disturbing the comfortable

Notice of Peter Webster's Passing

2009-11-08T13:17:00.000-08:00

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.

Peace Prize? Yeah.

2009-10-09T19:26:00.000-07:00

B.F.D. Let me repeat that: B.F.D..

The Ol' "Socialized Medicine" Whine, again

2009-10-09T18:51:00.000-07:00

I had an op-ed piece in our local daily. In it I tried to counter the rabid-right's bullshit 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.

After I took the mouse apart I blew compressed air

2009-10-05T18:30:00.000-07:00

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/business/03salmon.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

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.”

Sioux Screwed Again

2009-10-02T20:32:00.000-07:00

Here's something out of South Dakota that broke my heart

Cheyenne River Sioux Sue Over Dress Code

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."

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-09-18-tribe-dress-code_N.htm

Olympics? Olympia? Olympic Boulevard...

2009-10-02T17:14:00.000-07:00

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 fucking deserved it. Actions cause reactions. Blowback.

Guess America ain't the Big Boss it used to be.

Obama, Jefferson, Hemings, racism, the usual...

2009-10-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

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 shit-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...

Arundhati Roy: a conscience

2009-09-29T11:17:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

---------
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.

American Myth of the Frontier Sells Huge Gas Hog Rigs

2009-09-26T15:52:00.000-07:00

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

New Math? Old realities.

2009-09-26T15:29:00.000-07:00

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...?

Old-fart Freaks, Slackers, Deadheads and Dreadheads

2009-09-25T16:44:00.000-07:00

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!

Naomi Klein, Michael Moore: what else is there to say? (well, I'll come up with something...)

2009-09-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

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: http://www.alternet.org/story/142871/

Round and round in the circle game...

2009-09-22T15:39:00.000-07:00

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.

life within and without me

2009-09-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

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...

Rambling...

2009-09-13T17:13:00.000-07:00

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...

Flashback?

2009-09-08T18:11:00.000-07:00

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.

September Song?

2009-09-05T20:43:00.000-07:00

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 fuckedup 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.

WTF redoux

2009-07-31T20:33:00.000-07:00

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. Shit.

It's a sloooww week on the high desert

2009-07-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

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-shit.

Now, the problem is, that we don't go bat-shit trying to keep up with them.

MSNBC Anchors freak out over truth...

2009-07-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

According to a report on the Huffington Post, MSNBC anchors apologized because someone actually told the truth (god forbid):

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."

Now see what you made me do!

2009-07-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

Yeah. One of the famous lines of abusers is "Now see what you made me do!" Like, it's all your fault I hit/fucked/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.

New Low? Yup. Sewer-level.

2009-07-11T19:45:00.000-07:00

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

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."

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

Bend Bi-Mart: wheelchair semi-accessible, if you have friends

2009-07-08T17:14:00.000-07:00

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.

I'm starting to wonder...

2009-07-08T14:10:00.001-07:00

...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...

Bob Scheer on McNamara's death

2009-07-08T10:54:00.000-07:00

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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McNamara's Dead: just like the millions who died in Viet Nam

2009-07-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

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.

More on drugs in the US

2009-07-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

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.

NAFTA: free trade for narco-trafficantes

2009-07-01T17:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Trifling Tuesday

2009-06-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

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.

Well, it all depends, I guess...

2009-06-27T16:11:00.000-07:00

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.

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_fireworks_explosives.html

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."

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like bananas....

2009-06-27T15:37:00.000-07:00

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.

this is interesting...

2009-05-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

Just got this from Blogger:

2009-05-01T19:13:00.000-07:00

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:

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/scimedemail/la-sci-swine-reality30-2009apr30,0,1930617.story

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.

Speaking of America's karma...

2009-04-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

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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"Avoidable Mortality"

2009-04-26T19:51:00.000-07:00

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.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090423132916.htm
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

Moral ground and sand castles in the tide

2009-04-26T18:53:00.000-07:00

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 shitheads?

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.

Remember when a "tea party" meant getting stoned?

2009-04-19T17:45:00.000-07:00

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 shit-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 fuckedup people are, the more reactionary they are. There seems to be a lot of fuckedup people out there.

Torture, karma and oh-oh!

2009-04-17T15:12:00.000-07:00

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 fucking Christ. "We" —that is the government that represents us all— have gone off the deep end, completely, into the shit 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.

Ammo hard to find, according to news reports

2009-04-14T20:23:00.000-07:00

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.

Driving through the back lot of Bend Studios

2009-04-14T20:06:00.000-07:00

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 bullshit. 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.

spend now, save later v. don't spend now, pay lots more later

2009-04-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

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.”

Idiocy of the week?

2009-04-08T16:11:00.000-07:00

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.

Socialist? Obama? Hah!

2009-04-05T17:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Things fall apart?

2009-04-03T23:06:00.000-07:00

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!

Well, well, getting well...!

2009-03-29T19:59:00.000-07:00

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.com

I 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.

Ah, Reality!

2009-03-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

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 fucking 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.

2009-03-26T16:11:00.000-07:00

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 http://thetyee.ca/Life/2009/03/25/SexEd/

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:

Sex Ed 2.0
Why teachers want kids to watch more online sex vids.
The Mathematics of Sex Ed
For this teacher, it doesn't add up.
The New Prudes
How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls (and America, Too!)

Tyee contributing editor Vanessa Richmond writes the Schlock and Awe column about popular culture and the media.

Back to Canada on Top in Sex Ed

Brain damage and popular activities

2009-03-26T10:33:00.000-07:00

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.

The Money Comes, the Money Goes where?

2009-03-15T15:38:00.000-07:00

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.

health update

2009-03-15T15:33:00.000-07:00

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 shitless.

Money makes the man?

2009-03-13T11:17:00.001-07:00

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."

Just for t he halibut

2009-03-07T11:14:00.000-08:00

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."

Finally, some sense about sinsimilla

2009-03-01T15:39:00.001-08:00

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: http://www.alternet.org/story/98952/
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.

Slumdog fantasy

2009-03-01T15:30:00.000-08:00

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 fucking 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 bullshit-o-rama.

Tom Paine on revelations

2009-02-28T10:22:00.000-08:00

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.

What happened? You know, already

2009-02-28T10:21:00.001-08:00

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.

Sexting: a ripple in the pond

2009-02-28T10:12:00.000-08:00

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 shit 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
http://www.alternet.org/story/125190/

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/

from a crowded desktop to a crowded life or the other way around....

2009-02-28T10:04:00.000-08:00

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.

As California goes...where?

2009-02-21T11:28:00.000-08:00

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.

Deficits v. tax cuts

2009-02-19T13:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Republicans hope to destabilise America?

2009-02-15T18:16:00.000-08:00

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.

Bend as Ponzi scheme

2009-02-15T16:01:00.000-08:00

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.

The City is a mental-health hazard

2009-02-14T18:27:00.000-08:00

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
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/01/04/how_the_city_hurts_your_brain?mode=PF
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

The latest sell-out

2009-02-11T16:05:00.001-08:00

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 "Dipshit." 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.

White supremacist attempts to assemble "dirty bomb"

2009-02-11T07:27:00.000-08:00

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.

***

Are there actually cuts in the stimulus bill?

2009-02-07T18:49:00.000-08:00

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 shit 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...

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?

2009-02-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

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. Fuck. I'm glad I'm old; I won't have to watch the utter degradation of this country—just the partial degredation, yeah.

Viagra and other stimuli

2009-02-07T11:53:00.000-08:00

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 fuck 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.

Friday follies

2009-02-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

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.

the kleptocracy and missing "reconstruction funds."

2009-02-02T14:01:00.000-08:00

“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.

Moonday meanderings

2009-02-02T12:36:00.000-08:00

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.

Now, here's the count-down—

2009-01-29T12:22:00.001-08:00

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.

Counting down toward....er...ah...?

2009-01-29T11:58:00.000-08:00

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 shit!

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.

Government thuggery exposed. Again...

2009-01-23T13:41:00.000-08:00

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."

Our patriots, their terrorists, revisited...

2009-01-23T12:59:00.000-08:00

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

Criminal behavior by KBR

2009-01-22T19:08:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

Oh, it's a happy day...

2009-01-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

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.

My mind is like tattered tatters

2009-01-05T11:38:00.000-08:00

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.

Breaking up is hard to do, unless you have brittle bones

2008-12-31T11:21:00.001-08:00

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.

A Bridge over the River Devisive

2008-12-20T18:51:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-12-19T13:07:00.002-08:00

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.

2008-12-19T13:07:00.001-08:00

Obama-of-the-left?

2008-12-18T19:06:00.001-08:00

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?

A little perspective on freedom and torture:

2008-12-16T13:10:00.000-08:00

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.
_______

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Bush gets free shoes!

2008-12-15T16:22:00.000-08:00

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. http://firedoglake.com/2008/12/15/shoe-thrower-being-tortured/#more-35044

For what it's worth dept., room 3,457

2008-12-13T12:48:00.000-08:00

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."

Sherman Alexie v. Central Oregon

2008-12-11T16:59:00.000-08:00

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.

A little head cold to clear the sinuses...

2008-12-11T16:54:00.000-08:00

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.

Gimme them ol' Halliburton Blues!

2008-12-04T16:07:00.000-08:00

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, http://www.militarytimes.com/news/2008/10/military_burnpit_102708w/)

Suit claims Halliburton, KBR sickened base
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/12/military_kbr_lawsuit_121508w/
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.
***
“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.”
***
“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.”
***
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.
***
“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.”
***
“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.
***

disturbing the comfortable

Notice of Peter Webster's Passing

Peace Prize? Yeah.

The Ol' "Socialized Medicine" Whine, again

After I took the mouse apart I blew compressed air

Sioux Screwed Again

Olympics? Olympia? Olympic Boulevard...

Obama, Jefferson, Hemings, racism, the usual...

Arundhati Roy: a conscience

What Have We Done to Democracy? Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos and a New Cold War in Kashmir

American Myth of the Frontier Sells Huge Gas Hog Rigs

Hummer Owners Claim Moral High Ground To Excuse Overconsumption, Study Finds

New Math? Old realities.

Old-fart Freaks, Slackers, Deadheads and Dreadheads

Naomi Klein, Michael Moore: what else is there to say? (well, I'll come up with something...)

Naomi Klein Interviews Michael Moore on the Perils of Capitalism

By Naomi Klein, The NationPosted on September 25, 2009, Printed on September 25, 2009http://www.alternet.org/story/142871/

© 2009 The Nation All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142871/

Round and round in the circle game...

life within and without me

Rambling...

Flashback?

September Song?

WTF redoux

It's a sloooww week on the high desert

MSNBC Anchors freak out over truth...

Now see what you made me do!

New Low? Yup. Sewer-level.

Conservative Free Republic blog in free speech flap after racial slurs directed at Obama children

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

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

Bend Bi-Mart: wheelchair semi-accessible, if you have friends

I'm starting to wonder...

Bob Scheer on McNamara's death

McNamara's Dead: just like the millions who died in Viet Nam

After the War Was Over

More on drugs in the US

NAFTA: free trade for narco-trafficantes

Trifling Tuesday

Well, it all depends, I guess...

Explosive fireworks easy to find at Boom City

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like bananas....

this is interesting...

disturbing the comfortable

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Speaking of America's karma...

"Avoidable Mortality"

Moral ground and sand castles in the tide

Remember when a "tea party" meant getting stoned?

Torture, karma and oh-oh!

Ammo hard to find, according to news reports

Driving through the back lot of Bend Studios

spend now, save later v. don't spend now, pay lots more later

States Slashing Social Programs for Vulnerable

Idiocy of the week?

Woman's tofu license plate curdles in Colo.

Socialist? Obama? Hah!

Things fall apart?

Well, well, getting well...!

Ah, Reality!

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.

Canada on Top in Sex Ed

Rise in US teen pregnancies proves information beats abstinence.

By Vanessa Richmond

Published: March 25, 2009

TheTyee.ca

Brain damage and popular activities

The Money Comes, the Money Goes where?

Breaking–AIG releases list of recipients of bailout money. US shortchanged.

health update

Money makes the man?

Just for t he halibut

Finally, some sense about sinsimilla

Slumdog fantasy

Tom Paine on revelations

What happened? You know, already

Sexting: a ripple in the pond

By Naomi Klein, The Nation
Posted on September 25, 2009, Printed on September 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142871/

© 2009 The Nation All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142871/