongoing earthquake. And here we are, waiting for the next year, wondering, will it be the last? Will there ever be a "last" or will just enough rabbits continue to be pulled out of the hat, enabled the country to keep tottering? It's going to out-last me, I know that. God help our children and grandchildren, the bills are coming due...
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14:39
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disturbing the comfortable
Definitely time for some humor!
Priests brawl at Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus
Dec 27 09:34 AM US/Eastern
Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.
But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.
For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.
A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee.
"As usual the cleaning of the church afer Christmas is a cause of problems," Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh told AFP, adding that he has offered to help ease tensions.
"For the two years that I have been here everything went more or less calmly," he said. "It's all finished now."
The Church of the Nativity, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City, is shared by various branches of Christianity, each of which controls and jealously guards a part of the holy site.
The Church of the Nativity is built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was born in a stable more than 2,000 years ago after Mary and Joseph were turned away by an inn.
Copyright AFP 2007, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium
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14:27
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disturbing the comfortable
Now that religiously-inspired violence is in the headlines again—Yes, the assassination of Ms Bhutto was religiously-inspired, just like so many other killings in the news—I'm reminded of a clipping I found in a magazine put out by the Unitarians.
I'm not a Unitarian, although I think as religions go they're pretty good...even if they don't know whether or not they get Sundays off, yeah... They're intelligent and try to see similarities, not differences. Of course there's nothing that pisses off fundamentalists of any and all varieties more than showing them similarities between view points...
The Fundamentalist Agenda
[www.uuworld.org] is absolutely natural, ancient, and powerful—but the liberal impulse makes us humane.
By Davidson Loehr
The most famous definition of fundamentalism is H. L. Mencken's: a terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun. There's something to this. Fundamentalism is too fearful, too restrictive, too lacking in faith to provide a home for the human spirit to soar or for human societies to blossom.
But there are far more fundamental things to understand about fundamentalism, especially in this age of terrorism. An adequate understanding also includes some inescapable and uncomfortable critiques of America's cultural liberalism of the last four decades. The attacks on September 11, 2001, provided us a rare revelation about fundamentalism that arrived in two installments.
First, we became vividly aware of the things some Muslim fundamentalists hate about our culture:
* They hate liberated women and all that symbolizes them. They hate it when women compete with men in the workplace, when they decide when or whether they will bear children, when they show the independence of getting abortions. They hate changes in laws that previously gave men more power over women.
* They hate the wide range of sexual orientations and lifestyles that have always characterized human societies. They hate homosexuality.
* They hate individual freedoms that allow people to stray from the rigid sort of truth they want to constrain all people. They hate individual rights that let others slough off their simple certainties.
Not much was really new in this installment of the revelation. We had seen all this before, when Khomeini's Muslim fundamentalists wreaked such havoc in Iran starting in 1979. We have long known that Muslim fundamentalism is a mortal enemy of freedom and democracy.
The surprise second installment came just a few days after 9 / 11 in that remarkably unguarded interview on The 700 Club when the Rev. Jerry Falwell told Pat Robertson, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'” These men are so media-savvy it's amazing they would say such things on the air. But it's also remarkable because in their list of “causes” of the 9 / 11 attacks, we heard almost exactly the same hate list:
* They hate liberated women who don't follow orders, who get abortions when they want them, who threaten or laugh at some men's arrogant pretensions to rule them.
* They hate the wide range of sexual orientations that have always characterized human societies. They would force the country to conform to a fantasy image of two married heterosexual parents where the husband works and the wife stays home with the children—even when that describes fewer than 25 percent of current American families.
* They hate individual freedoms that let people stray from the one simple set of truths they want imposed on all in our country. Robertson has been on record for a long time saying that democracy isn't a fit form of government unless it is run by his kind of fundamentalist Christians.
Together, the two installments make vivid the fact that “our” Christian fundamentalists have the same hate list as “their” Muslim fundamentalists....
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14:22
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disturbing the comfortable
Just in case anybody is still buying the bulls--t that the Iraqis really do love us and think we’ve liberated their country, freed them from slavery, and brought roses to every rain barrel... I really do want my country to act in ways that do not bring misery and pain to people, regardless of who they are or where they live. Too bad it doesn't act that way.
All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion For Discord, Study Shows
Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, Wednesday, December 19, 2007; A14
[www.washingtonpost.com] Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.
That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results. At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings indicate that Iraqis hold some "shared beliefs" that may eventually allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war.
…
Dated December 2007, the report notes that "the Iraqi government has still made no significant progress toward its fundamental goal of national reconciliation." Asked to describe "the current situation in Iraq to a foreign visitor," some groups focused on positive aspects of the recent security improvements. But "most would describe the negative elements of life in Iraq beginning with the 'U.S. occupation' in March 2003," the report says.
Some participants also blamed Iranian meddling for Iraq's problems. While the United States was said to want to control Iraq's oil, Iran was seen as seeking to extend its political and religious agendas.
Few mentioned Saddam Hussein as a cause of their problems, which the report described as an important finding implying that "the current strife in Iraq seems to have totally eclipsed any agonies or grievances many Iraqis would have incurred from the past regime, which lasted for nearly four decades - as opposed to the current conflict, which has lasted for five years."
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14:09
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disturbing the comfortable
Was Ms Bhutto stupid?
No...perhaps suicidal? A bit too driven by her ego? I don't know. She wasn't stupid, but she may have been foolish; certainly there've been millions of non-stupid people who have behaved foolishly. I don't think her story could have ended otherwise, though. Guns, explosives, religious fundamentalism: a real formula for violence.
Pakistan is clearly a country that has not been helped by America's War on Reality. I'm not sure what countries have been helped—I mean, apart from the ruling parties of those countries. Obviously, we've helped the people in power. Helped them get richer. We'll never know how much money we've spent on Ms Bhutto. Or on any of the politicians in Pakistan. We know the country is corrupt, even if the state department is reluctant to actually use such a concrete word. But, yeah, Pakistan, India, Russia, Afghanistant, Iraq, Egypt, China—America has made a lot of people very rich and helped keep millions of other people in the swamp of poverty. Why do we let that happen? Because that's the way it is here, too.
America really isn't all that much more moral or upright than any other country. It's just that it's easier to identify corruption elsewhere than in your own town, county, state, nation. "Oh yeah, them folks over in Bum F--k, they're as crooked as a dog's hind leg, yup."
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14:40
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disturbing the comfortable
Back in early August 2006, I posted about a little boy who was beaten to death. This happened over in Prineville, a smaller town northeast of Bend. It was one of those crimes that just simply shouldn't have happened. Beaten to death by his step-father.
I just got a post about it, correcting some details about the boy's age and giving a follow up on the abuser—doing life without parole. Good. It would have been much better if the crime hadn't happened: much much better, but at least the perp is out of the Circle for the rest of his life.
Ahh, all you can do is sigh and shake your head and say some sort of prayer. For everybody. Everything.
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10:45
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disturbing the comfortable
Almost everyone I know has had some experience with counseling. Some people are or have been counselors, some have been in counseling (and, yeah, some have done both, and others went through the sort of peer-counseling that happens in 12-step groups. I’ve never worked as a counselor—at least I’ve never been paid for it... Counseling is a good thing: it’s helped me through some rough places.
But it isn’t perfect. Some counselors are control freaks, of course: they have a carefully constructed picture of how people should act and do their their utmost to try to get people to live up to that picture. A lot of that type are in religious work, sure. Some counselors are counselors almost by accident, because they studied it to help themselves and ended up trying to help others. And it goes on. I’ve known all kinds, socially and professionally. I’ve got counseling through social-service agencies, mostly.
Social service agencies, like mental health departments, have an often unstated agenda that drives the system: to get people “better.” By that I mean to get them in and out and produce results that look good as statistics.
Statistics mattter to agencies. Patients or clients or whatever they’re called—”consumers of services” is one of my favorite labels, need to be diagnosed. The diagnosis required for billing/funding purposes.
I think the whole idea of therapy is to help us become comfortable with who we are—not to "improve" ourselves or become better adapted—it's just to say, hey am what I am and if you don't like it, f--k off. But the way the money works...the patient or client has to acquire a label, and "get better." A lot of counselors are agents of the status quo, especially those who have public funding. Results, results, results, otherwise no more money.
The big thing in our local mental health system is "DBT:" Dialectical Behavioral Therapy—sans Marx or Engels, of course. It's actually, I think, an improvement on a lot of behavioral stuff because it includes elements from outside the rat labs. There's no doubt that skewed thinking underlies a lot of our conflicts and misery. But skewed thinking is also a cornerstone of our economy and society ("You're nobody till somebody loves you..."), and where would we be if people didn't go out and shop (which means having money) to prove their patriotism... However, the purpose of DBT is still to turn out employable and employed people who are off the dole. This makes it hard for the counselors and it makes it hard for the people seeing those counselors. There are those of us, like I mentioned, who just believe we need to accept ourselves as we are—free up the energy it takes to struggle with internal conflicts between what is and what we think we should be. I mean, f--k getting better.
Who wants to move into a house in a neighborhood that's burning down?
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18:30
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disturbing the comfortable
Must be a good time to slam Dick Cheyney...it's always a good time to do that. Cheyney is a good example of how good government health care can be. The man has been kept alive at almost no expense to himself by the real socialized medicine in this country, the kind that goes to our politicians.
AlterNet
New Ad: If Cheney Didn't Get Government Health Care, "He'd Probably Be Dead by Now"
By Matt Corley, Think Progress
Posted on December 11, 2007, Printed on December 11, 2007
[www.alternet.org] This post, written by Matt Corley, originally appeared on Think Progress
In Iowa yesterday, 10 newspapers are running a full page ad advocating for a single-payer health-care bill, highlighting the fact Vice President Dick Cheney has benefited from his government-provided coverage. "If he were anyone else, he'd probably be dead by now," the ad claims. Cheney, as the ad notes, has a long history of health problems:
The patient's history and prognosis were grim: four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery, angioplasty, an implanted defibrillator and now an emergency procedure to treat an irregular heartbeat
The ad, which is sponsored by the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee, argues that without his government-provided health care, Cheney's recent heart problems would have been "a death sentence":
For millions of Americans, this might be a death sentence. For the vice president, it was just another medical treatment. And it cost him very little.
Unlike the average American, the president, vice president and members of Congress all enjoy government-financed health care with few restrictions or prohibitive fees.
In response to the ad, Cheney spokesperson Megan Mitchell told the Wall Street Journal that "something this outrageous does not warrant a response."
The factual and provocative ad isn't outrageous. What is outrageous is the fact that there are roughly 47 million people in America without health insurance, including 3.2 million children, but President Bush vetoed legislation in October that would have extended coverage to 4 million more children.
While it is certainly good that Vice President Cheney was able get the medical attention he needed, the groups' ad is right. "The rest of us deserve no less" than Cheney.
Matt Corley is a Research Associate for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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18:25
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disturbing the comfortable
Sometimes I find stuff on the internet and I have to sit on for a while. Just to let the content and meaning percolate.
I like guns: I like shooting guns. I haven’t done any shooting for years, but if the occasion came along, I’d go shooting again. No necessarily at animals, though I’ve done quite a bit of that. I don’t see anything wrong with hunting, per se. But it depends on the rationalizations involved. Trophy-hunting, killing “big game” to have heads to mount on your wall seems kind of sick. I mean, killing anything, even a fish, is taking a life: it needs to be done for a damned good reason. Like getting food and fur to use later. Does anyone really need to eat lion meat? Or coyote meat? Is the amount and quality of wild sheep meat increased by the size of the horns? Hell, all a trophy head does is maybe make some people believe you got a bigger penis than most people have—like a big 4 x 4 pickup does, you know... And the idea of seeing how many semi-tame birds you can blast seems just plain old sick.
A lot of hunting is just to reassure the hunter he’s a REAL man. I’m thinking of Dick Cheyney, here.
AlterNet
Dick Cheney's Sadistic Passion for Shooting Tame Animals
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
Posted on November 14, 2007, Printed on November 14, 2007
[www.alternet.org] While most people are lamenting the violence in Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan and Iraq, apparently it's not enough bloodshed for Vice President Dick Cheney.
Last month in a caravan of 15 sport utility vehicles and an ambulance -- no jokes, please -- Cheney made his way to Clove Valley Rod & Gun Club, about 70 miles north of New York City, near Poughkeepsie, for a day of controlled bloodletting.
Cheney landed at Stewart Air Force Base and took off the following day for the upscale gun club at a cost of $32,000 for local law enforcement officials who guarded his hotel, protected his motorcade and diverted school buses.
Unlike Cheney's 2003 trip to Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township, Pa., in which he killed 70 pheasants and an undisclosed number of ducks (his hunting party killed 417 pheasants), staff at the Clove Valley Rod & Gun Club remained tight-lipped about the take.
An employee who answered the phone would not disclose which species was being shot -- ads say pheasants, ducks and Hungarian partridges -- and kept repeating "I don't know anything about it" before hanging up. Like Cheney's last visit to Clove Valley in 2001, the 4,000-acre club, which costs $150,000 a year to join, was a fortress with Blackwater-style snipers "protecting" the vice president's right to shoot tame birds.
But a New York Daily News photographer did snap a picture of a small Confederate flag hanging inside a garage on the hunt club property, which prompted civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton to demand that Cheney "leave immediately, denounce the club and apologize for going to a club that represents lynching, hate and murder to black people."
Cheney spokeswoman Megan Mitchell said neither Cheney nor anyone on his staff saw such a flag at the hunt club. (Maybe the flag was on the women's side of Clove Valley; only men are allowed in the clubhouse.)
Of course the nation is still amused about Cheney's 2006 hunting mishap in which he shot 78-year-old attorney Harry Whittington in the face in Texas instead of a quail -- and everyone from Letterman to President Bush jokes about it.
But canned hunting isn't funny.
Birds raised for canned hunts at gun clubs and in state "recreational" areas are grown in packed pens -- think factory farmed chickens -- and fitted with goggles so they won't peck each other to death from the crowding.
When released for put and take hunters like Cheney, pen raised birds can barely walk or fly -- or see, thanks to the goggles. They don't know how to forage or hide in the wild and sometimes have to be kicked to "fly" enough to be shot.
Some hunters say shooting the pellet-ready tame animals, which offer no resistance, is like having sex with a blow-up doll.
But others say hunting itself is like sex with a blow up doll and that the 10 percent decline in hunters seen in the United States since the late '90s -- from 14 million to about 12.5 million -- coincides exactly with the debut of impotence drugs like Viagra.
Still for the veep to pursue his addiction to the "programmed massacre of scores of tame, pen-raised birds" despite all the "negative publicity it has generated for him" suggests a deep psychological disorder, writes Gerald Schiller in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Especially since criminologists have long recognized that premeditated, sadistic treatment of animals is a strong predictor of criminal and homicidal violence.
Sociopaths Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Speck were both big on animal cruelty. And they weren't running foreign policy.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/67663/">[www.alternet.org]
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disturbing the comfortable
...No, I’m not particularly enthusiastic about Christmas. It’s OK: I like it better than, say, Valentine’s Day or the 4h of July. Less than a nice camping trip, though, or visiting with friends I haven’t seen for a long time.
The idea of the sun starting a new year is good.
Intellectually, I like the way the christian church appropriated old ceremonies and holidays. Smart move. If you look at it as a conscious action it was a smart move; but if you look at it as the Old Religion, the Old Spirituality, finding cracks in newer structures and pushing on through—like grass coming up through cracks in a cement sidewalk—ah, that’s even better. Yesterday was the Feast of the Virgin of Guadlupe, a major N. & S. American Catholic-oriented event. It’s the day the Virgin appeared to a Mexican Indian and announced she was the Mother of God and she had a special place in her heart for those of us in the “New” World. She appeared at the site of an Aztec temple to the moon goddess. Hmm? No coincidence. You can look on this as a particularly Catholic, Mary-mother-of-god event, if you want, but I think it goes way deeper—and way older—than that.
Basically, I think the Catholic Church is...well.... When the leader of the church says stuff like this, it’s hard to keep a straight face:
Pope offers 'shortcut' through purgatory
12/07/2007 @ 1:10 pm
Filed by Mike Aivaz and Jason Rhyne
[rawstory.com] For devout Catholics fearful of a long stint in purgatory -- a vast metaphysical holding area where the faithful believe they will go to be "purified" prior to their admittance to heaven -- the Pope had some encouraging news this week: there's an easier way.
Pope Benedict XVI has decreed that Catholics can cut short their future purgatory stays by visiting a holy shrine in Lourdes, France, a site where believers say the Virgin Mary appeared to a shephardess in 1858. Catholic pilgrims who visit Lourdes from now through next year, which will mark the 150th anniversary of the miracle claim, will receive an "indulgence" from the Pope, which he says will speed the trip to heaven.
"The door for indulgences is not always open, though, and for years after the Vatican Council reforms of the 1960s, they were rarely offered -- until 2000, when Pope John Paul II started using them to attract pilgrims to World Youth Day," reports the New York Times' Mike Nizza. "The pilgrimage, which must be made in the next year, can be accomplished using Vatican charter flights that began over the summer."
For Catholics not in a position to jaunt off to France, prayer at other select sites during a ten-day span in February may also do the trick. According to the BBC, the Pope indicated that "believers who prayed at places of worship dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes from 2-11 February next year -- or who were unable to make the journey -- would also be able to receive indulgences."
"The spirit always has to be one of trust in Christ and trust in the words of Christ to his apostles," Father Jonathan Morris, a priest, told the BBC. "And those words were this: 'What you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven; and what you loose on Earth will be loosed in Heaven.' If those words are true, and if the Pope understands them correctly, indulgences really do work."
In 1998, Pope John Paul II announced that Catholic penitents would receive indulgences for such good deeds as quitting smoking, abstaining from alcohol, or performing a charitable act. "Indulgences are an ancient form of church-granted amnesty from certain forms of punishment, in this life or hereafter, for sin," the Times reported then. "The medieval church sold indulgences, a practice that drove Martin Luther to rebel, beginning the Reformation. They remain a source of theological debate between Protestants and Catholics..."
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disturbing the comfortable
Well, here's something disconcerting: it looks like one reason the Democratic leadership shies away from impeachment proceedings is because they colluded in letting the administration get away with torture. Why? Because they're players, too—just like the Republicans. The last thing any player wants is to have the game end or to have the game suddenly change. Politicians are politicians; for the most part they could care less about morals.
This came off OpEd News. It's good:
Well maybe it is a little clearer why the first thing Pelosi did after she became speaker of the house was to take impeachment off the table.
According to the Washington Post beginning in 2002 leading lawmakers both Republican and Democrat where briefed on the so called enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during that time period included Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman, Bob Graham, John Rockefeller IV, Porter Goss, and Pat Roberts.
The only one that objected the technique was Representative Jane Harmon.
[www.washingtonpost.com]
So it looks as though Speaker Pelosi and other Democrats have colluded with the Bush administrations torture techniques because she knew about them but did not report them.
Senator Biden has called for an independent counsel to investigate the destruction of the torture tapes that have been in the news for the last week. It seems though Senator Jay Rockefeller D(W.V.) chairman of the Senate intelligence Committee does not think there is a need for an independent counsel because he said “ it is the job of the intelligence committee to do that.” I believe that the foxes are guarding the hen house.
This is starting to make some sense why after the Democrats took control of Congress that no serious investigation of this administrations lawlessness has occurred.
We the people need to make sure that there is an independent counsel appointed to investigate the destruction of the terror tapes and to determine who is complicit in this administrations total disregard for the rule of law.
The fox should not be guarding the hen house and we must enhance the improvements already made in Congresses ethics reform laws this year to include, a standing independent investigating body to watch Congress and the President. Without this who are we to trust, the politicians?????
Peace and Liberty through intelligence, strength, and integrity.
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12:09
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disturbing the comfortable
Impeach FAQ Submitted by davidswanson on Fri, 2007-06-15 13:48.
Impeachment Visit the IMPEACHMENT RESOURCE CENTER.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT IMPEACHMENT
By Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice
What are the grounds for impeachment for Bush and Cheney?
BUSH:
1. Refusal to comply with subpoenas (not disputable, and passed by the Judiciary Committee against Nixon)
2. Routine violation of numerous laws, preceded by announcement of intention to do so in signing statements (White House website and GAO study)
3. Violating U.S. law and the Constitution through widespread wiretapping of the phone calls and emails of Americans without a warrant. (Confessed to.)
4. Commuting the sentence of I Lewis Scooter Libby. (Both Madison and Mason argued at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia that impeachment would protect against a president pardoning someone for a crime that he himself was involved in).
5. Violating the United Nations Charter by launching an illegal "War of Aggression" against Iraq without cause, using fraud to sell the war to Congress and the public, and misusing government funds to begin bombing without Congressional authorization.
6. Violating U.S. and international law by authorizing the torture of thousands of captives, resulting in dozens of deaths, and keeping prisoners hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
7. Violating the Constitution by arbitrarily detaining Americans, legal residents, and non-Americans, without due process, without charge, and without access to counsel.
8. Violating the Geneva Conventions by targeting civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, and using illegal weapons, including white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and a new type of napalm.
9. Violating U.S. law by using paid propaganda and disinformation, selectively and misleadingly leaking classified information, and exposing the identity of a covert CIA operative working on sensitive WMD proliferation for political retribution.
10. Violating U.S. and state law by obstructing honest elections in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006.
11. Gross negligence in failing to assist New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina.
CHENEY:
1. Refusal to comply with subpoenas.
2. Creating and advocating the "Unitary Executive Theory" which is used by the White House to defy laws duly enacted by Congress and thereby justify dictatorial action. Cheney's office has drafted many if not all of the signing statements.
3. Cheney played a key role in setting up illegal spying programs.
4. Coordinating campaign to obstruct the investigation of Patrick Fitzgerald.
5. Coordinating a campaign of retribution against whistleblower Joseph Wilson, including the outing of a covert CIA operative.
6. Leading efforts to institute routine use of torture.
7. Leading campaign to manipulate pre-war intelligence.
8. Creating secret Energy Task Force which operated in defiance of open-government laws.
9. Directing massive no-bid contracts to his company, Halliburton, and profiting from the same illegal war he defrauded the American public to launch.
10-12 from H Res 333:
Cheney has purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests, to wit….
Cheney purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States about an alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in order to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests, to wit….
Cheney has openly threatened aggression against the Republic of Iran absent any real threat to the United States, and done so with the United States proven capability to carry out such threats, thus undermining the national security of the United States, to wit….
Why would we want a President Cheney? Or why would we want a new Republican who could run as an incumbent? Or why would we want a President Pelosi?
We propose impeaching Cheney first or together with Bush. The first Articles of Impeachment to be introduced (H Res 333) are addressed only to Cheney. Impeaching Cheney first ought to put the fear of a President Cheney to rest. But there remains the possibility of fearing his replacement or even of not wanting Nancy Pelosi to be president or not wanting her to become president in this way. She won't. We will never succeed in removing Bush and Cheney from office simultaneously and by surprise. We will remove them, but they will be replaced by a new President Ford, who will operate within the rule of law and lose the next election.
But this whole discussion misses the point. The question of who holds which office for the next year or six months, as well as the question of who wins the next election, is of very minor importance in comparison with the question of whether future administrations will be compelled to operate within the limitations of the law. If we do not impeach Cheney and Bush, we will establish that it is permitted for future presidents and vice presidents to mislead the Congress and the public into wars, spy in violation of the law, detain without charge, torture, operate in secrecy, and rewrite laws with signing statements. Those powers in the wrong hands could do far more serious damage than Bush and Cheney have done.
So, if we keep this in perspective, the fear of Cheney appears trivial. It appears even more so when we consider that impeachment and removal from office are two separate steps and that we're only working on the first one so far, and when we recognize the extent to which Cheney has been running the country already for years. Were Cheney officially president, most policies would remain unchanged, but the public face of the White House and of the Republican party would be that of a man whose approval rating has been unable to top 20 percent. The Republicans will never allow this, so it would be rather foolish for the Democrats to retreat out of fear of it.
Whoever is president next will have to operate under fear of being impeached next. That is the point of impeachment. In the case of Cheney, he would be operating under the high probability of being impeached. No serious discussion of the evidence can incriminate Bush or Cheney but not the other. And, in any event, we will be impeaching Cheney first.
Why not just wait for the next election?
The authors of our Constitution established the schedule for elections, but devoted a lot more attention to the mechanism of impeachment as a check on elected despotism in between elections. They had recently thrown off a king and had no interest in electing temporary kings every four years. Neither should we.
Bush and Cheney can still do a great deal of damage before the end of their term. People are dying every day as a result of their policies. There is an urgent need to remove them from office in order to end the brutal occupation of Iraq and prevent an attack on Iran.
But we would need to impeach them were this January 2009 or had they already left office. The purpose of impeachment, again, is to set standards for future administrations. We cannot give the powers assumed by this administration (to mislead the Congress and the public into wars, spy in violation of the law, detain without charge, torture, operate in secrecy, and rewrite laws with signing statements) to future presidents and vice presidents without expecting similar or worse abuses.
Won't impeachment take up too much time and distract from other goals?
Nixon's impeachment took three months. Clinton's impeachment and trial combined took four months. The current Congress has wasted more than that amount of time already in avoiding impeachment, and has almost nothing to show for it (a minimal partial and gradual correction to the plummeting minimum wage). Congress has taken no serious steps toward ending the occupation of Iraq, and has in fact provided major new funding for it. During Nixon's impeachment and the lead up to it, in contrast, the threat of impeachment allowed Congress to raise the minimum wage, create the Endangered Species Act, and end a war.
Important as stem cell research and immigration policy may be, when did the Bill of Rights become a distraction? What is more important than restoring the right to not be spied on, to not be picked up without charge and locked away to be tortured with no access to a lawyer, a trial, or your family, not to be sent into an aggressive war for greed and power? Of course, there are many pressing areas in which we need to pass legislation. But the outgoing Republican Congress passed some important bills, including those banning torture and illegal spying. But Bush used signing statements to announce his intention to disobey those laws. Under the new Democratic Congress, Bush has made clear that he will either veto or signing statement any bill he disapproves of.
Isn't it more important to end the war?
Ending the war is a task that could best be accomplished by inaction, by Congress refusing to provide any more funding. Or it could be accomplished by a bill created by one committee. It is not a fulltime task for the entire Congress.
However, this Congress has already demonstrated that it has no intention of ending the war. Pelosi has sworn that cutting off the funding is "off the table."
What could help move Congress would be the same thing that helped a previous Congress find the nerve to end the Vietnam War and convinced Nixon not to veto the cut-off in funding: impeachment. In this case, even more so than Nixon's, impeachment would drive the war debate in the right direction, because impeachment would be for offenses either directly connected to the war or offenses that have been justified by "war on terror" propaganda.
In addition, should Congress actually cut off the funding and end the war, it is very likely that Bush and Cheney would misappropriate funds from the Pentagon to keep the occupation going. They did so in order to secretly begin the war, and they have never been held accountable for it. So, removing them from office is not only needed in order to give Congress the nerve to end the war, but is also needed if the war is ever to actually end.
Isn't it more important to win the next election(s)?
No. It isn't. But if it were, we would be wise to recognize that impeachment is the best guarantee of electoral success for Democrats and Republicans alike. Voters appreciate efforts to push for a cause. Cowardice and restraint are not very popular.
When the Democrats held back from impeachment during Iran Contra, they lost the next elections. When the Democrats led the effort to investigate and impeach Nixon, they won big in the next election, even though Ford was running as an incumbent. When the Republicans tried to impeach Truman, they got what they wanted out of the Supreme Court and then won the next elections. Articles of Impeachment have been filed against 10 presidents, usually by Republicans, and usually with electoral success following. When the Republicans impeached Clinton, impeachment was actually unpopular with the public. Even so, the Republicans lost far fewer seats than is the norm for a majority party at that point in its tenure. Two years later, they lost seats in the Senate, which had acquitted, but maintained their strength in the House, with representatives who had led the impeachment charge winning big.
Parties that seek to impeach are not punished at the next election. In fact, they frequently improve their position -- as evidenced by Dems in 1974, Republicans in 1952, and all the way back to the Whigs of last century. In every election back to 1842 where House members of an opposition party to a sitting president have -- as a whole or a significant caucus within the party -- proposed impeachment of the president, that opposition party retained or improved its position in the House at the following election. There is no instance of voters responding to a significant impeachment effort by sweeping its advocates out of office. In fact, history points in a different direction -- suggesting that voters frequently reward parties for taking the Constitution and the rule of law seriously.
Use this flyer.
Wouldn't impeachment split the Democrats?
It is splitting them now, but wouldn't if they united behind it. At least 80 percent of Democrats want impeachment. If 80 percent of Democratic elected representatives were pushing for impeachment, the Bush presidency would be over quite quickly. The Democrats in Congress tried to avoid the topic of the war, for fear it would split them. Iraq went unmentioned in Pelosi's plan for her first 100 hours. But the majority of the country wants to see the issues it cares about dealt with, and there are some Democrats who will stand with the people. The Democratic Party could unite by supporting peace and impeachment.
Why not do investigations and see where they lead?
They have led to the Bush administration refusing to comply with a growing list of subpoenas: [democrats.com] . The House Judiciary Committee passed three articles of impeachment against Nixon. Article 3 was for refusal to comply with subpoenas.
And they've led to Bush ordering a former staffer not to comply with subpoenas, and to Bush announcing that the Justice Department will not enforce congressional contempt citations. Where do you go from there, for A YEAR AND A HALF, other than impeachment?
Impeachment is an investigation, leading to an indictment. A preliminary investigation is not possible when subpoenas are ignored, and is not needed when indisputable evidence is already public knowledge.
Has Bush announced his intention to violate numerous laws? The signing statements are on the White House website. The Supreme Court has begun citing them in rulings, as if they have the force of law.
Has Bush authorized spying programs knowing they violated the law and the Bill of Rights? He's on videotape lying about it for years. He's on videotape confessing to it. A federal court has already ruled what he's done a felony, finding in NSA vs. ACLU that the NSA program of broad data-mining and warrantless wire-tapping of U.S. citizens is illegal and unconstitutional, violating the Fourth Amendment.
Have Bush and Cheney threatened an aggressive war on Iran? They're both on videotape doing so.
Was Bush criminally negligent during Hurricane Katrina? He's on videotape being warned of the danger. He's on videotape claiming he was never warned.
Have Bush and Cheney used unlawful detentions and torture? The Supreme Court in Rosul v. George W. Bush ruled detainees were being wrongfully imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba. The Bush Administration’s detainment policies and actions were ruled unconstitutional and illegal - in violation of Amendments V, VI &VII. The use of torture, legally justified by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and thus condoned by President Bush and Vice President Cheney is an additional violation to the 8th Amendment. The Supreme Court again in Hamdan v. Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, et al. ruled that the Military Commissions instituted by the Bush Administration violate the Universal Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions to which we are bound by American law. Again, the Bush Administration’s actions were found by the highest court of the land to be illegal and unconstitutional - violating Amendments V, VI, VII . Bush and Cheney and their staffs have defended these policies on video and in writing. The practice of detaining without charge and the numerous victims of it are undisputed public knowledge. Evidence of torture is voluminous and indisputable and includes public photographs.
Did Bush and Cheney intentionally mislead the Congress and the public into the invasion and occupation of Iraq? They are on videotape doing so, and the evidence that they knew exactly what they were doing is overwhelming and has been collected here: [afterdowningstreet.org]
Isn't impeachment an extreme remedy? Doesn't there have to be an actual crime committed? Doesn't there have to be perjury?
There's nothing extreme about it. The authors of the Constitution expected it to be used frequently. The U.S. House of Representatives has impeached 16 people, two of them presidents.
One of the better lists of the specific criminal violations is found in Congressman John Conyers' report: [www.afterdowningstreet.org]
Impeachment is the penalty for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. The Constitution says nothing about perjury as a ground for impeachment. And it is a crime to mislead or to defraud Congress, whether or not you do so under oath.
When Diane Sawyer asked Bush on television why he had made the claims he had about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, he replied:
"What's the difference? The possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons, if he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger."
What's the difference? The difference is that had the President merely said that Saddam Hussein could conceivably acquire weapons someday, many people would have opposed his war who supported it. They supported it because Bush said that Saddam had nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and was behind the attacks of 9-11. He and his subordinates (for whom he is legally responsible) made these claims in the clearest language. In every such case, fraud was committed. And instances of implying and omitting are legally fraud as much as lying is.
When Bush lies, he is well aware of what he is doing. The day after the 2004 elections, he told reporters that he had lied to them about keeping Rumsfeld on as Secretary of Defense so that they wouldn't write anything about it.
It is illegal to spy in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It is illegal to detain without charge and to torture. It is illegal to take funds from other projects to begin a war before it has been authorized. It is illegal to target civilians and hospitals and journalists, and to use white phosphorous and napalm as weapons. It is a fundamental violation of the U.S. Constitution to alter laws with signing statements. Congressman John Conyers' report lists numerous other laws violated by Bush.
So what purpose does impeachment serve?
It denies future presidents and vice presidents the power to mislead the Congress and the public into wars, spy in violation of the law, detain without charge, torture, operate in secrecy, and rewrite laws with signing statements. Again, those powers in the wrong hands could do far more serious damage than Bush and Cheney have done.
If we do not impeach when the case is as compelling as it is now, we are effectively removing impeachment from the Constitution. Secretly, almost everyone agrees that the Bush/Cheney Administration has committed impeachable offenses. That’s why even the pundits and Republicans are not arguing the case on its merits, but trying to scare the Democrats off based on politics. Given that, how can we not pursue accountability?
Isn't impeachment divisive and unpleasant and traumatic and catastrophic and unsettling and partisan?
No. Impeachment is a remedy for trauma, and one that the majority of Americans long for. Here are the polls: [www.afterdowningstreet.org]
Our President belongs to a political party, it's true. But that does not make him any less of a threat to our system of government. Voters in 2006 rejected his party overwhelmingly. Not a single new Republican was elected, and enough new Democrats won to achieve a substantial majority in the House and a slim one in the Senate. Voters opposed the party of Bush and Cheney, who are incredibly unpopular. Even some Republicans who spoke against the war lost, primarily because they were Republicans. But Republican Ron Paul of Texas, who had spoken in support of impeaching Bush, won.
If Paul and other Republicans manage to put their country ahead of their party's president, as Republicans did during Nixon's presidency, impeachment will not look so partisan. But if Republicans fail to stand for impeachment, then Democrats must do it alone, and doing so will be partisan in the best sense. It will build the Democratic Party into a powerful force for years to come, and it will be divisive primarily on Capitol Hill and in the world of media pundits.
Around the country it will bring us together. Hearings that expose Bush and Cheney's abuses of power will serve to educate many of those who still support them, including those who believe there really were WMDs, there really was a tie to 9-11, Bush was honestly mistaken but meant well, illegal spying is saving us from terrorists, nobody has been tortured, and a signing statement is just something a deaf person tells you with his hands.
Wouldn't impeachment be depicted as revenge?
Probably. But would you believe that depiction? Do you think everyone else is dumber than you are and would fall for it? The coverage thus far of the initial push for impeachment in Congress does not depict it as revenge.
What Articles of Impeachment have been introduced thus far?
Only three against Cheney, contained in H. Res. 333. (Not H.R. 333, but H. Res. 333. Let's say that one more time: You will not find it under H.R. 333, but must look up H. Res. 333.) You can find all the details at http://www.impeachcheney.org
How many towns, cities, states, state political parties, labor unions, and other groups have passed resolutions calling for impeachment?
The list grows every day at [impeachpac.org]
Why should a small town or large city or county or state pass a resolution for impeachment?
Impeachment was placed in the House of Representatives as the part of our government closest to the people. Closer still are states and cities and towns and counties. The people can speak through their local governments. This is how impeachment is supposed to happen. There are precedents: state legislatures have petitioned Congress successfully to impeach. This tradition is laid out in the Jefferson Manual, a rule book for the House of Representatives originally written by Thomas Jefferson. The actions of local governments and state governments are heard by Congress Members.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson's_Manual
But isn't impeachment a national issue?
As pointed out at [www.impeachbush.tv] , most city council members take an oath of office promising to "protect and defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic." They don't take an oath to fix potholes. If the Constitution is in danger, then their primary duty is to defend it. If it is safe, and they have time on their hands, then they can fix potholes.
Cities and towns routinely send petitions to Congress for all kinds of requests. This is allowed under Clause 3, Rule XII, Section 819, of the Rules of the House of Representatives. This clause is routinely used to accept petitions from cities, and memorials from states, all across America.
If a federal action has a significant negative impact on a city, then it is appropriate for the city to defend itself. Citizens from this city may be sent, or have been sent, to Iraq to fight in an illegal and unjustified war. Tax funds from this city that could have been spent locally have been spent in Iraq for war. Tax money from this city has been wasted in no-bid contracts with companies like Halliburton with deep ties to the Bush administration. Yet this city can barely afford the emergency services, libraries, and schools that we need. For the specific cost, see [www.costofwar.com]
The state National Guard should be available to protect this city from floods, hurricanes, earthquakes or other disasters. But instead they have been sent to Iraq by President Bush.
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19:48
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disturbing the comfortable
According to a report in The Sunday Times (London), the US can kidnap whoever it wants, where-ever that person happens to be.
This is f--king insane. Only a demented wannabe cowboy (or couple of demented wannabe cowboys named Dick and George) could come up with such a whacked plan. “The rule of law”...anyone remember hearing that? “We’re a nation of laws” Remember that one? Lies, lies, lies, anymore.
The crowd running the show in Washington is both nuts and power-mad. They are convinced they have such a lock-down on power, as a matter of fact, they believe they can do anything they want. This is an insane concept held by a couple of insane people.
From The Sunday Times
December 2, 2007
US says it has right to kidnap British citizens
David Leppard
[www.timesonline.co.uk] AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.
A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.
The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.
Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.
The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.
Legal experts confirmed this weekend that America viewed extradition as just one way of getting foreign suspects back to face trial. Rendition, or kidnapping, dates back to 19th-century bounty hunting and Washington believes it is still legitimate.
The US government’s view emerged during a hearing involving Stanley Tollman, a former director of Chelsea football club and a friend of Baroness Thatcher, and his wife Beatrice.
The Tollmans, who control the Red Carnation hotel group and are resident in London, are wanted in America for bank fraud and tax evasion. They have been fighting extradition through the British courts.
During a hearing last month Lord Justice Moses, one of the Court of Appeal judges, asked Alun Jones QC, representing the US government, about its treatment of Gavin, Tollman’s nephew. Gavin Tollman was the subject of an attempted abduction during a visit to Canada in 2005.
Jones replied that it was acceptable under American law to kidnap people if they were wanted for offences in America. “The United States does have a view about procuring people to its own shores which is not shared,” he said.
He said that if a person was kidnapped by the US authorities in another country and was brought back to face charges in America, no US court could rule that the abduction was illegal and free him: “If you kidnap a person outside the United States and you bring him there, the court has no jurisdiction to refuse — it goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s.”
Mr Justice Ouseley, a second judge, challenged Jones to be “honest about [his] position”.
Jones replied: “That is United States law.”
He cited the case of Humberto Alvarez Machain, a suspect who was abducted by the US government at his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1990. He was flown by Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Texas for criminal prosecution.
Although there was an extradition treaty in place between America and Mexico at the time — as there currently is between the United States and Britain — the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that the Mexican had no legal remedy because of his abduction.
In 2005, Gavin Tollman, the head of Trafalgar Tours, a holiday company, had arrived in Toronto by plane when he was arrested by Canadian immigration authorities.
An American prosecutor, who had tried and failed to extradite him from Britain, persuaded Canadian officials to detain him. He wanted the Canadians to drive Tollman to the border to be handed over. Tollman was escorted in handcuffs from the aircraft in Toronto, taken to prison and held for 10 days.
A Canadian judge ordered his release, ruling that the US Justice Department had set a “sinister trap” and wrongly bypassed extradition rules. Tollman returned to Britain.
Legal sources said that under traditional American justice, rendition meant capturing wanted people abroad and bringing them to the United States. The term “extraordinary rendition” was coined in the 1990s for the kidnapping of terror suspects from one foreign country to another for interrogation.
There was concern this weekend from Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP, who said: “The very idea of kidnapping is repugnant to us and we must handle these cases with extreme caution and a thorough understanding of the implications in American law.”
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said: “This law may date back to bounty hunting days, but they should sort it out if they claim to be a civilised nation.”
The US Justice Department declined to comment.
Additional reporting: Anna Mikhailova
© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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19:43
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disturbing the comfortable
I came across this on an e-mail list I’m on. I think it nicely sums up the religious point-of-view.
There is only One True God, but there are many gods.
You can easily determine the One True God, because in
all cases of conflict He is on my side. Any god that is
not on my side is clearly not the One True God, and
*you* should be damned careful which you listen to!
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19:39
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disturbing the comfortable
Too bad fish are political; too bad they’re considered to be on the left-wing side of things. Anything non-human, it seems, is considered to be...well, less important than the right of white people to make as much money as they possibly can. Yeah, this is the view of the Republican Party—and it’s policy. Fish, trees, mountains, rivers, the air we breath, and the ground itself are only there to be exploited, according to the folks in power in Washington. Cut it down, dig it up, and plow it under. That’s what made this country great, they say...
When the National Research Council first said the fish in the Klamath River need more water, the administration leaned on them to change their opinion. That was so the issue could be used to milk farmers for votes to the Republicans. Actually, the Republicans can no more about the farmers in the Klamath Basin than they do about miners in Idaho or aero-space workers in Houston: groups like that are just votes. The groups that really matter to the Republicans are the ones that contribute big bribes—er, "campaign contributions."
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Too bad fish are political; too bad they’re considered to be on the left-wing side of things. Anything non-human, it seems, is considered to be...well, less important than the right of white people to make as much money as they possibly can. Yeah, this is the view of the Republican Party—and it’s policy. Fish, trees, mountains, rivers, the air we breath, and the ground itself are only there to be exploited, according to the folks in power in Washington. Cut it down, dig it up, and plow it under. That’s what made this country great, they say...
When the National Research Council first said the fish in the Klamath River need more water, the administration leaned on them to change their opinion. That was so the issue could be used to milk farmers for votes to the Republicans. Actually, the Republicans can no more about the farmers in the Klamath Basin than they do about miners in Idaho or aero-space workers in Houston: groups like that are just votes. The groups that really matter to the Republicans are the ones that contribute big bribes.
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
[seattlepi.nwsource.com] Last updated November 28, 2007 1:12 p.m. PT
New report says Klamath River fish need more water
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
PORTLAND, Ore. -- A new report confirms research indicating that salmon and other fish need more water in the Klamath River.
A National Research Council report on two separate water studies says more work is needed to integrate all the research being done on the Klamath River Basin in southern Oregon and Northern California.
But the council praises one of the studies, conducted by Utah State University. It says more water in the lower Klamath could benefit fish runs.
Meanwhile, talks are under way about the future of four aging dams operated by PacifiCorp on the Klamath River.
Federal regulators have recommended keeping them in place, but environmentalists and others say the water studies show the dams should be removed.
Last updated November 28, 2007 1:12 p.m. PT
New report says Klamath River fish need more water
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
PORTLAND, Ore. -- A new report confirms research indicating that salmon and other fish need more water in the Klamath River.
A National Research Council report on two separate water studies says more work is needed to integrate all the research being done on the Klamath River Basin in southern Oregon and Northern California.
But the council praises one of the studies, conducted by Utah State University. It says more water in the lower Klamath could benefit fish runs.
Meanwhile, talks are under way about the future of four aging dams operated by PacifiCorp on the Klamath River.
Federal regulators have recommended keeping them in place, but environmentalists and others say the water studies show the dams should be removed.
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15:57
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disturbing the comfortable
It seems to be official: 1 percent of Americans get 21% of the all the income. That was in 2005. They keep getting more and more. The bottom 50% only earned less than 13% of the income. That’s quite a difference. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, folks.
The rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer. It hasn’t been like a vast seizure of wealth, but it’s been incremental. The middle class and the poor are getting boiled alive, much the way frogs can be killed by putting them in a pan of cold water and gradually increasing the heat until they’re dead. Its slow enough that nobody actually rebels at the state of things. Everybody—except someone who’s rich—just whines more. It works out to something like this: 10% of the population owns 90% of the wealth in this banana—er, great republic.
The Wall Street Journal
October 12, 2007
Income-Inequality Gap Widens
Boom in Financial Markets
Parallels Rise in Share
For Wealthiest Americans
By GREG IP
October 12, 2007; Page A2
The richest Americans' share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and underlining the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers.
The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks.
• Widening Gap: The wealthiest Americans' share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and highlighting the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers.
• Behind the Numbers: Scholars attribute rising inequality to several factors, including technological change that favors those with more skills, and globalization and advances in communications that enlarge the rewards available to "superstar" performers whether in business, sports or entertainment.
• Political Fallout: The data pose a potential challenge for President Bush and the Republican presidential field. They have sought to play up the strength of the economy and low unemployment, and the role of Mr. Bush's tax cuts in both. Democrats may use the data to exploit middle-class angst about stagnant wages.
• See related IRS data1.
The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000.
The IRS data, based on a large sample of tax returns, are for "adjusted gross income," which is income after some deductions, such as for alimony and contributions to individual retirement accounts. While dated, many scholars prefer it to timelier data from other agencies because it provides details of the very richest -- for example, the top 0.1% and the top 1%, not just the top 10% -- and includes capital gains, an important, though volatile, source of income for the affluent.
The IRS data go back only to 1986, but academic research suggests the rich last had this high a share of total income in the 1920s.
Scholars attribute rising inequality to several factors, including technological change that favors those with more skills, and globalization and advances in communications that enlarge the rewards available to "superstar" performers whether in business, sports or entertainment.
[Unequal]
In an interview yesterday with The Wall Street Journal, President Bush said, "First of all, our society has had income inequality for a long time. Secondly, skills gaps yield income gaps. And what needs to be done about the inequality of income is to make sure people have got good education, starting with young kids. That's why No Child Left Behind is such an important component of making sure that America is competitive in the 21st century." (See article2.)
Jason Furman, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and an adviser to Democratic politicians, said: "We've had a 30-year trend of increasing inequality. There was an artificial reduction in that trend following the bursting of the stock-market bubble in 2000."
The IRS data don't identify the source of increased income for the affluent, but the boom on Wall Street has likely played a part, just as the last stock boom fueled the late-1990s surge. Until this summer, soaring stock prices and buoyant credit markets had produced spectacular payouts for private-equity and hedge-fund managers, and investment bankers.
One study by University of Chicago academics Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh concludes that in 2004 there were more than twice as many such Wall Street professionals in the top 0.5% of all earners as there are executives from nonfinancial companies.
Mr. Rauh said "it's hard to escape the notion" that the rising share of income going to the very richest is, in part, "a Wall Street, financial industry-based story." The study shows that the highest-earning hedge-fund manager earned double in 2005 what the top earner made in 2003, and top 25 hedge-fund managers earned more in 2004 than the chief executives of all the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, combined. It also shows profits per equity partner at the top 100 law firms doubling between 1994 and 2004, to over $1 million in 2004 dollars.
The data highlight the political challenge facing Mr. Bush and the Republican contenders for president. They have sought to play up the strength of the economy since 2003 and low unemployment, and the role of Mr. Bush's tax cuts in both. But many Americans think the economy is in or near a recession. The IRS data show that the median tax filer's income -- half earn less than the median, half earn more -- fell 2% between 2000 and 2005 when adjusted for inflation, to $30,881. At the same time, the income level for the tax filer just inside the top 1% grew 3%, to $364,657.
Democrats, on the other hand, have sought to exploit angst about stagnant middle-class wages and eroding benefits in showdowns with Mr. Bush over issues such as health insurance and trade.
Write to Greg Ip at greg.ip@wsj.com5
URL for this article:
[online.wsj.com] Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1)
[www.irs.gov] (2)
[online.wsj.com] (3)
[blogs.wsj.com] (4)
[blogs.wsj.com] (5) mailto:greg.ip@wsj.com
Copyright 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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15:47
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disturbing the comfortable
I’m ambivalent about Chris Hedges, most of the time. For whatever neurotic reasons, I think he’s kind of a weenie. Yeah, I know: misjudgment is one of my fortes.
This essay does a great job of deconstructing the empire and it’s crumbling facade. One thousand words: I could not do anywhere near as good a job. The problem is, though, that who cares? You know the old joke: “The biggest problem today is apathy...but who cares...”
We’re demoralized. I am and most of the people I meet feel equally powerless and cynical in the face of our government’s stupidity and bulls--t. In many countries, governments are afraid of the people—as Jefferson dreamed. In Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile, Stalin’s Russia, though, the people were afraid of the government. That’s the way it is here in America, too. The story is that back in the days of Jack Kennedy, nobody wanted to take on J.Edgar Hoover, the nutty head of the FBI, because he had the goods on just about everybody in government. He would have loved the way things are today. That’s why nobody among the Democrats is really willing to stand up to the Bush-Cheney Junta: they’re compromised. It isn’t just the blockheads like Larrry Craig or Trent Lott that have shady connections or smelly histories: the Democrats do, too. Christ, it costs so much to be elected, all of the politicians, especially the highly visible ones, have to go in debt to some sources of bad money.
America in the Time of Empire
By Chris Hedges
Truthdig
[www.truthout.org] Monday 26 November 2007
All great empires and nations decay from within. By the time they hobble off the world stage, overrun by the hordes at the gates or vanishing quietly into the pages of history books, what made them successful and powerful no longer has relevance. This rot takes place over decades, as with the Soviet Union, or, even longer, as with the Roman, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires. It is often imperceptible.
Dying empires cling until the very end to the outward trappings of power. They mask their weakness behind a costly and technologically advanced military. They pursue increasingly unrealistic imperial ambitions. They stifle dissent with efficient and often ruthless mechanisms of control. They lose the capacity for empathy, which allows them to see themselves through the eyes of others, to create a world of accommodation rather than strife. The creeds and noble ideals of the nation become empty cliches, used to justify acts of greater plunder, corruption and violence. By the end, there is only a raw lust for power and few willing to confront it.
The most damning indicators of national decline are upon us. We have watched an oligarchy rise to take economic and political power. The top 1 percent of the population has amassed more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, creating economic disparities unseen since the Depression. If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes president, we will see the presidency controlled by two families for the last 24 years.
Massive debt, much of it in the hands of the Chinese, keeps piling up as we fund absurd imperial projects and useless foreign wars. Democratic freedoms are diminished in the name of national security. And the erosion of basic services, from education to health care to public housing, has left tens of millions of citizens in despair. The displacement of genuine debate and civil and political discourse with the noise and glitter of public spectacle and entertainment has left us ignorant of the outside world, and blind to how it perceives us. We are fed trivia and celebrity gossip in place of news.
An increasing number of voices, especially within the military, are speaking to this stark deterioration. They describe a political class that no longer knows how to separate personal gain from the common good, a class driving the nation into the ground.
"There has been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders," retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of forces in Iraq, recently told the New York Times, adding that civilian officials have been "derelict in their duties" and guilty of a "lust for power."
The American working class, once the most prosperous on Earth, has been politically disempowered, impoverished and abandoned. Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. State and federal assistance programs have been slashed. The corporations, those that orchestrated the flight of jobs and the abolishment of workers' rights, control every federal agency in Washington, including the Department of Labor. They have dismantled the regulations that had made the country's managed capitalism a success for ordinary men and women. The Democratic and Republican Parties now take corporate money and do the bidding of corporate interests.
Philadelphia is a textbook example. The city has seen a precipitous decline in manufacturing jobs, jobs that allowed households to live comfortably on one salary. The city had 35 percent of its workforce employed in the manufacturing sector in 1950, perhaps the zenith of the American empire. Thirty years later, this had fallen to 20 percent. Today it is 8.8 percent. Commensurate jobs, jobs that offer benefits, health care and most important enough money to provide hope for the future, no longer exist. The former manufacturing centers from Flint, Mich., to Youngstown, Ohio, are open sores, testaments to a growing internal collapse.
The United States has gone from being the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor. As of September 2006, the country was, for the first time in a century, paying out more than it received in investments. Trillions of dollars go into defense while the nation's infrastructure, from levees in New Orleans to highway bridges in Minnesota, collapses. We spend almost as much on military power as the rest of the world combined, while Social Security and Medicare entitlements are jeopardized because of huge deficits. Money is available for war, but not for the simple necessities of daily life.
Nothing makes these diseased priorities more starkly clear than what the White House did last week. On the same day, Tuesday, President Bush vetoed a domestic spending bill for education, job training and health programs, yet signed another bill giving the Pentagon about $471 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. All this in the shadow of a Joint Economic Committee report suggesting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been twice as expensive than previously imagined, almost $1.5 trillion.
The decision to measure the strength of the state in military terms is fatal. It leads to a growing cynicism among a disenchanted citizenry and a Hobbesian ethic of individual gain at the expense of everyone else. Few want to fight and die for a Halliburton or an Exxon. This is why we do not have a draft. It is why taxes have not been raised and we borrow to fund the war. It is why the state has organized, and spends billions to maintain, a mercenary army in Iraq. We leave the fighting and dying mostly to our poor and hired killers. No nationwide sacrifices are required. We will worry about it later.
It all amounts to a tacit complicity on the part of a passive population. This permits the oligarchy to squander capital and lives. It creates a world where we speak exclusively in the language of violence. It has plunged us into an endless cycle of war and conflict that is draining away the vitality, resources and promise of the nation.
It signals the twilight of our empire.
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15:30
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disturbing the comfortable
Well, dammit, I took a bunch of photos on our trip up to Anacortes and now I can't find the bloody USB-miniUSB cable to download them. Rats. I feel like I put it someplace safe. It's very safe: it appears to be unfindable. I have absolutely no idea where it could be. Some places I've checked twice.
There doesn't seem to be any legitimate way to blame somebody else. Believe me, I've run through all possible scenarios that would put the blame elsewhere. My fault. Twenty dollar cable, too, bloody hell.
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14:31
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disturbing the comfortable
One more month and the American holiday/Holyday season will be over. Not a moment too soon, of course.
We were gone for a week. When we came back, on Saturday, the internet connection was down; we didn't get back to cyberlandia until late yesterday. I spent a half-hour with tech support: we somehow got my system back up on-line without knowing quite how we did it. Sometimes it's smart not to ask the wizard too many questions.
Something that came along and was clogged in the pipes was this link:
[www.fixingtheplanet.com] If you think about it, this link...well, it would be one hell of a christmas card.
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18:40
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disturbing the comfortable
Spinning and spinning...
One of the blog/news sites from way out west, here, has a discussion going on about the Mining Act of, I think, 1872. That old law still in effect. It's been a wonderful way for big companies to mine the public lands and not have to pay much of anything for the privlege. A few bribes here and there to make sure the law doesn't get changed too much, but it's meant companies like Anaconda, Peabody, Kennecott, and dozens of others have been able to extract billions and billions of dollars' worth of coal and copper and gold—hell, even gravel!—from land that at least in theory belongs to all of us. And then walk away from the ruins of their pasts.
There is a movement to reform that law—not to prevent egregious abominations like the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, or the ruined rivers flowing from hundreds of abandoned mines and mills, but to at least charge more for the ability to rip off the future.
Mining is as wrapped in fantasy as cattle-ranching and logging. You think of miners and you think of the old guys wandering around with their burros, looking for gold and silver all over the empty western spaces. The reality of mining, though, was the same in the west as in the east: dirty dangerous deadly work in near darkness for low wages. The big old mining towns we remember, Butte, Virginia City, Tombstone, Leadville, Silver City were ugly muddy shanty towns with overfilled cemeteries and many grieving families. It was no more romantic than chopping cotton or digging sewers. But the fantasy lives: just like people still think cowboys are the ultimate American icon, "single-blanket" prospectors still evoke dreams of never-ever land. And still have a tug on American heartstrings... just like the idea of Aunt Jemima....
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15:42
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disturbing the comfortable
Yet another story about wasted funding is in today’s WaPo. “Wasted” isn’t the right word, though. It’s like the stories about overblown contract pay-offs for incompleted work in Iraq, for defense systems that don’t work, for DHS safety inspections that overlook bombs, and a few dozen (or score? Hundred?) other examples of government spending that...well, doesn’t quite shape up.
That “wasted” money actually went exactly where it was supposed to go. Years and years ago, Robert Kennedy was conducting hearings on the food stamp program and the continuing problem of hunger in this country. (Yeah, the problem continues, doesn’t it?) Kennedy said, wtf, the food stamp program isn’t working! The Dept of Agriculture people said, oh, no, it’s working just fine. It wasn’t written to benefit the hungry; it was written to benefit the farmers!
So these kajillions of missing, misplaced, mishandled dollars...well, gee whiz, that money was destined from the beginning to end up in pockets. The administration wanted it to go to cronies, donors, and friendly folks, and they wrote the rules so the money would go to those people. Reconstruction? No, pay-back. Alleviation of suffering? No, pay-back. And so forth.
It’s a crooked system, folks, run by crooked politicians. You know their names.
FEMA Accused Of Wasting More Katrina Funding
$30 Million Misspent Last Year On Trailers in Miss., GAO Says
[www.washingtonpost.com] By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 16, 2007; A18
The Federal Emergency Management Agency wasted about $30 million last year in maintaining trailers for Hurricane Katrina survivors in Mississippi, according to a new government report. In one case cited, FEMA awarded contracts that could have cost as much as $229,000 to support one family in a single trailer -- roughly the price of a five-bedroom home in Jackson, Miss.
By not awarding work to contractors with the lowest bids, FEMA misspent $16 million, said the Government Accountability Office, Congress's audit arm. The agency misspent an additional $15 million on inspections that it could not prove were performed, preventive maintenance for which contractors falsified documents, and emergency repairs on trailers that FEMA did not own, the GAO said.
"Over 2 years have passed since the storms and FEMA is still wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars as a result of poor management and ineffective controls," the GAO concluded in a draft report to be released today. The agency said it would refer apparent criminal conduct it discovered to the Justice Department.
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17:55
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disturbing the comfortable
The famous La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles seem to have sucked away whatever morality the LA Police Department had.
No, it isn’t easy being a cop in such a huge sprawling discoordinated mess; it’s questionable that it’s easy being a cop anyway, let alone in L.A.... However, Los Angeles has come a long way since Jack Webb and "Dragnet" made the department famous.
But they’ve outdone themselves with this: in order to “reach out” to the Muslim community in L.A., the police want to identify and locate the different enclaves, neighborhoods—you know, so the police can be more sensitive and caring about issues that matter to those communities. Yeah. Uh-huh.
The Huffington Post
Welcome| November 9, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20071109/lapd-muslims/
Los Angeles Police Plan to Map Muslims
November 9, 2007 10:54 AM EST | AP
LOS ANGELES — Civil rights advocates criticized plans by the Los Angeles Police Department to map the city's Muslim communities, calling it racial profiling.
The LAPD's counterterrorism bureau plans to identify Muslim enclaves in order to determine which might be likely to become isolated and susceptible to "violent, ideologically based extremism," said Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing on Thursday.
"We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities," said Downing, who heads the counterterrorism bureau.
Downing said the plan is still in its early stages, but the LAPD wants to work with a Muslim partner and intends to have the data assembled by the University of Southern California's Center for Risk and Economic Analysis.
Downing testified about the plan before a U.S. Senate committee on Oct. 30.
In his testimony, Downing said his bureau wanted to "take a deeper look at the history, demographics, language, culture, ethnic breakdown, socioeconomic status and social interactions" of the city's Muslim communities.
There are an estimated 500,000 Muslims in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties.
On Thursday, several Muslim groups and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California sent Downing a letter expressing "grave concerns" about the program.
"Singling out individuals for investigation, surveillance, and data-gathering based on their religion constitutes religious profiling that is just as unlawful, ill-advised and deeply offensive as racial profiling," said the letter.
It was signed by representatives of the ACLU of Southern California; Muslim Advocates, a national association of Muslim lawyers; the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The plan "basically turns the LAPD officers into religious political analysts, while their role is to fight crime and enforce the laws," said Hussam Ayloush, head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who signed the letter.
However, another group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, is considering working with the LAPD on the project.
"We will work with the LAPD and give them input, while at the same time making sure that people's civil liberties are protected," said Salam al-Marayati, the council's executive director.
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17:48
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disturbing the comfortable
So the deal is this: the government can try someone as an “enemy combatant,” and can not detail exactly what evidence it has. Like “trust us, we’re the government.” This is just absolute bulls--t: immoral, unconstitutional, and unreal. It’s like the worst kind of set-up to railroad people, as bad as anything Stalin or Hitler or Pinochet did. That the United States is doing it means morally we’re no better than any tin-horn dictatorship. Which is maybe appropriate, since no matter how one looks at it, George Bush is a tin-horn.
[www.justforeignpolicy.org] Detainee lawyers see stacked deck; Guantanamo attorneys point to evidence and witnesses that are brought to their attention late -- if at all.
Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2007; A14
[www.latimes.com] The rules governing war-crimes trials here require defense lawyers and prosecutors to inform each other of witnesses they will call and evidence they will present at the military commissions.
But the vague guidance on the process known as discovery doesn't impose any obligation to make timely disclosures. Nor does it oblige the government to make its witnesses available to the defense for pretrial interviews.
Unique to the tribunal system that is governed by neither U.S. criminal law nor the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the commissions allow liberal use of classified evidence that a defendant doesn't get to see and protective orders that shield the identity of witnesses, interrogators and informants.
Defense lawyers for the terrorism suspects contend that the deck is stacked against them in preparing their cases. They say the administration officials running the tribunals can hide critical information and helpful testimony from the defense.
The extent to which the government can thwart defense preparation became apparent last week just 36 hours before the Thursday arraignment of Canadian war-crimes suspect Omar Khadr. His Navy lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler, learned then that the commissions' hierarchy had known for five years of a U.S. government employee who was an eyewitness to the 2002 firefight in Afghanistan in which Khadr is accused of having thrown the grenade that killed a U.S. Special Forces medic.
The eyewitness' account contradicts the government version of events and could exonerate Khadr of the war crimes with which he is charged: murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, spying and material support for terrorism.
"They weren't going to tell us who he was or how to get in touch with him or where he was," said Kuebler, who has been lobbying the Canadian government to demand repatriation of his client so he can be tried "in a legitimate system."
"This is a process that's not designed to be fair; it's designed to produce convictions," Kuebler added.
Kuebler described as "draconian" the government's use of protective orders -- a move to shield evidence on grounds that its disclosure would reveal intelligence tactics, undermine security or pose a risk to the person providing it.
Affidavits sworn by bounty hunters in Pakistan who turned over more than 200 of Guantanamo's prisoners in exchange for sums upward of $5,000 are among the classified documents that neither defendants nor trial observers are allowed to see.
That withholding of classified information from the defense and the public has resulted in many of the 305 prisoners here remaining in detention for nearly six years without knowing exactly what they are accused of or who made the accusations.
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disturbing the comfortable
The following is a little piece that came down from Wired, somehow. I’m not sure how it arrived. I’m pretty sure the reportage is factual: I mean this is just stupid and bureaucratic (which I realize is redundant) enough to be real.
God help us all.
WIRED: WATCH WHAT THEY EAT
When word broke in 2002 that the feds were picking out terror suspects based on what they ordered for dinner, most observers figured it was a glitch during the War on Terror's beta test — a one-time overreach. Turns out the strategy has been employed again.
"The FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists," CQ's Jeff Stein reports.
The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area…
But at least it's refinement to the 2002 version of the technique. Back then, federally-employed data-mining software labeled someone as a potential terrorist "if you were a person who frequently ordered pizza and paid with a credit card."
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15:58
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disturbing the comfortable
Sometimes, it’s hard to remember what are the “freedoms” our enemies are supposed to hate us for. Freedom from torture? No... The right of habeas corpus? Um, no, not that one... The freedom to travel? That one appears to be on the auction block. Freedom of speech? Kinda—at least if you don’t care what kind of labels the government lays on you or how many files they have with your name in them... How about being from a peaceful nation? Forget that!
Biden and Kennedy have introduced legislation to ban “waterboarding,” which is currently the torture-of-choice of the Bush-Cheney Junta. The nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, said it wasn’t really illegal unless congress passed legislation making it illegal—and, of course, such legislation were signed into law by His Excellency, President Bush. That's not going to happen: let's get real.
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted on Thu, Nov. 08, 2007
Two Democrats move to outlaw waterboarding
Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers
[www.mcclatchydc.com] last updated: November 07, 2007 07:52:53 PM
WASHINGTON — The practice of waterboarding would be outlawed specifically, along with other extreme interrogation techniques, under legislation pushed by two Democratic senators.
The measures would repudiate the Bush administration’s policy on torture. The CIA reportedly has used waterboarding — or simulated drowning — when questioning terrorism suspects. It’s also used exposure to extreme temperatures and other methods that are expressly forbidden by the Army Field Manual. The proposed bills would require that all U.S. personnel — including the CIA — use only interrogation techniques authorized by the Army manual.
Last month, President Bush’s choice for attorney general, Michael Mukasey, refused to say whether waterboarding was torture and therefore illegal. And an executive order that President Bush released in July on what techniques the CIA could use was silent on whether waterboarding and other extreme measures were among them.
Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., have offered separate bills that make the Army manual the standard for all U.S. interrogators. All members of the military by law already must abide by the manual. The proposed law would require civilians to do the same.
However, it’s unlikely that the Senate will debate the matter before the end of the year. The legislative calendar is jammed, sponsors of these measures must round up support and Republicans may be reluctant to tie the CIA’s hands against the Bush administration’s will.
Similar legislation is expected soon in the House of Representatives.
“We need to send a clear message that torture, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees, is unacceptable and is not permitted by U.S. law. Period,” Biden said in a letter to senators.
Michael V. Hayden, the director of the CIA, argued at a Council on Foreign Relations talk in September that the CIA shouldn't be limited to the Army Field Manual’s requirements on interrogation.
“It's clear that what it is we do as an agency is different from what is contained in the Army Field Manual. I don't know of anyone who has looked at the Army Field Manual who could make the claim that what's contained in there exhausts the universe of lawful interrogation techniques consistent with the Geneva Convention,” he said.
U.S. law and international treaties have long banned torture. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 said all U.S. personnel must not treat detainees in cruel, inhuman and degrading ways. But backers of the proposed bills say they’re needed because the Bush administration has interpreted the law in a way that leaves open the possibility that the CIA can use the extreme techniques.
Biden said his bill would end “the administration’s semantic games on what constitutes torture. . . . There is no place for the administration’s bad faith interpretation — of waterboarding and other forms of torture — to gain a toehold.” He also warned that “continuing to equivocate about torture” would weaken the coalitions needed to fight terrorism, fuel terrorist recruitment and place Americans in jeopardy.
Biden’s legislation also would close the “black sites” outside the United States where detainees have been held, grant detainees at Guantanamo the right to challenge their imprisonment in court and require the administration to go to a special court and make the case that any non-American terrorist suspect it wants to send to another country wouldn't be tortured there. Kennedy’s bill is limited to interrogations.
“This involves taking on the administration in a very big way,” said Elisa Massimino, an international rights expert with the advocacy group Human Rights First.
The White House’s July order allowed the CIA to restart its secret detention and interrogation program, which had been put on hold in 2006, Massimino said.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the proposed restrictions on CIA interrogations were unnecessary. Graham, a judge advocate general in the Air Force Reserves, said he was briefed on how the CIA interrogates suspected terrorists. “I think the president’s CIA program has found the right balance,” he said “It’s lawful; it’s effective. It’s different from the military’s, but still within bounds.”
Graham said he believed that waterboarding was illegal for any branch of government.
McClatchy Newspapers 2007
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11:19
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disturbing the comfortable
I was reading a column by Dan Savage (The Stranger, the Seattle alternative weekly) about one of the more recent GOP fiascos. Here’s a quote I like:
GOP sex scandals have unnerved and alienated the Republican base and shredded the party's claim to moral superiority. GOP no longer stands for Grand Old Party. It's Gross Old Perverts now.
Amen, Brother Dan.
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disturbing the comfortable
The question isn’t why is Canadian money worth more than American money, but why in the hell aren’t people out to tar and feather the administration in Washington? The ultimate failure of “free market” theory in the American economy is evident. Christ, even big time fashion models are refusing to be paid in U.S. dollars.
This is another nice present from the Bush-Cheney junta...Well, I guess if nothing else, I should give them credit for accelerating the collapse of the American Empire. It was historically inevitable, though I wish it wasn’t so hard on so many relatively innocent people.
Canadian dollar passes US$1.10 mark in overseas trade Wednesday.
[ca.news.yahoo.com]
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disturbing the comfortable
It’s a great day for the...racists... I think we can say—well, s--t, Beth just came through running the vacuum and announced that the box springs are all torn up under the bed...I’m not surprised: we’ve never figured out how to really keep the cats from ripping around down there. She shouldn’t be, either...But it’s something that’s momentarily important, I guess...sort of like whatever I was going to say about the following news story—
Immigration Director Hosts Party With Guest In Blackface
By Paddy , Brave New Films
Posted on November 6, 2007, Printed on November 6, 2007
[www.alternet.org] This post, written by Paddy, originally appeared on Cliff Schecter's Brave New Blog
This woman is just too much.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Department of Homeland Security will investigate a Halloween costume party hosted by a top immigration official and attended by a man dressed in a striped prison outfit, dreadlocks and darkened skin make-up, a costume some say is offensive, the department's secretary said.
Julie Myers, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and host of the fundraising party, was on a three-judge panel that originally praised the prisoner costume for "originality."
"Some say" is offensive? What the hell is unoffensive about a man in blackface, dreadlocks and a prison uniform?
Any sane manager of anything would know this is unacceptable.... oh, wait- seems this Julie Myers is another of Bush's crony appointments who has NO qualifications for the job, at all.
Concerns over Myers, 36, were acute enough at a Senate hearing last week that lawmakers asked the nominee to detail during her testimony her postings and to account for her management experience. Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) went so far as to tell Myers that her résumé indicates she is not qualified for the job.
(snip)
Her uncle is Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She married Chertoff's current chief of staff, John F. Wood, on Saturday.
That is what serves as qualifications in Bush's government.
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disturbing the comfortable
Another piece of news about First Americans. A fight has been going on for years back at the University of Illinois over their use of the offensive mascot, Chief Illiniwek (think of Sambo and Aunt Jemima and add feathers—it’s that bad).
[www.smirkingchimp.com)] The Sad Resurrection of Chief Illiniwek
By Dave Zirin
Created Oct 31 2007 - 8:54am
Last weekend an unfortunate figure returned to the University of Illinois, and it wasn't Jeff George. Chief Illiniwek, the former school mascot, was back to adorn floats and assorted regalia at Homecoming to the cheers of some and the bitter horror of those who thought the feathered one had been retired for good.
You may have thought that the Chief was banned last year after the NCAA called Illiniwek a "hostile or abusive" mascot and prevented the school from hosting postseason games as long as it paraded him about. You may have thought Illinois had joined dozens of other schools from Stanford to St. John's in putting Native American caricatures to bed. You thought wrong.
A victory 20 years in the making was overturned when Illinois chancellor Richard Herman declared that the Homecoming ban violated the U.S. constitution saying, "The University values free speech and free expression and considers Homecoming floats, decorations, costumes and related signage all representations of such personal expression."
Yes, our forefathers fought and died to protect the right to display caricatures of the conquered at public institutions of higher learning. The word Illiniwek means "tribe of superior men." In making the decision to allow Chief Illiniwek to return, Herman acted in a manner of the inferior, following instead of leading.
Those whose heart is with the dancing chief were thrilled, calling Homecoming "a victory parade." The organization Students for Chief Illini issued a statement saying that the original policy was a "slap in the face to people in the community to say you can't support your symbol." In an irony that could only be found in the bizarre lexicon of university political correctness, the group uses the world "symbol" instead of "mascot" because the term "mascot" is offensive to Chief Illiniwek.
Keep in mind, that there never was a Chief Illiniwek. No one with that name ever existed. His costume is not in keeping with anything the Illini tribe ever wore and the dance at halftime was created in 1926 by the Boy Scouts. But by all means support such a noble symbol.
The Chief was certainly celebrated at Homecoming. No counter protestors were reported and thousands of attendees wore Chief regalia. Although no Native American organizations support the Chief, he was celebrated lustily.
The same students and alumni that clamor for the Chief as a symbol of Native American nobility, put far more time and energy into a fictional chief than aiding actual Native Americans. Students of Native American descent are a mere 0.2% of the overall student population, and 0.1% of the faculty. "Honoring" Native Americans is confined to a white guy in buckskin pants and feathers (only whites have portrayed the Chief throughout it's 81-year history).
There was little said about the fact that while Chief Illiniwek never existed, the Illini tribe did. They were torn apart, forcibly removed so schools like Illinois could take root. Chief Ron Froman of the Peoria tribe once said of the Chief, "I don't think it was to honor us, because, hell, they ran our (butts) out of Illinois."
Since there is nothing honorable about resurrecting the Chief, is it then an issue of freedom of speech? In a letter to Chancellor Herman, professor Antonia Darder wrote, "If a float maker wants to use KKK imagery or a noose hanging from a tree on a homecoming float, is this now also acceptable under the auspices of 'free expression?' Or if a float maker wants to use images of people copulating or nude participants on a float, would this also be accepted as the freedom of personal expression? And if not, why not? Certainly if public nudity is considered immoral or at least inappropriate, why not public racism?"
This is the climate in which Herman resurrects the Chief. The latest in this marathon battle of memory, history, and the role of sports in this process comes two weeks after the death of Native American activist and longtime leader of the American Indian Movement, Vernon Bellecourt.
Bellecourt spent years as a thorn in the side of organizations like the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, demanding that they change their mascots. He once said, "Our detractors always say, 'We are honoring you.' It's not an honor. In whose honor, we have to ask. Beginning with the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, about 16 million of us were wiped out, including whole villages in Washington."
To other teams with Indian nicknames and to their fans, he said, "No more chicken feathers ... No more paint on faces. The chop stops here."
Maybe the University of Illinois should step up and honor Bellecourt by putting Chief Illiniwek to rest -- for good.
_______
Source URL:
[www.smirkingchimp.com]
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15:22
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disturbing the comfortable
Activist and actor Floyd Red Crow Westerman is sick. So, pray for him, light sage, candles, whatever you choice is.
Brothers and sisters,
Floyd still is not out of the woods. We have lots of people at his bedside holding vigil. But he is still really in a bad way.
WE NEED YOUR PRAYERS!!
Please do not try and call Floyd or Rosie. Floyds Phone is full of messages and we are not going to empty them right now. You can e-mail me and let me know that you are praying for him. I will make a record of the people who send me e-mails and tell him.
Right now we are told that he can hear us when we talk to him. But for the most part he is unconcious. We are up there singing to him and trying to get through to him. Keith Secola came fly in yesterday. He went in right away and sang to Floyd. Floyd seemed to respond to that.
Please send your prayers and your energy to help Floyd.
Anaquad
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disturbing the comfortable
What does this mean?
I believe it means that the government is no longer there for our benefit. The government is there because it controls everyone, one way or another. You want to travel overseas? OK, be a good little boy or girl or else you can't go...
That's what totalitarianism means.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/9/17/9846/64393 Daily Kos
The Nightmare of DHS´s *Secure Flight*
by Blue Patriot Woman
Mon Sep 17, 2007 at 10:34:23 AM PDT
Buried in the September 5 issue of the Federal Register, was a notice that this Thursday, September 20, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) will hold public hearings on their ¨Secure Flight Plan.¨
Come with me into a nightmare world where American citizens will have to obtain permission from the government before they can travel by air in the U.S.
* Blue Patriot Woman's diary :: ::
*
Your government (meaning the Department of Homeland Security) is up to no good.
Beginning in February 2008, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will implement their ¨Advance Passenger Information System (APIS),¨ the gist of which is that you will need permission from the United States Government to travel on any air or sea vessel that goes to, from or through the U.S. The travel companies will not be able to issue a boarding pass until you are cleared by DHS. This applies to ALL passengers, US citizens and visitors alike. And how do you get said permission to travel? That´s for your government to know and you to never find out.
Now TSA proposes to do for domestic travel what APIS will do for international routes. That´s what I said: the new TSA rule would require that you obtain PERMISSION to travel within the U.S.
Here is the summary of their proposed rules, which seem so reasonable, couched as they are in the blandness of governmenteez [emphasis added].
The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to assume from aircraft operators the function of conducting pre-flight comparisons of airline passenger information to Federal Government watch lists for international and domestic flights.
[snip]
This rule proposes to allow TSA to ... receive passenger and certain non-traveler information, conduct watch list matching ... and transmit boarding pass printing instructions back to aircraft operators.
[snip]
TSA would do so in a consistent and accurate manner while minimizing false matches and protecting privacy information.
Right. And I have a bridge in Brooklyn...
We propose that, when the Secure Flight rule becomes final, aircraft operators would submit passenger information to DHS through a single DHS portal for both the Secure Flight and APIS programs. This would [result] in one DHS system responsible for watch list matching for all aviation passengers.
Don´t you feel great knowing that your government will use economies of scale to protect you?
Edward Hasbrough states that these rules are more insidious than merely complying to demands for ¨Your papers please.¨ He states,
The proposal ... require[s] that travellers display their government-issued credentials not to government agents but to airline personnel (staff or contractors), whenever the DHS orders the airline to demand them. But since the orders to demand ID of [certain passengers] will be given to the airline in secret, ... travellers will have no way to verify whether ... demands for ID are actually based on government orders.
Think about that: you will not be allowed to verify if the person demanding your papers is actually authorized to do so. In addition, the airlines or their contractors (or sub or even sub sub contractors) have the right, under the proposed rules, to do anything they like with your personal information including:
keep copies of your passport ... as long as they like, use it, publish it, broadcast it, sell it, rent it, or pass it on to whomever they please.... [T]hey would have no obligation to get your permission for any of this.
Aside from the privacy issue, this is the DHS. Their past performance is an indication of future returns and we can look forward to true travel nightmares beginning February 19, 2008. Just think about the mess that occurred when CBP demanded that travelers to Canada and Mexico have a passport. Multiply that by orders of magnitude to imagine what travelers will be facing.
***
The Identity Project at Papers Please is working to prevent your government from robbing you of your right to privacy in your movements.
© Kos Media, LLC
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disturbing the comfortable
Thanks, Andre, for this reminder of how history is written by the victors and isn’t necessarily closely involved with truth.
Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 03:02:09 +0000
Subject: How It Got Started (holidaze)
How it all got started.
The year was 1637. 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe,
gathered for their "Annual Green Corn Dance" in the area that is now
known as Groton, Conn.
While they were gathered in this place of meeting, they were surrounded
and attacked by mercenaries of the English and Dutch. The Indians were
ordered from the building and as they came forth, they were shot down.
The rest were burned alive in the building.
The next day, the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared: "A
day of Thanksgiving, thanking God that they had eliminated over 700 men,
women and children. For the next 100 years, every "Thanksgiving Day"
ordained by a Governor or President was to honor that victory, thanking
God that the "battle" had been won.
Source: Documents of Holland, 13 Volume Colonial Documentary History,
letters and reports form colonial officials to their superiors and the
King in England and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British
Indian agent for the New York colony for 30 years.
Researched by William B. Newell (Penobscot Tribe) Former Chairman of the
University of Connecticut Anthropology Department.
[www.genealogyforum.rootsweb.com] A lecture presented at the Smithsonian in 1993, called "The First
Thanksgiving: Myths and Legends" by Dr. James Loewen of the University
of Vermont. (Another opinion regarding Thanksgiving traditions and
myths, thoughtfully provided by the renowned Jeremy Bangs, can be found
at
[hnn.us] Here are some of the nuggets from
the 1993 Smithsonian lecture:
Myth: The 1620 Plymouth Pilgrim's Thanksgiving was the first in America
Fact: In 1620, the Indians had been in North America for some 40,000
years, no doubt celebrating harvest before 1620.
Fact: There were Europeans in North America well before 1526 - there was
an established Spanish settlement in SC in 1526, which included African
slaves. The Spanish left, and the Africans remained. So the longest
continuous settlement in North America after the Indians is the African
Americans.
The Spanish had lasting settlements in FL by 1565, and in NM by 1598.
The English were in Jamestown VA in 1607, and Dutch were settled in
Albany NY in 1614. So the 1620 "Pilgrims" (who called themselves
"Separatists" - the name "Pilgrim" was tacked on by historians) were
hardly the hosts of the "First Thanksgiving".
The Indians there did not roam and wander and live in tepees. The New
England tribes were settled farmers, with fields of crops. The foods
they brought to the "First Thanksgiving" had been staples of their
farming for years - and they taught the colonists how to plant and use
them.
Myth: Mysterious Error in American History Books
Fact: Little or nothing appears in school texts about a monumental event
that happened in New England from 1616-1619 when a "plague" (probably
carried by European visitors) killed 90% of the Indian population. When
the Plymouth Colony was founded in 1620/21, then, the Indians were
decimated and could offer no resistance. It took 50 years for their
numbers to regenerate - and King Philip's War of 1676 was the first
massive resistance - but by then the English were well established and
prevailed.
I bet if we asked 100 otherwise educated people what the biggest crisis
was in the New England native community in the years immediately
preceding the arrival of the English Plymouth colony - I wonder how many
would know it was this terrible disease.
The speaker asked the audience to go home and check their kids' American
history textbooks and see if it was featured.
Samuel Eliot Morison's "Builders of the Bay Colony" (1930) describes it
briefly - and the Pilgrim's less-than-"friendly" attitude towards it
(p.13), citing contemporary writings: "It was fortunate for the Pilgrims
that a pestilence among the Indians of Massachusetts Bay - a special
dispensation of Providence in the opinion of Captain John Smith and
Thomas Morton - had decimated the tribes along our coast 1617-18....The
few Indians who had any spirit left had it knocked out of them by Miles
Standish and his army of eight. This advantage became all the more
palpable when in 1622 an uprising of the Indians in Virginia set that
colony back a decade...."
Our "myth" of the "friendship" between Indians and Plymouth colonists
may have been overdone in our schoolbooks .....
Myth: The word "Thanksgiving" didn't apply to harvest feasts
Fact: There were autumnal "harvest" festivals and feasts in Europe for
centuries, and since the first settled European colony was in Virginia
in 1607 - not Massachusetts in 1620/1 - we can expect that the Jamestown
Colony might have well celebrated their survival with such a group
feast. Stephen Hopkins, of the Plymouth Colony, had been in Virginia
years earlier.
One of the Plymouth colonists described such a meal in New England in a
contemporary "advertisement" .... Edward Winslow. Quoting from Eugene
Aubrey Stratton's "Plymouth Colony: Its History and People 1620-1691" .
Ancestry Pub. Co. (Salt Lake City:1986), pp. 24-25.
"Our harvest being gotten in, our Governour sent foure men on fowling,
that so we might after a more speciall manner rejoyce together, after we
had gathered the fruit of our labours; they foure in one day killed as
much fowle, as with a little helpe beside, served the Company almost a
weeke, at which time among other Recreations, we exercised our Armes,
many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest
King Massasoyt, with some nintie men, whom for three days we entertained
and feasted, and they went out and killed five Deere, which they brought
to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governour, and upon the Captaine,
and others. And although it be not always so plentifull, as it was at
this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so farre from
want, that we often wish you partakers of our plentie..."
Stratton points out that Winslow wrote this to be sent to England to
attract new settlers, and that he no doubt greatly overstated the
settlers being "farre from want" - as they all suffered greatly from
hunger for many years in the new colony.
Besides deer and game birds, they might well have eaten the new food
introduced to them by the Indians - corn, plus peas and barley. In 1621,
Winslow reported "we set... some twentie acres of Indian Corn and sowed
some six Acres of Barly and Pease." The main beverages were water and
beer. In a letter of 1623 describing another celebration for a wedding,
records mentioned eating "the best grapes .. divers sorts of plums and
nuts..." And they had fish and lobster - Winslow also wrote: "God fedd
them out of the sea for the most parte."
So the foods we often use today - turkey, peas, corn, fruits and nuts -
would have been available to the Pilgrims. No word about cranberries
although the major source of them today is still Plymouth County!
The word "Thanksgiving" was not applied to any feasts like this. A 1636
law recorded in Plymouth County Records mentioned "..solemn days of
humiliation by fastings, etc., and also for thanksgiving as occasion
shall be offered." Stratton presents that a "thanksgiving" was a
religious end to a fasting period, and refers to another book, W.D.D.
Love's "Fast and Thanksgiving Days In New England" (1896) for other
data.
As previously noted, the above discussion of the myths of
Thanksgiving come from a fascinating lecture presented at the
Smithsonian in 1993, called "The First Thanksgiving: Myths and Legends"
by Dr. James Loewen of the University of Vermont. An alternating opinion
regarding Thanksgiving traditions and myths associated with them,
provided by the renowned Jeremy Bangs, can be found at
[hnn.us]
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10:44
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disturbing the comfortable
I really love the way America supports democratic regimes around the world. We hold other countries to the same standards we uphold here at home. And that's the problem...
Activists detained in Pakistan emergency
Opposition Leaders, Activists Arrested in Pakistan After Musharraf Imposes Emergency Rule
MATTHEW PENNINGTON
AP News
[talkingpointsmemo.com] Nov 04, 2007 09:25 EST
Police wielding assault rifles rounded up opposition leaders and rights activists Sunday after Pakistan's military ruler suspended the constitution, ousted the top justice and deployed troops to fight what he called rising Islamic extremism.
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup but had promised to hand over his army fatigues and become a civilian president this year, declared a state of emergency Saturday night, dashing hopes of a smooth transition to democracy for the nuclear-armed nation.
"Gen. Musharraf's second coup," read the headline in the Dawn daily. "It is martial law," said the Daily Times.
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said the extraordinary measures would remain in place "as long as it is necessary." He also said parliamentary elections could be postponed up to a year, but no such decision had been made.
Aziz also said that up to 500 opposition activists had been arrested in the last 24 hours.
Among those detained were Javed Hashmi, the acting president of the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif; cricket star-turned politician, Imran Khan; Asma Jehangir, chairman of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan; and Hamid Gul, former chief of the main intelligence agency and a staunch critic of Musharraf's support for the U.S.-led war on terror.
Some 200 armed police stormed the rights commission office in Lahore on Sunday and arrested about 50 activists, said Mehbood Ahmed Khan, a legal officer for the body.
***
Attorney General Malik Mohammed Qayyum denied claims by Bhutto and others that Musharraf had imposed martial law — direct rule by the army — under the guise of a state of emergency. He noted the prime minister was still in place and that parliament would complete its term, ending Nov. 15.
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14:15
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disturbing the comfortable
Rowdy Rudy G., of course, tells us how much better American health care is compared to England’s “socialized medicine.” Bill Maher made the comment that Rudy pulled the statistics out of his ass. It’s too bad that the Republicans consider the man, so far, as a viable candidate for president. I suppose, compared to Dubya, he is—but by the current president, an armadillo would be a viable candidate. Even a dead armadillo. In the middle of the road.
America’s health care, like our standard of living, has eroded in the last twenty or thirty years. It’s all well and good that our tories jump up and down waving flags and crosses and guns and proclaim jihad against non-believers and those who question our greatness. But not when they have to lie to do it. Just as Bush lied and people died, the health care boosters are lying while people are dying.
US healthcare comes up short in survey of 7 nations
Thu Nov 1, 2007 12:00am EDT
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
[www.reuters.com] WASHINGTON, Nov 1 (Reuters) - Americans spend double what people in other industrialized countries do on health care, but have more trouble seeing doctors, are the victims of more errors and go without treatment more often, according to a report released on Thursday.
Patients in the Netherlands struggle the most with paperwork, while British and Canadian citizens wait the longest for elective surgery, the Commonwealth Fund reports in the journal Health Affairs.
The report, published on the Internet at
[content.healthaffairs.org] provides an annual comparison from the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports research on health systems.
This year it may be especially important as the 2008 U.S. elections are featuring health care reform as one of the most important issues, fund president Karen Davis said.
"The survey shows that in the U.S., we pay the price for having a fragmented health care system," Davis told reporters in a telephone briefing.
Harris Interactive researchers surveyed 12,000 adults in the United States, Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Of these, only the United States lacks a universal health care system.
The report said Americans spent $6,697 per capita on healthcare in 2005, or 16 percent of gross domestic product. All the other countries spent less than half of that -- $3,128 in Australia or 9.5 percent of GDP, $3,326 in Canada or 9.8 percent of GDP, down to a low of $2,343 in New Zealand or 9 percent of GDP.
Davis said the Netherlands is included for the first time and is interesting because of its mix of mandated employer-sponsored, private and public insurance.
STANDING OUT BUT NOT OUTSTANDING
The report found that the United States stands out because of its expense and people's dissatisfaction.
"The thing that struck me in this survey is the trouble that Americans have in getting to see their own doctors," Davis said. Americans and Canadians often go to emergency departments for what should be routine care, the survey found.
"As in previous surveys, U.S. adults were most likely to have gone without care because of cost and to have high out-of-pocket costs," the report reads.
"In the U.S., nearly two of five (37 percent) of all adults and 42 percent of those with chronic conditions had skipped medications, not seen a doctor when sick, or foregone recommended care in the past year because of costs -- rates well above all other countries," it adds.
"In contrast to the U.S., patients in Canada, the Netherlands, and the U.K. rarely report having to forgo needed medical care because of costs."
Patients in New Zealand and Britain had the least confidence of getting top-notch care.
German and U.S. adults had the quickest access to elective surgery. "In most countries, waits of a year or more were rare; in Canada and the United Kingdom, though, 8 percent reported waiting that long, and 15 percent reported waiting six months or more for elective surgery," the report reads.
Having a "medical home" -- such as an easily reached primary care doctor who coordinates other care -- seemed to provide the most satisfaction, said Commonwealth vice president Cathy Schoen, who led the study.
© Reuters 2006.
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13:59
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disturbing the comfortable
Naomi Klein, again. Looking at the new and (un)improved private fire fighting technology.
The fires in Southern California, as predictable as a TV news anchor’s make-up, have again decimated thousands of acres and thousands of lives. The lucky ones have insurance and extra protection; the unlucky ones are poor—and that says it all.
Rapture Rescue 911: Disaster Response for the Chosen
By Naomi Klein
The Nation
[www.truthout.org] 19 November 2007 Issue
I used to worry that the United States was in the grip of extremists who sincerely believed that the Apocalypse was coming and that they and their friends would be airlifted to heavenly safety. I have since reconsidered. The country is indeed in the grip of extremists who are determined to act out the biblical climax-the saving of the chosen and the burning of the masses - but without any divine intervention. Heaven can wait. Thanks to the booming business of privatized disaster services, we're getting the Rapture right here on earth.
Just look at what is happening in Southern California. Even as wildfires devoured whole swaths of the region, some homes in the heart of the inferno were left intact, as if saved by a higher power. But it wasn't the hand of God; in several cases it was the handiwork of Firebreak Spray Systems. Firebreak is a special service offered to customers of insurance giant American International Group (AIG) - but only if they happen to live in the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country. Members of the company's Private Client Group pay an average of $19,000 to have their homes sprayed with fire retardant. During the wildfires, the "mobile units" - racing around in red firetrucks - even extinguished fires for their clients.
One customer described a scene of modern-day Revelation. "Just picture it. Here you are in that raging wildfire. Smoke everywhere. Flames everywhere. Plumes of smoke coming up over the hills," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Here's a couple guys showing up in what looks like a firetruck who are experts trained in fighting wildfire and they're there specifically to protect your home."
And your home alone. "There were a few instances," one of the private firefighters told Bloomberg News, "where we were spraying and the neighbor's house went up like a candle." With public fire departments cut to the bone, gone are the days of Rapid Response, when everyone was entitled to equal protection. Now, increasingly intense natural disasters will be met with the new model: Rapture Response.
During last year's hurricane season, Florida homeowners were offered similarly high-priced salvation by HelpJet, a travel agency launched with promises to turn "a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation." For an annual fee, a company concierge takes care of everything: transport to the air terminal, luxurious travel, bookings at five-star resorts. Most of all, HelpJet is an escape hatch from the kind of government failure on display during Katrina. "No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first class experience."
HelpJet is about to get some serious competition from some much larger players. In northern Michigan, during the same week that the California fires raged, the rural community of Pellston was in the grip of an intense public debate. The village is about to become the headquarters for the first fully privatized national disaster response center. The plan is the brainchild of Sovereign Deed, a little-known start-up with links to the mercenary firm Triple Canopy. Like HelpJet, Sovereign Deed works on a "country-club type membership fee," according to the company's vice president, retired Brig. Gen. Richard Mills. In exchange for a one-time fee of $50,000 followed by annual dues of $15,000, members receive "comprehensive catastrophe response services" should their city be hit by a manmade disaster that can "cause severe threats to public health and/or well-being" (read: a terrorist attack), a disease outbreak or a natural disaster. Basic membership includes access to medicine, water and food, while those who pay for "premium tiered services" will be eligible for VIP rescue missions.
Like so many private disaster companies, Sovereign Deed is selling escape from climate change and the failed state - by touting the security clearance and connections its executives amassed while working for that same state. So Mills, speaking recently in Pellston, explained, "The reality of FEMA is that it has no infrastructure, and a lot of our National Guard is elsewhere." Sovereign Deed, on the other hand, claims to have "direct access and special arrangements with several national and international information centers. These proprietary arrangements allow our Emergency Operations Center to...give our Members that critical head start in times of crisis." In this secular version of the Rapture, God's hand is unnecessary. Not when you have retired ex-CIA agents and ex-Special Forces lifting the chosen to safety - no need to pray, just pay. And who needs a celestial New Jerusalem when you can have Pellston, with its flexible local politicians and its surprisingly modern regional airport?
Sovereign Deed could soon find itself competing with Blackwater USA, whose CEO, Erik Prince, wrote recently of his plans to offer "full spectrum" services, including humanitarian aid in disasters. When fires broke out in San Diego County, near the proposed site of the controversial Blackwater West base, the company immediately seized the opportunity to make its case. Blackwater could have been the "tactical operation center for East County fires," said company vice president Brian Bonfiglio. "Can you imagine how much of a benefit it would be if we were operational now?" To show off its capacity, Blackwater has been distributing badly needed food and blankets to people of Potrero, California. "This is something we've always done," Bonfiglio said. "This is what we do." Actually, what Blackwater does, as Iraqis have painfully learned, is not protect entire communities or countries but "protect the principal" - the principal being whoever has paid Blackwater for its guns and gear.
The same pay-to-be-saved logic governs this entire new sector of country club disaster management. There is, of course, another principle that could guide our collective responses in a disaster-prone world: the simple conviction that every life is of equal value.
For anyone out there who still believes in that wild idea, the time has urgently arrived to protect the principle.
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13:52
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disturbing the comfortable
The synopsis of this Barbara Ehrenreich rap would be something like “As long as it’s trendy, we don’t care where it comes from.”
That’s the way it is, these days.
AlterNet
Gap Kids: New Frontiers in Child Abuse
By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbaraehrenreich.com
Posted on November 2, 2007, Printed on November 2, 2007
[www.alternet.org] It was enough to make you vomit all over your new denim jacket. The Gap has been caught using child labor in an Indian sweatshop, and not just child labor -- child slaves. As extensively reported on the news, the children, some as young as ten, were worked 16 hour days, fed bowls of mosquito-covered rice, and forced to sleep on a roof and use over-flowing latrines. Those who slowed down were beaten with rubber pipes and the ones who cried had oily cloths stuffed in their mouths.
But let's try to look at this dispassionately -- not as a human rights issue but as a PR disaster, ranking right up there with the 1982 discovery of cyanide in Tylenol capsules. Think of this as a case study in a corporate Crisis Communication course: How is The Gap handling the problem, and could it do better?
This is not the first time The Gap has been caught using child labor, but CEO Martha Hansen went on the air to state that the situation was "completely unacceptable" and that the company would "act swiftly." Two problems here: One, she failed to detail the actions. It would have been nice, for example, if she had announced that some of the top-producing child slaves would be reassigned to manage Gap outlets in American malls, and that the under-performers would be adopted by Angelina Jolie.
The other, more serious, problem is that she got defensive about child labor. This is the mistake Kathie Lee Gifford made in 1996. When accused of using child labor in Honduras to manufacture her Kathie Lee line of clothing, Gifford broke into tears on TV. Maybe Hansen meant to cover herself by saying that The Gap would not "ever, ever condone any child laborer making our garments" rather than saying the company does not condone child labor itself. We already knew, from the rubber pipes and oily cloths, that The Gap does not condone much from its child laborers.
Hansen underestimated the potential support for a full-throated defense of child labor. More and more American children are tried and punished as adults today. And the ubiquitous conservative pundit William Kristol will surely be enthusiastic, considering his recent -- though possibly facetious -- statement that "whenever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it's a good idea."
The core of the argument, though, is that anyone who opposes child labor has not witnessed its opposite, which is child unemployment and idleness.
Hansen claims to be a mother herself, but I wonder how often she has returned home from a hard day in the C-suites to find her unemployed offspring Magic Marker-ing the walls and crushing the Froot Loops into the carpet. This is what jobless children do: They rub Crazy Glue into their siblings' hair; they spill apple juice onto your keyboard. Believe me, I see this kind of wantonly destructive behavior every day. Vandalism is a way of life for unemployed children, and they do not know the meaning of remorse.
In fact, corporate America should go further and make a strong statement against the sickening culture of dependency that has grown up around childhood. Why are jobless children so criminally inclined? Because they know that whatever damage they inflict, the Froot Loops will just keep coming. The Gap should portray its child-staffed factories as part of a far-seeing welfare-to-work program, which will eventually be extended to American children as well.
To appeal to American parents, our own child factories should be run more like Montessori schools, where the children are already encouraged to regard every one of their demented activities as "work." If they're going to pile up blocks and knock them down all day, then why not sew on buttons and bring home a little cash? But even American families will have to brace themselves for the inevitable cost cutting measures. First the cookies and milk may have to go, then, as in India, the toilets and beds. Wal-Mart has already pioneered the price-cutting defense of human rights abuses, and The Gap should follow suit.
The company can of course expect some lingering opposition. Just as there are vegetarians and pacifists, there will always be some men, for example, who would rather wear skirts than blue jeans impregnated with the excrement and tears of ten-year-olds. Well, let them shop at American Apparel or some other "sweat-free" vendor, and if they can't find anything there, let them wear dhotis. In a nation that cannot bring itself to extend child health insurance (SCHIP) to all children in need, child-made clothes make a fine fashion statement. And why not accessorize your denim jacket with a scarf derived from one of those oily cloths stuffed in weeping workers' mouths?
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
[www.alternet.org]
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10:56
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disturbing the comfortable
While we're sitting in line waiting to gas up, here's a piece on American Indians.
Kaiser Health Disparities Report: A Weekly Look At Race, Ethnicity And
Health
Health in the Community | American Indians Work To Address Fetal Alcohol
Syndrome, Effects on Children
[Oct 24, 2007]
Minnesota Public Radio on Monday as part of a six-part series on
fetal alcohol syndrome examined how the condition affects American
Indians in the state. According to CDC studies, the fetal alcohol rate
among American Indians is 30 times higher than the rate among whites.
The syndrome affects 40,000 infants in the U.S. each year, MPR reports.
Sandra Parsons, director of Family and Children's Services for the Red
Lake Band of Ojibwe in northern Minnesota, said, "I would say it's very
definitely a problem, almost pervasive. I haven't found anybody yet who
disputes that. I think people would be literally amazed at how prevalent
it might be." She added, "It's kind of one of those 'don't talk about
it, don't exist' pieces. But if we are damaging our kids in those kind
of numbers, somebody needs to talk about it. Somebody needs to be
looking at what is the reality."
Some Minnesota tribal officials say fetal alcohol syndrome is linked to
a high number of children with learning disabilities and higher drop out
and prison rates on Indian reservations. Parsons said while she also
believes there is a connection between fetal alcohol damage and social
and behavioral problems among American Indian children, there is little
scientific evidence to support such claims. Her group worked with more
than 900 children last year, and many of them had behavior problems that
Parsons thinks might be related to fetal alcohol syndrome.
Complete @:
http://tinyurl.com/2q6pgu">[tinyurl.com] ------------------------------
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10:26
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disturbing the comfortable
Hmm. Looks like the same ol' world outside the window. I know, I know: it's a brand new day!© Today is the first day of the rest of your life!™
However, "Same s--t, different day" is more appropriate.
The sky is blue; the deciduous trees are naked; and it could be a lot worse.
Still working my way, digesting my way, through Naomi Klein's new book. She's done an excellent job so far. She starts with a history of ECT—shock treatments. The original idea was to destroy the personality so a new improved one could be implanted. the originator thought that only through that method could an unhappy, psychotic, crazy person be brought to "sanity." The strength and numbers of shock treatments given to patients, though, make you wonder about the sanity of the person giving them. The experts believed they knew what made a happy functional person. Uh-huh. The entire psychiatric profession should go sit in penance for decades over that gig.
From the mental tortures inflicted via shock, Klein details the origins and philosophy of the "Chicago School" of economics. The Chicago School, Milton Friedman's baby, believe in the free market. The free market means no government interference in commerce whatsoever—and almost no government at all. The idea is that the free market will fix everything if it is just let alone. Wages will set their own level. Profits will soar. The workers will be happy. Everything will work just fine, if only...the government gets out of the way. Before it gets out of the way, however, it has to remove any and all hinderances to the operation of the free market—wage supports, taxes, regulations, unions, social services, and anything else that requires excess taxes. Excess taxes are those used to pay for things like highways, health care, schools, noxious inspectors, laws that impinge on the absolute freedom of the market to determine everything—because everything can be done by private individuals and businesses operating for profits.
Wow. Talk about idealism! Friendman's theories are as ungrounded as Marxist economics, as bouyant as nitrous oxide, and as realistic as Disneyland.
The reference to Marism: just like Communism requires government action, so does the theory of the free market. Both systems, of course, promise to evaporate the state, eventually. But in the meantime, well, the government has to use coercion to bring about Utopia.
Klein moves on to the example of the southern cone of South America: Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, as places where the ideas of the free market were first applied, with U.S. help. The application of Friedman's theories required "shock treatments" to the countries, which were seen as left-wing and potentially dangerous to American and trans-national businesses. Just as the original ECT was seen as a way to blast away the old, "unhealthy" personalities, shock was seen as necessary to destroy all vestiges of the existing societies and economies. Those economies were not pure capitalist. Capitalism, though, was seen as God's gift to the world. Since it was God's gift, any means of bringing it about was OK.
Enter Pinochet, the Argentinian Generals, and assorted other torture-loving regimes, lovingly supported by the U.S.A., the C.I.A., the School of the Americas, mega corporations, and such. Price regulations were removed, wage supports dropped, dissidents killed, and the free market ran amok. What's f--king awful about this is that the U.S. supported and often helped run these terrible vicious governments. Remember how hard it was to get the U.S. to boycott South Africa or Pinochet's Chile? That was because we liked—we loved—those governments. We helped torture, we helped bomb, we helped murder and starve those people who got in the way of the free market.
The people who arranged and helped these authoritarian governments are war criminals. They should be sent to tribunals and made to answer for their heartless crimes. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld included.
The truth is, America is living on the blood of other nations. Every sweat shop, every broken strike, every Thai sex shop—America is supporting that. We're Americans, and we're living off that human misery. Mostly, like Ward Churchill and others have said, Americans are good germans. We don't see anything, we don't smell anything, we don't see any mass graves—leave us alone so we can drive our SUVs and buy our trendy clothes!
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19:05
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disturbing the comfortable
I've never met, as far as I can remember, Eugene Johnson, over at KBOO in Portland. He had a blog I like and try to read as often as I can.
Lately I've been down. The news seems to get worse, both nationally and internationally. I had some cautious hopes after the last national election, but the smell of a chicken coop permeates the Democratic Party. I'm reading Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, which is a fine fine book and one I think we all should read, discuss, and then act upon her insights. It's not a cheery book, though.
Eugene came through with a good gentle nudge from behind. He put me in a list of people who I would neverever consider myself...aw, hell. Thanks, Eugene! Pidamaya!
http://pudgyindian2.blogspot.com/
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18:33
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disturbing the comfortable
This is something that's been on my mind, lately. The U.S. is no longer what it was, no longer has moral high ground—in fact, it's a moral swamp. Thanks, Bill, for summing this up.
Published on The Smirking Chimp (
[www.smirkingchimp.com] ) It's Kidnapping and Torture, Not Rendition and Interrogation By Bill Hare Created Oct 29 2007 - 2:40pm
How Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney want to believe that they are a part of the James Bond world and are accomplishing good on behalf of God, mother and country!
Since their government relies on spin control we get some exciting words that appear to be out of an old Sean Connery film as the dashing Scot appears as good old 007 James Bond. Now we have words like rendition and interrogation making their way into the public lexicon.
It is time to get down to basics and call these actions what they really are. You grab somebody and dump that individual in a friendly (for interrogators) outpost.
You then begin to “interrogate.”
How is that defined? Well, one activity is waterboarding. What is that? That’s a term that stands for simulated drowning.
Hold it, isn’t that torture? Shhh! We shouldn’t call it that since that is upsetting.
Remember how we needed that Patriot Act after 9/11?
Well, remember now that we provide a label for someone we grab and throw into jail or some dark and isolated room that constitutes a substitute for jail without giving these individuals access to a lawyer.
Mind you, according to fashionable labeling these are not citizens. We call these individuals that we are trying to convince to confess, we label them enemy combatants.
I mean, doesn’t that carry a less offensive ring than if we label them torture victims?
As we learned from Karl Rove and the Republican spin machine – Labeling is the thing! How much better to refer to interrogations of enemy combatants than those other unpleasant names that conjure up cruel dictatorships and the most barbaric methods of torture.
Remember, loyal citizens, to learn the correct labeling and above all do not question your masters since they are conducting wars and engaging in rendition and interrogation to make all of you safer.
Always remember these operative code words: Perpetual War is a necessary means to achieve Perpetual Peace.
Some of us, no matter how hard you try, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, think that all of this nifty little phraseology is nothing more than subterfuge, cruel and tragic subterfuge.
What does all of this really mean?
It means that a government calling itself the beacon of democracy and the standard to be held up high for the entire world to follow resorts to preventive rather than pre-emptive war, ah, another labeling conflict, along with kidnap and torture, all in the name of preserving American democracy.
Shame on you, Congress, for not performing your constitutional responsibility.
Shame on you Congress for not convening immediate hearings on the impeachment and removal from office of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who tirelessly and ruthlessly subvert the U.S. Constitution and defile international law.
Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi, your refusal to act as leaders of the respective bodies of Congress in the face of democracy’s destruction will ensure roles for you in historical infamy!
_______
Bill Hare
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Living Laduree
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Bend Oregon Real Estate News
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Standup Paddle Flatwater
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Fox CX
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Bronco Billy In Sisters Oregon
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Nitro Sister- Christina
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Kaitlyn Cooks
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Ad HOC : Words + Ideas
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Fearless Baking
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The Martini Chronicles
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White-House-On-An-Acre
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An Eskimo bakes
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NitroSister Christina : Artwork
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Bankermom
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Damian Fagan
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BP's Bend Properties
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Community Learning Instructor
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Volcano Vineyards Blog
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
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Pressing On
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Diner Life
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Good Fitness, Great Life
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Lean Startup - smsDrone
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Rob Umphress
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Moving On
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Bend, Oregon Real Estate Blog
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Leave it to Barney
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Foot Zone Blog
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Dating Is Weird
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Trying to live the raw food life in Bend, Oregon
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The Lone Cowgirl
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Planker Sandwiches Presents: Traveling Sandwiches
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Wiggling Around
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Campbell PR Blog
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Good Dirt Jewelry
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Escape to Books
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Run Girl Run!
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Professional Counseling Services
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The Bend Beer Blog
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Latitudes and Lassitudes
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WAVE Journey.com
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A Day on the Bike
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Run Bitches Run
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Bend Oregon ... and a little beyond!
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Fleet Feet Sports Bend Blog
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to knit in peace
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Pastor Mike's Faith Journey Adventure
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True North
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The Beeb, the Beagle & My Bestfriend
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Camalli Book Company
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The Central Oregon Veteran
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Sagebrush Blog
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The Wagger
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The Map
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Amerine.net
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Barker Bass Blog
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Sagewind Voices
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Awbrey Dental Group Blog
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Greener By Design
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Nosler
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Don's Sunnyside Blog
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Until All have Heard
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Carpet Cleaning Bend Oregon
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Buzz By Annie's
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My Tangerine Dreams
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Blooming Eventually
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Learning Conversations
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The Pure Ingredients
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3:18 Theology
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CS Distributors and Creative Smocking
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yarrow
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Ginger's Kitchenware
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View From The Cliff
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Create and Relate
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Parenting A Complex Special Needs Child
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Dudley's BookShop Cafe
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Postcards from the Edge
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Parking Lot Mamas
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It Was Written
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Be Well with Qigong
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Spiritual Awareness Community of the Cascades
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BendNights Dot Blog
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Olive Stew - All the Ways We Eff-Up Love
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Liana's Lifetime
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The Huni Family (Almost) Daily Diatribe
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life is weird (and so am i)
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BendBubble Phase Three
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coldframed tomatoes
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On The Record
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NeighborImpact Food Bank News
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The Sorted
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IronHorse
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Wannabe Hipster Mom
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Shopping With Katrina
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BrianInBend
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Central Oregon Critic
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Katie
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Juniper Seahorses
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Bicycle43
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High Desert Diva
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Tom's Book Publishing Blog
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THE JC PEOPLE
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Living With Music
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The Grumpy Forester
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Central Oregon Food
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Mom2Mom Bend, Oregon
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Brysons of Bend
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Birdies 4 Babies Golf Charity
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How the Real Mother Hen Sees the World
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Garage Improvement
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Bend, Oregon, Daily Photo
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PPP (Pole Pedal Paddle)
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End Times
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WebCyclery Blog
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The Commercial Photographer
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Elan Vital Anthology
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Peebo the Bike Commuter
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Bend Mothers Acting Up
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Bend Chiro Blog
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It's the little things in life...
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there once was a girl
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Things that go great with coffee, friends and waffles
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Dwyer Williams Potter, Attorneys, LLP
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dopeblend news
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Stroller Strides - Bend, OR
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Isabella Acosta Barna
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Bend Morons
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bent and beat
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backstage pass
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The Debut Effect
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Stride Steady
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Victoria's Secrets Told
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XC Oregon
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Ania Designs
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Dusty Tales
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Bend Oregon Photos
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Bend Gazette
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Our journey to Paige
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Pensees
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Bivwak Outdoors
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Scam Protectors
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bikebuzz
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Gregg Zivney
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Music and Musings
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The Adventures of Rich Jandt
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The Christensons
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Kitchen Weech
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Juniper Ridge Info
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Lighthouse Parents
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Not So Sex and the City
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Laura @ Curl Up & Dye
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Media Review
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