Not an Apathist

Redirecting Readers

2011-12-30T08:23:00.002-05:00

My work will continue, in new ways and more slowly as I find my way to a new style of net presence, at the following site: Resistance is Fertile

PEACE!

Mitre Consultant Murdered

2011-03-20T08:23:00.002-04:00

For more in Mitre Corporation, click here.

John Wheeler, US military expert, found dead in US landfill

Police are investigating death of former US government official John Wheeler after his body was found at dump

Associated Press

The body of a military expert who served in three Republican administrations was found dumped in a landfill over the New Year's weekend, and investigators said Monday they do not know who might have killed him.

Authorities say John Wheeler III, 66, was scheduled to be on an Amtrak train from Washington to Wilmington on 28 December. Police say it's now not clear if he ever made that trip. His body was found three days later, on New Year's Eve, as a garbage truck emptied its contents at the Cherry Island landfill. His death has been ruled a homicide.

Wheeler, who served as an Army staff officer in Vietnam, later worked in the Reagan and both Bush administrations and helped lead efforts to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington. He also was the second chairman and chief executive officer of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

His body was discovered on 31 December as a waste management truck emptied its contents at the Wilmington-area landfill. His death has been ruled a homicide.

Police have determined that all the stops made by the garbage truck on Friday before it arrived at the landfill involved commercial disposal bins in Newark, several miles from Wheeler's home in the historic district of New Castle.

Newark, Delaware police spokesman Lt. Mark Farrall said investigators had been to Wheelers' house, which was roped off with police tape after his death, but that it could not be considered a crime scene.

"We don't have a crime scene at this point in time," said Farrall, adding that investigators still do not have any leads in the case.

Farrall said initial police reports that Wheeler was last seen getting off an Amtrak train in Wilmington last Tuesday were incorrect.

"The information that we have is that he was scheduled to take a train from Washington DC, to Newark on the 28th. We don't know if that occurred," Farrall said, adding that investigators don't know how long Wheeler might have been missing before his body was found, or where and when he was last seen.

Asked why Wheeler had not been reported missing, Farrall said the family was not in town at the time.

"That's why there was some delay in notification," he explained.

A graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, Wheeler went on to study at Harvard Business School and Yale Law School.

Richard Radez, a longtime friend who also graduated from West Point and Harvard Business, said he exchanged e-mails with Wheeler on Christmas. On the day after Christmas, Wheeler sent Radez an e-mail expressing concern that the nation wasn't sufficiently prepared for cyber warfare.

"This was something that had preoccupied him over the last couple of years," Radez said.

James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, wrote in an article on the magazine's website that he had known "Jack" Wheeler since the early 1980s.

Wheeler, Fallows wrote, had spent much of his life trying to address "what he called the '40 year open wound' of Vietnam-era soldiers being spurned by the society that sent them to war."

Wheeler retired from the military in 1971, and went on to serve in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, including at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He also was a special assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force under President George W. Bush. He recently worked as a consultant for The Mitre Corporation, a nonprofit based in Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Virginia, that operates federally funded research and development centers.

"He was just not the sort of person who would wind up in a landfill," said Bayard Marin, an attorney who was representing Wheeler and his wife, Katherine Klyce, in an ongoing legal dispute with a couple wanting to build a home near the Wheelers' in the historic district.

"He was a very aggressive kind of guy, but nevertheless kind of ingratiating, and he had a good sense of humor," Marin said.

SOURCE: The Guardian

Smart ranchers, real sportsmen do not curse wolves

2010-11-17T08:54:00.000-05:00

by MARTY ESSEN

I grew up in northern Minnesota, spent summers on my grandparents' and uncles' farms, and eventually married the daughter of a Minnesota farmer. In addition, my grandfather, uncles and father-in-law were all hunters.

Why do I share this information? In 30 years of living in Minnesota I never once heard a farmer or a hunter complain about wolves. Now that I live in Montana, such complaints from hunters and ranchers are commonplace.

Considering that Minnesota is just 55 percent the size of Montana yet supports six times more wolves, I have to ask myself: Are Minnesota hunters more skilled than Montana hunters? Are Minnesota farmers better at taking care of their livestock than Montana ranchers?

While emotionally I'm temped to answer the question with a resounding "yes," intellectually I know there are also good hunters and ranchers in Montana. The problem is that right now it is the lazy/poor Montana hunters and ranchers who are most vocal about the wolf.

One reason why Minnesotans complain less than Montanans is that wolves have always been in Minnesota. Even in the 1950s, when Minnesota had a bounty on wolves, the state still supported between 400 and 700 wolves.

Here in Montana, a significant number of hunters and ranchers are having difficulty accepting change. They feel that Montana eradicated its wolves for a reason, and they don't see reintroduction as the righting of a wrong. Of those who accept reintroduction, many still want wolf numbers artificially "managed" to lower than natural numbers - as if wolves and game animals never coexisted before humans arrived!

While nothing I can say will convince wolf-hating hunters to reconsider their position, perhaps they'd at least agree to stop calling themselves "sportsmen" or "sportswomen." Imagine if our beloved University of Montana football team only played opponents that fielded eight players? Few fans would rejoice as our team pummeled outmanned opponents each week, and the eventual national championship would feel hollow.

Just as there is no sportsmanship in an 11-man team slaughtering an eight-man team, there is also no sportsmanship in hunters slaughtering game animals in an artificial ecosystem with few predators. Without predators, game animals become lazy and stop behaving naturally. Photographs of prideful hunters showing off their kills mean nothing if the hunters accomplished their feat in what is essentially a giant game farm.

A big reason I've never heard a Minnesota farmer complain about large predators is because of the tradition of bringing the cows home at night. Granted, such a tradition is more practical on Minnesota farms, which usually have less acreage than Montana ranches, but Montanans have access to numerous other nonlethal solutions, such as flagging, portable electric fences, guard dogs, and range riders. Whether it's in Minnesota or Montana, a little extra work goes a long way.

I salute the ranchers who understand that a wide variety of wildlife is part of what makes Montana such a great and unique state. There are plenty of places where they could raise their livestock with minimal predators, but they stay here and exert the extra effort to properly take care of their animals.

On the other hand, no one should salute ranchers who complain about their cattle falling victim to wolves on public lands. Public lands belong to everyone - including those who see wolves as an asset. Ranchers who run their cattle on public lands do so at their own risk and should not expect any predator to understand the difference between livestock and natural prey.

Wolves are the anti-laziness animal. They make game animals, hunters, and ranchers work just a little harder. While the game animals simply move on, many of the people in the equation have an attitude of entitlement; successful hunts or carefree livestock grazing are expected, not wished for.

That attitude of entitlement may work in the short term, but eventually all the whining will backfire. After all, hunters and ranchers combined still make up a minority of Montana's population. So if you are a hunter who believes in a true fair chase, or a rancher who is capable of outsmarting a wolf, it's time to speak up. A group that's seen as nothing but a bunch of whiners will soon lose credibility.

SOURCE: The Missoulian

Why Alex Jones lies about William (Bill) Cooper

2010-10-16T09:03:00.001-04:00

New Hampshire to Cage Medical Marijuana Growing Nurse for Two Years

2010-10-14T22:41:00.002-04:00

The headline says medical but the video does not mention medical and I am starting to think it is not (at least legally). However, this is exactly the kind of case that would be directly dealt with, by law, if California's Prop 19 passes. Many say that making it so that people trying to obtain something less harmful than alcohol, tobac...co, sugar, and caffeine should not necessitate that a person goes to the black market where can also be found far worse things. THAT'S the gateway!!

Water for animals whilst Bushmen thirst

2010-09-10T14:49:00.000-04:00

by Survival

Wilderness Safaris operates a safari lodge on Bushman territory in Botswana.

Just days ago, with the Bushmen launching an appeal against the Botswana government’s position to deny them water in their desperately dry home land, we read that Wilderness is mercifully stepping in to relieve thirst in another area it works in.

This time, it is the animal population of Hwange, Zimbabwe who will receive the company’s blessing.

’Water is life’, it says. So far, ‘Wilderness Safaris and Wilderness Trust have been helping out in keeping some 22 diesel pumps working throughout winter so that our wildlife will survive.’

They have now installed a series of windmill pumps to make the animals’ supply more environmentally friendly.

‘

it is gratifying to see [the animals] slake their thirst.Wilderness Safaris press release

’

All whilst the Bushmen suffer one of the longest dehydration crises on the planet.

This also follows the firm’s insistence that ‘Wilderness Safaris is not a water utility and its business model is not robust enough [to provide water to Bushman communities in the reserve]’.

We’ve come to expect nothing less from this self-proclaimed ‘responsible ecotourism and conservation company’.

SOURCE: Survival International

Welfare Ranching

2010-07-15T09:24:00.002-04:00

"Our problem results from acting like cowboys on a limitless frontier when in truth we inhabit a living spaceship with a finely balanced life-support system." - David C. Korton

This was a speech given before a "crowd of five to six hundred students, ranchers, and instant rednecks (transplanted Easterners); it was reprinted verbatim, bawdy stories and all in the Montana magazine Northern Lights."(Abbey 3) Written in April of 1985 it was given at the University of Montana. Having been asked to speak at an event highlighting the issue of free speech, one cannot help but wonder if deep down inside he was saying, "Free speech? I'll give you free speech!"

Free Speech: The Cowboy and His Cow
by Edward Abbey

When I first came West in 1948, a student at the University of New Mexico, I was only twenty years old and just out of the Army. I thought, like most simple-minded Easterners, that a cowboy was a kind of mythic hero. I idolized those scrawny little red nosed hired hands in their tight jeans, funny boots and comical hats.

Like other new arrivals in the West, I could imagine nothing more romantic than becoming a cowboy. Nothing more glorious than owning my own little genuine working cattle outfit. About the only thing better, I thought, was to be a big league baseball player. I never dreamed that I'd eventually sink to writing books for a living. Unluckily for me coming from an Appalachian hillbilly background and with a poor choice of parents-I didn't have much money. My father was a small-time logger. He ran a one-man sawmill and a sub marginal side hill farm. There wasn't any money in our family, no inheritance you could run ten thousand cattle on. I had no trust fund to back me up. No Hollywood movie deals to finance a land acquisition program I lived on what in those days was called the GI Bill, which paid about $150 a month while I went to school. I made that last as long as I could-five or six years. I couldn't afford a horse. The best I could do in 1947 and '48 was buy a third-hand Chevy sedan and roam the West, mostly the Southwest, on holidays and weekends.

I had a roommate at the University of New Mexico. I'll call him Mac. He came from a little town in the southwest New Mexico where his father ran a feed store. Mackie was a fair bronc rider, eager to get into the cattle-growing business. And he had some money, enough to buy a little cinderblock house and about forty acres in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque, near a town we called Landfill. Mackie fenced those forty acres, built a corral and kept a few horses there, including an occasional genuine bronco for fun and practice.

I don't remember exactly how Mackie and I became friends in the first place. I was majoring in classical philosophy. He was majoring in screw-worm management. But we got to know each other through the mutual pursuit of a pair of newarly inseparable Kappa Kappa Gamma girls. I lived with him in his little cinderblock house. Helped him meet the mortgage payments. Helped him meet the girls. We were both crude, shy, ugly, obnoxious-like most college boys.

[Interjection: "Like you!"]

My fried Mac also owned a 1947 black Lincoln convertible, the kind with the big grille in the front, like a cowcatcher on a locomotive, chrome-plated. We used to race to classes in the morning, driving the twenty miles from his house to the campus in never more than fifteen minutes. Usually Mac was too hung over to drive, so I'd operate the car, clutching the wheel while Mac sat beside me waving his big .44, taking potshots at jackrabbits and road signs and bill boards and beer bottles. Trying to wake up in time for his ten o'clock class in brand inpection.

I'm sorry to say that my friend Mac was a little bit gun-happy. Most of his forty acres was in tumbleweed. He fenced in about half an acre with chicken wire and stocked that little pasture with white rabbits. He used it as a target range. Not what you'd call sporting, I suppose, but we did eat the rabbits. Sometimes we even went deer hunting with handguns. Mackie with his revolver, and me with a chrome-plated Colt .45 automatic I had liberated from the US Army over in Italy. Surplus government property.

On one of our deer-hunting expeditions, I was sitting on a log in a big clearing in the woods, thinking about Plato and Aristotle and the Kappa Kappa Gamma girls. I didn't really care whether we got a deer that day or not. It was a couple of days before opening, anyway. The whole procedure was probably illegal as hell. Mac was out in the woods somewhere looking for deer around the clearing. I was sitting on the log, thinking, when I saw a chip of bark fly away from the log all by itself, about a foot from my left hand. Then I heard the blast of Mac's revolver-that big old .44 he'd probably liberated from his father. Then I heard him laugh.

"That's not very funny," Mackie," I said.

"Now don't whine and complain, Ed," he said. "You want to be a real hunter like me, you gotta learn to stay awake."

We never did get a deer with the handguns. But that's when I had my first little doubts about Mackie, and about the cowboy type in general. But I still loved him. Worshipped him, in fact. I was caught in the grip of the Western myth. Anybody said a word to me against cowboys, I'd jump down his throat with my spurs on. Especially if Mac was standing near by.

Sometimes I'd try to ride those broncs that he brought in, trying to prove that I could be a cowboy too. Trying to prove it more to myself than to him. I'd be on this crazy, crackpot horse going up, down left, right, and inside out. Hanging on to the saddle horn with both hands. While Mac sat on the corral fence throwing beer bottles at us and laughing. Every time I got thrown of, Mac would say, "Now get right back on there, Ed. Quick, quick. Don't spoil 'im."

It took me a long time to realize I didn't have to do that kind of work. And it took me another thirty years to realize that there's something wrong at the heart of our most popular American myth-the cowboy and his cow.

[Jeers.]

You may have guessed by now that I'm thinking of criticizing the livestock industry. And you are correct. I've been thinking about cows and sheep for many years. Getting more and more disgusted with the whole business. Western cattlemen are nothing more than welfare parasites. They've been getting a free ride on the public lands for over a century, and I think it's time we phased it out. I'm in favor or putting the public lands livestock grazers out of business.

First of all, we don't need the public lands beef industry. Even beef loves don't need it. According to most government reports (Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service), only about 2 percent of our beef, our red meat, comes from the public lands of the eleven Western states. By those eleven I mean Montana, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, and California. Most of our beef, aside from imports, comes from the Midwest and the East, especially the Southeast-Georgia, Alabama, Florida- and from other private lands across the nation. More beef cattle are raised in the state of Georgia than in the sagebrush empire of Nevada. And for a very good reason: back East, you can support a cow on maybe half an acre. Out here, it takes anywhere from twenty-five to fifty acres. In the red-rock country of Utah, the rule of thumb is one section-a square mile-per cow.

[Shouts from rear of hall.]

Since such a small percentage of cows are produced on public lands in the West, eliminating that part of the industry should not raise supermarket beef privies very much. Furthermore, we'd save money in the taxes we now pay for various subsidies to these public lands cattlemen. Subsidies for things like "range improvement"-tree chinning, sagebrush clearing, mesquite poisoning, disease control, predator trapping, fencing, wells, stock ponds roads. Then there are the salaries of those who work for government agencies like the BLM and the Forest Service. You could probably also count in a big part of the overpaid professors engaged in range-management research at the Western land-grant colleges.

Moreover, the cattle have done, and are doing, intolerable damage to our public lands-our national forests, state lands, BLM-administered lands, wildlife preserves, even some of our national parks and monuments. In Utah's Capital Reef National Park, for example, grazings is still allowed. In fact, it's recently been extended for another ten years, and Utah politicians are trying to make the arrangement permanent. They probably won't get away with it. But there we have at least one case where cattle are still tramping about in a national park, transforming soil and grass into dust and weeds.

[Disturbance]

Overgrazing is much too weak a term. Most of the public lands in the West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call "cowburnt." Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestem and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Weeds.

Even when the cattle are not physically present, you'll see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general destruction. if you don't see it, you'll smell it. The whole American West stinks of cattle. Along every flowing stream, around every seep and spring and water hole and well, you'll find acres and acres of what range-management specialists call "sacrifice areas"-another understatement. These are places denuded of forage, except for some cactus or a little tumbleweed or maybe a few mutilated trees like mesquite, juniper, or hackberry.

I'm not going to bombard you with graphs and statistics, which don't make much of an impression on intelligent people anyway. Anyone who goes beyond the city limits of almost any Western town can see for himself that the land is overgrazed. There are too many cows and horses and sheep out there. Of course, cattlemen would never publicly confess to overgrazing, any more than Dracula would publicly confess to a fondness for blood. Cattlemen are interested parties. Many of them will not give reliable testimony. Some have too much at stake: their Cadillacs and their airplanes, their ranch resale profits and their capital gains. (I'm talking about the corporation ranchers, the land-and-cattle companies, the investment syndicates.) Others, those ranchers who have only a small base property, flood the public lands with their cows. About 8 percent of federal land permittees have cattle that consume approximately 45 percent of the forage on the government range lands. Beef ranchers like to claim that their cows do not compete with deer. Deer are browsers, cows are grazers. That's true. But when a range is overgrazed, when the grass is gone (as it often is for seasons at a time), then cattle become browsers too, out of necessity. In the Southwest, cattle commonly feed on mesquite cliff rose, cactus, acacia or any other shrub or tree they find biodegradable. To that extent, they compete with deer. And they tend to drive out other and better wildlife. Like elk, or bighorn sheep, or pronghorn antelope.

[Sneers, jeers, laughter.]

How much damage have cattle done to the Western range lands? Large scale beef ranching has been going on since the 1870s. There's plenty of documentation of the effects of this massive cattle grazing on the erosion of the land, the character of the land, the character of the vegetation. Streams and rivers that used to flow on the surface all year round are now intermittent, or underground, because of overgrazing and rapid runoff.

Our public lands have been overgrazed for a century. The BLM knows it; the Forest Service knows it. The Government Accounting Office knows it. And overgrazing means eventual ruin, just like stripmining or clear-cutting or the damming of rivers. Much of the Southwest already looks like Mexico or southern Italy or North Africa: a cowburnt wasteland. As we destroy our land, we destroy our agricultural economy and thebasis of modern society. If we keep it up, we'll gradually degrade American life to the status of life in places like Mexico or southern Italy or libya or Egypt. In 1984 the Bureau of Land Management, which was required by Congress to report on its stewardship of our rangelands-the property of all Americans, remember-confessed that 31 percent of the land it administered was is "good condition," and 60 percent was in "poor condition." And it reported that only 18 percent of the range lands were improving, while 68 percent were "stable" and 14 percent were getting worse. if the BLM said that, we can safely assume that range conditions are actually much worse.

[Shouts of "bullshit!"]

What can we do about this situation? This is the fun part- this is the part I like. It's not easy to argue that we should do away with cattle ranching. The cowboy myth gets in the way. But I do have some solutions to overgrazing.

[A yell: "Cowboys do it better!" Answered by another: "Ask any cow!" Coarse laughter]

I'd begin by reducing the number of cattle on public lands. Not that range managers would go along with it, of course. In their eyes, and in the eyes of the livestock associations they work for, cutting down on the number of cattle is the worst possible solution -an impossible solution. So they propose all kinds of gimmicks. Portable fencing and perpetual movement of cattle. More cross-fencing. More wells and ponds so that more land can be exploited. These proposals are basically a maneuver by the Forest Service and the BLM to appease their critics without offending their real bosses in the beef industry. But a drastic reduction in cattle number is the only true and honest solution.

I also suggest that we open a hunting season on range cattle. I realize that beef cattle will not make sporting prey at first. Like all domesticated animals (including most humans), beef cattle are slow, stupid, and awkward. But the breed will improve if hunted regularly. And as the number of cattle is reduced, other and far more useful, beautiful, and interesting animals will return to the range lands and will increase.

Suppose, by some miracle of Hollywood or inheritance or good luck, I should acquire a respectable-sized working cattle outfit. What would I do with it? First I'd get rid of the stinking, filthy cattle. Every single animal. Shoot them all, and stock the place with real animals, real game, real protein: elk, buffalo, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, moose. And some purely decorative animals, like eagles. We need more eagles. And wolves we need more wolves. Mountain lions and bears. Especially, of course, grizzly bears. Down in the desert, I would stock every water tank, every water hole, every stockpond, with alligators.

You may not that I have said little about coyotes or deer. Coyotes seem to be doing all right on their own. They're smarter than their enemies. I've never heard of a coyote as dumb as a sheepman. As for deer, especially mule deer, they, too, are survivng-maybe even thriving, as some game and fish departments claim, though nobody claims there are as many deer now as there were before the cattle industry was introduced in the West. In any case, compared to elk the deer is a second-rate game animal, nothing but a giant rodent-a rat with antlers.

[Portions of the audience begin to leave.]

I've suggested that the beef industry's abuse of our Western lands is based on the old mythology of the cowbo as a natural nobleman. I'd like to conclude this diatribe with a few remarks about this most cherished and fanciful of American fairy tales. In truth, the cowboy is only a hired hand. A farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat. A herdsman who gets on a horse to do part of his work. Some ranchers are also cowboys, but most are not. There is a difference.

There are many ranchers out there who are big time farmers of the public lands-our property. As such, they do not merit any special consideration or special privileges. There are only about 31,000 ranchers in the whole American West who use the public lands. That's less than the population of Missoula, Montana. The rancher (with a few honorable exceptions) is a man who strings barbed wire all over the range; drills wells and bulldozes stockponds; drives off elk and antelope and bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs; shoots eagles, bears and cougars on sight; supplants the native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cowshit, anthills, mud, dust, and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how much he loves the American West. Cowboys also are greatly overrated. Consider the nature of their work. Suppose you had to spend most of your working hours sitting on a horse, contemplating the hind end of a cow. How would that affect your imagination? Think what id does to the relatively simple mind of the average peasant boy, raised amid the bawling of calves and cows in the splatter of mud and the stink of shit.

[Shouting. Laughter. Disturbance.]

Do cowboys work hard? Sometimes. But most ranchers don't work very hard. They have a lot of leisure time for politics and bellyaching (which is why most state legislatures in the West are occupied and dominated by cattlemen). Any time you go into a small Western town you'll find them at the nearest drugstore, sitting around all morning drinking coffee, talking about their tax breaks.

Is a cowboy's work socially useful? No. As I've already pointed out, subsidized Western range beef is a trivial item in the national beef economy. If all of our 31,000 Western public-land ranchers quite tomorrow, we'd never even notice. Any public school teacher does harder work, more difficult work, more dangerous work, and far more valuable work than the cowboy or the rancher. The same applies to the registered nurses and nurses' aides, garbage workers, and traffic cops. Harder work, tougher work, more necessary work. We need those people in our complicated society. We do not need cowboys or ranchers. We've carried them on our backs long enough.

[Disturbance in rear of hall.]

"This Abbey," the cowboys and their lovers will say, "this Abbey is a wimp. A chicken-hearted sentimentalist with no feel for the hard realities of practical life." Especially critical of my attitude will be the Easterners and Midwesterners newly arrived here from their Upper West Side apartments, their rustic lodges in upper Michigan. Our nouveau Westerners with their toy ranches, their pickup trucks with the gun racks, their pointy-toed boots with the undershot heels, their gigantic hats. And of course, their pet horses. The instant rednecks.

To those who might accuse me of wimpery and sentimentality, I'd like to say this in reply. I respect real men. I admire true manliness. But I despise arrogance and brutality and bullies. So let me close with some nice remarks about cowboys and cattle ranchers. They are a mixed lot, like the rest of us. As individuals, they range from the bad to the ordinary to the good. A rancher, after all, is only a farmer, cropping the public range lands with his four-legged lawnmowers, stashing our grass into his bank account. A cowboy is a hired hand trying to make an honest living. Nothin special. I have no quarrel with these people as fellow human. All I want to do is get their cows off our property. Let those cowboys andranchers find some harder way to make a living, like the rest of us have to do. There's no good reason why we should subsidize them forever. They've had their free ride. It's time they learned to support themselves. In the meantime, I'm going to say good-bye to all you cowboys and cowgirls. I love the legend too-but keep your sacred cows and your dead horses out of my elk pastures.

[Sitting ovation. Gunfire in parking lot.]

All of this information was taken from One Life at a Time, Please which was written by Edward Abbey and published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., in 1988.

Dispelling the Cowboy Myth: an Interview with George Wuerthner

Sacred Buffalo, Holy Cow: The Struggle for the Western Range

We Ought Not Grow Cows In Dry West

Cowboy Mentality Dominates Bison Slaughter

Cattle are the biggest source of global warming, producing more greenhouse gases than cars!

Western Watersheds Project

Buffalo Field Campaign

From Earth Day to “Eco-Terrorism”

2010-06-15T09:54:00.002-04:00

Apr 22nd, 2010 by Will Potter

Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and everyone, it seems, is “going green.” With widespread oil shortages due to peak oil looming within five years, and the startling effects of climate change becoming shockingly clear, environmentalism is more accepted and urgently needed than ever.

So why is the “number one domestic terrorism threat,” according to the FBI, the “eco-terrorism, animal rights movement”?

The environmental movement, like all social movements, has a wide-range of elements. There are people who leaflet and write letters. And there are underground groups, like the Earth Liberation Front, which have vandalized SUVs, burned ski resorts, and destroyed genetically-engineered crops. Even at their most extreme, none of these tactics have injured a single human being.

Nevertheless, they have been called “terrorism,” a label which has had extreme repercussions for those targeted. An environmental activist named Daniel McGowan was sentenced as a terrorist for his role in two ELF crimes, and for that he is now in a secretive prison facility called a Communications Management Unit, for “domestic terrorists.” The inmates and guards call it “Little Guantanamo.”

The “eco-terrorist” label has not been confined to the ELF and acts of sabotage. Corporations and the politicians who represent them have campaigned to stretch the label as far as they can. For example:

Utah Bill Would Make Environmentalists Like Tim DeChristopher “Eco-Terrorists”

“Animal Planet Collaborated with Eco-Terrorists”

Mafia Law Used Against Environmentalists for Tree Sits, Civil Disobedience, Blog Post

So how do government agencies and industry groups rationalize this? How do they justify labeling activists who have never harmed anyone with the same term as people who have flown planes into buildings?

A report by the Department of Homeland Security called “Eco-terrorism: Environmental and Animal Rights Militants in the United States” reveals part of the answer:

“All of these beliefs stand in direct contrast to the notion of individualism as promoted by Western culture..”

Put another way, the beliefs of a growing segment of the environmental movement go beyond urging people to switch lightbulbs or drive hybrids. Their critique challenges widespread cultural values, and questions deeply-held beliefs about whether humans have the right to exploit the natural world. Fundamentally, these activists question the unspoken dogma that human beings, and their interests, trump those of all other species.

That is only part of the explanation, though. It is not just that activists hold these beliefs. That, alone, is not a threat. The threat is when they act on them. Effectively.

That last word is critical. When activists take direct action to put their beliefs into practice, and in doing so threaten corporate profits, they become worthy of government reports and national security warnings.

For instance, the State Department warned corporations in a PowerPoint presentation:

“Although incidents related to terrorism are most likely to make the front page news, Animal Rights Extremism is what’s most likely to affect your day-to-day business operations…”

Forty years after Earth Day, the message from corporations, politicians and government agencies is clear. Shop and consume and shop some more, perhaps signing a petition or two along the way, and that is “going green.”

But if you go further, if you start demanding substantive, systemic change and shaking the economic and political power structures behind the green-washing, that is “eco-terrorism.”

SOURCE: Green is the New Red

Proposal to legalize pot in Detroit headed for council vote

2010-06-02T11:58:00.000-04:00

BY BILL LAITNER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

A proposal to legalize small amounts of marijuana in Detroit is headed to Detroit City Council.

The council is likely to have the issue on its June 15 agenda, a spokeswoman for Council President Pro Tem Gary Brown said today. If council members decline to approve the proposal, it automatically will appear on the November ballot, Brown’s public affairs director Stacie Clayton said.

Leaving it up to voters is “actually what I expect will happen,” Clayton said. The subject was twice postponed by the city council’s Internal Operations Committee — last week for the visit to Detroit of first lady Michelle Obama last week and this week so that council members could attend the statewide conference of government officials on Mackinac Island, Clayton said. The committee now is planning to discuss the proposal at 10 a.m. June 9, she said.

The full council’s consideration would follow Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey’s decision May 19 to certify more than 6,000 petition signatures in favor of the proposal, which would allow Detroiters who are 21 or older to possess up to 1 ounce of marijuana on private property, petition organizer Tim Beck said.

“We’re thrilled” that the petitions were certified because “we could’ve had one paragraph misnumbered and they could keep us off the ballot,” Beck, 58, the owner of a health-insurance firm and a Detroit resident, said today.

"These things have to be absolutely perfect,” said Beck, a veteran of successful drives to approve medical marijuana in five Michigan cities and ultimately statewide.

SOURCE: Detroit Free Press

Amerika

2010-05-31T12:16:00.003-04:00

JOHN TRUDELL SPEAKS AT JUDI BARI MEMORIAL

2010-05-27T11:14:00.002-04:00

April 26, 1997:

I'm pleased to be here and I'm glad that you're here and I'll attempt to be as clear as I can while I'm up here.

It's about our D and A. Descendants and ancestors. We are the descendants and we are the ancestors. D and A, our DNA, our blood, our flesh and our bone, is made up of the metals and the minerals and the liquids of the earth. We are the earth. We truly, literally and figuratively are the earth. Any relationship we will ever have in this world to real power -- the real power, not energy systems and other artificial means of authority -- but any relationship we will ever have to real power is our relationship to the earth.

So whatever Judi was doing and what Earth First! does, they were establishing connection with the basic reality, that we must take care of the earth. Our power comes from the earth.

And because we are made up of the earth -- our common ground, so to speak -- we are all the descendants of tribes. Each and every one of us is a descendant of a tribe. We have genetic memories. Inside of our genetic memories, that power connection exists to our ancestral past. We are all descendants of tribes.

But the tribes of the planet earth have encountered a technological religious mind set that removes all spiritual value and real value about life from the earth and puts it into theoretical heavens or hells. And it does it under a male image of a male dominator god.

In our tribal ancestry each and every one of our ancestors resisted that notion, that imposition. Tribes of Europe, tribes of Africa, tribes of here. Every tribe resisted it. It started in different time frames in different parts of the planet. It's almost like a disease. A virus, a virus, a disease that lives in the human. A disease of the spirit. It's almost like a diseased spirit affects the perception of reality of the carrier of the disease, the human being.

Power. It's very important that we understand who we are in relationship to power, because we have been tricked and lied to, almost in a way one would say, "brainwashed", into looking at authority as power. It is very important that we make this distinction because we need to have something to pass to the next generations.

Authority is not power. Authority is authority. All authority is usually based upon aggression or implied aggression or active aggression. Authority is authority. Power is something else. Power is what we come from. It is a part of the natural order of the universe -- power.

Authority is something that man creates. It's limitation is that it was created by man. Power has no limitations.

Our relationship to the earth, DNA. We are different shapes and forms of the earth. We are different trees. We are no more or no less than the tree. We are different stones. We are just different shapes of the life of the earth.

As human beings we understand in this technologic religious mind set that the authoritarian system, the industrial fascism, the industrial Reich that we live under, we understand that they can mine the other natural resources of the earth, and through refinement processes take old dinosaurs out of the ground and turn them into energy to run the machine world that we're very addicted to and partly enslaved to.

We have to make the connection that we are just a different shape but our value is no more or no less than the rest of the natural resources of the earth, the rest of the DNA of the earth. So it's very possible that we are being mined in the same way that the dinosaurs are, out of the ground. Human being, human physical, being spirit. Human physical, being spirit. Human physical, being spirit.

And we live under an authoritarian system, an industrial technologic mind set that has discovered and developed a way to mine, to take the being part of human, the spirit part of human and convert it into energy and then use that energy to power their system, to run their system. They are literally eating our spirits.

Literally eating our spirits.

Our spirit is eaten when we do not understand the distinction, the difference between authority and power. If they tell us money resembles power, then whoever has the most money has the most power.

But that is a lie.

Whoever has the most money has the ability to get authority. But that is not power. But if we believe that, if we believe that money is power, or that it can take us to power, then we will always understand that power is something removed from us and is not a natural part of us.

It is just so subtle, and so blatant.

If we believe that political systems are power, they're manipulative. That's all they are: a political system is a way of mining the spirit, in just the same way as the definition of authority: mining our spirit.

This is where someone like Judi [Bari] becomes a threat, because she understands she has power, and she understands the reality of responsibility that goes with power. She understands that. We can't communicate with her now the way that we used to, but we can communicate with her. That's life. That's spirit.

In the ways of the tribes and in our common ancestry, we understood the play with our ancestors. We understood the ones before us, the ones that we were the descendants of. This was our power connection to knowledge. This was our power connection to the past and our power connection to the future. So as we enter into this, whatever has to come down in the future -- I don't really have time to go into too far! --

But the antibiotic to dealing with these people, these vampires -- and it t is, it is vampires, cannibalization -- the antibiotic to this disease is our intelligence. We were given intelligence by the creator. We have intelligence. That is the antibiotic.That is the cure. There is no existing cure to the problem other than the one we will create by using our intelligence as intelligently and as clearly as we possibly can.

To use our intelligence as intelligently as we possibly can.

To have clarity. Because this beast that feeds and eats our spirit does it by the confusions that are in our minds.

But we understand the pollution of the air, of the water, we understand the pollution of the environment has come from this plundering and mining of the planet in an irresponsible manner. But you think about every fear, every doubt, every insecurity, every way that we ever beat ourselves up inside of our own heads -- that is the pollution left over from the mining of our spirit.

Another word I hear used a lot -- I don't "believe" anything. I tried to believe but there was a "lie" in the middle: B, E, LIE, V, E. Again, use our intelligence very intelligently. There are certain words that we should use very, very, very carefully and I think that's one of those words, because either we know or we don't know.

We should think -- anything in between us knowing and not knowing -- we should think.

Thank you.

SOURCE: Settlers in Support of Indigenous Sovereignty

The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy

2010-05-22T10:17:00.001-04:00

By Noam Chomsky

Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline.

On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections—a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.

The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political system.

To the editors of The New York Times, the ruling “strikes at the heart of democracy” by having “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.”

The court was split, 5-4, with the four reactionary judges (misleadingly called “conservative”) joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. selected a case that could easily have been settled on narrow grounds and maneuvered the court into using it to push through a far-reaching decision that overturns a century of precedents restricting corporate contributions to federal campaigns.

Now corporate managers can in effect buy elections directly, bypassing more complex indirect means. It is well-known that corporate contributions, sometimes packaged in complex ways, can tip the balance in elections, hence driving policy. The court has just handed much more power to the small sector of the population that dominates the economy.

Political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics” is a very successful predictor of government policy over a long period. The theory interprets elections as occasions on which segments of private sector power coalesce to invest to control the state.

The Jan. 21 decision only reinforces the means to undermine functioning democracy.

The background is enlightening. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment”—the constitutional guarantee of free speech, which would include support for political candidates.

In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts implemented the court’s 1886 decision that corporations—these “collectivist legal entities”—have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood.

This attack on classical liberalism was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives. Christopher G. Tiedeman described the principle as “a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American states as popular governments.”

Morton Horwitz writes in his standard legal history that the concept of corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power from shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that “the powers of the board of directors “are identical with the powers of the corporation.” In later years, corporate rights were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably by the mislabeled “free trade agreements.” Under these agreements, for example, if General Motors establishes a plant in Mexico, it can demand to be treated just like a Mexican business (“national treatment”)—quite unlike a Mexican of flesh and blood who might seek “national treatment” in New York, or even minimal human rights.

A century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described an America in which “comparatively small groups of men,” corporate managers, “wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country,” becoming “rivals of the government itself.”

In reality, these “small groups” increasingly have become government’s masters. The Roberts court gives them even greater scope.

The Jan. 21 decision came three days after another victory for wealth and power: the election of Republican candidate Scott Brown to replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the “liberal lion” of Massachusetts. Brown’s election was depicted as a “populist upsurge” against the liberal elitists who run the government.

The voting data reveal a rather different story.

High turnouts in the wealthy suburbs, and low ones in largely Democratic urban areas, helped elect Brown. “Fifty-five percent of Republican voters said they were `very interested’ in the election,” The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll reported, “compared with 38 percent of Democrats.”

So the results were indeed an uprising against President Obama’s policies: For the wealthy, he was not doing enough to enrich them further, while for the poorer sectors, he was doing too much to achieve that end.

The popular anger is quite understandable, given that the banks are thriving, thanks to bailouts, while unemployment has risen to 10 percent.

In manufacturing, one in six is out of work—unemployment at the level of the Great Depression. With the increasing financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of productive industry, prospects are bleak for recovering the kinds of jobs that were lost.

Brown presented himself as the 41st vote against healthcare—that is, the vote that could undermine majority rule in the U.S. Senate.

It is true that Obama’s healthcare program was a factor in the Massachusetts election. The headlines are correct when they report that the public is turning against the program.

The poll figures explain why: The bill does not go far enough. The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll found that a majority of voters disapprove of the handling of healthcare both by the Republicans and by Obama.

These figures align with recent nationwide polls. The public option was favored by 56 percent of those polled, and the Medicare buy-in at age 55 by 64 percent; both programs were abandoned.

Eighty-five percent believe that the government should have the right to negotiate drug prices, as in other countries; Obama guaranteed Big Pharma that he would not pursue that option.

Large majorities favor cost-cutting, which makes good sense: U.S. per capita costs for healthcare are about twice those of other industrial countries, and health outcomes are at the low end.

But cost-cutting cannot be seriously undertaken when largesse is showered on the drug companies, and healthcare is in the hands of virtually unregulated private insurers—a costly system peculiar to the U.S.

The Jan. 21 decision raises significant new barriers to overcoming the serious crisis of healthcare, or to addressing such critical issues as the looming environmental and energy crises. The gap between public opinion and public policy looms larger. And the damage to American democracy can hardly be overestimated.

SOURCE: In These Times

Rustbelt Rage

2010-05-22T10:04:00.001-04:00

By Noam Chomsky

On Feb. 18, Joe Stack, a 53-year-old computer engineer, crashed his small plane into a building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide, killing one other person and injuring others.

Stack left an anti-government manifesto explaining his actions. The story begins when he was a teenager living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pa., near the heart of what was once a great industrial center.

His neighbor, in her ’80s and surviving on cat food, was the “widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement.

“Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was Social Security to live on.”

He could have added that the super-rich and their political allies continue to try to take away Social Security, too.

Stack decided that he couldn’t trust big business and would strike out on his own, only to discover that he also couldn’t trust a government that cared nothing about people like him but only about the rich and privileged; or a legal system in which “there are two `interpretations’ for every law, one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us.”

The government leaves us with “the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies (that) are murdering tens of thousands of people a year,” with care rationed largely by wealth, not need.

Stack traces these ills to a social order in which “a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities—and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours.”

Stack’s manifesto ends with two evocative sentences: “The communist creed: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: from each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.”

Poignant studies of the U.S. rustbelt reveal comparable outrage among individuals who have been cast aside as state-corporate programs close plants and destroy families and communities.

An acute sense of betrayal comes readily to people who believed they had fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with business and government, only to discover they had been only instruments of profit and power.

Striking similarities exist in China, the world’s second largest economy, investigated by UCLA scholar Ching Kwan Lee.

Lee has compared working-class outrage and desperation in the discarded industrial sectors of the U.S. and in what she calls China’s rustbelt—the state socialist industrial center in the Northeast, now abandoned for state capitalist development of the southeast sunbelt.

In both regions Lee found massive labor protests, but different in character. In the rustbelt, workers express the same sense of betrayal as their U.S. counterparts—in their case, the betrayal of the Maoist principles of solidarity and dedication to development of the society that they thought had been a moral compact, only to discover that whatever it was, it is now bitter fraud.

Around the country, scores of millions of workers dropped from work units “are plagued by a profound sense of insecurity,” arousing “rage and desperation,” Lee writes.

Lee’s work and studies of the U.S. rustbelt make clear that we should not underestimate the depth of moral indignation that lies behind the furious, often self-destructive bitterness about government and business power.

In the U.S., the Tea Party movement—and even more so the broader circles it reaches—reflect the spirit of disenchantment. The Tea Party’s anti-tax extremism is not as immediately suicidal as Joe Stack’s protest, but it is suicidal nonetheless.

California today is a dramatic illustration. The world’s greatest public system of higher education is being dismantled.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he’ll have to eliminate state health and welfare programs unless the federal government forks over some $7 billion. Other governors are joining in.

Meanwhile a newly powerful states’ rights movement is demanding that the federal government not intrude into our affairs—a nice illustration of what Orwell called “doublethink”: the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind while believing both of them, practically a motto for our times.

California’s plight results in large part from anti-tax fanaticism. It’s much the same elsewhere, even in affluent suburbs.

Encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of business propaganda. People must be indoctrinated to hate and fear the government, for good reasons: Of the existing power systems, the government is the one that in principle, and sometimes in fact, answers to the public and can constrain the depredations of private power.

However, anti-government propaganda must be nuanced. Business of course favors a powerful state that works for multinationals and financial institutions—and even bails them out when they destroy the economy.

But in a brilliant exercise in doublethink, people are led to hate and fear the deficit. That way, business’s cohorts in Washington may agree to cut benefits and entitlements like Social Security (but not bailouts).

At the same time, people should not oppose what is largely creating the deficit—the growing military budget and the hopelessly inefficient privatized healthcare system.

It is easy to ridicule how Joe Stack and others like him articulate their concerns, but it’s far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their perceptions and actions at a time when people with real grievances are being mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger to themselves and to others.

SOURCE: In These Times

Sniffing Out Tea Party Corporatism

2010-05-22T08:55:00.001-04:00

By Michael Winship
April 30, 2010

Editor’s Note: The Tea Party movement has generated a lot of media talk about “populism,” which gets defined as the battle between Big Government and the Common Folk, but what gets ignored is that the only feasible check on unlimited corporate power would be a democratized and energized federal government.

So, by targeting government, not corporatism, the Tea Partiers serve essentially as “faux populist” front-men for corporate interests, a reality noted by longtime populist Jim Hightower and cited in this guest essay by Michael Winship:

I first became aware of Jim Hightower more than 20 years ago, during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. The Democrats were nominating Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis to run for president against Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, and at the time Dukakis looked like he had a pretty good chance at the White House.

This was before a series of events did him in, including the notorious Willie Horton ad that attacked Dukakis for a Massachusetts weekend furlough prison program that allowed a convicted murderer back on the street, where he robbed and raped.

And it was before Dukakis bobbled a harsh debate question about what he would do if his own wife Kitty was raped and murdered. And it was before he was photographed atop an Abrams tank wearing a helmet that made him look like he was starring in Snoopy III: This Time It's Personal.

All of that misery lay ahead. The Democrats were still in giddy spirits during the convention and had a high old time poking fun at Bush, Sr. That was when the late Ann Richards, then the Texas state treasurer, famously lamented, "Poor George! He can't help it - he was born with a silver foot in his mouth!"

But it was the convention speech by Hightower that I especially remember. He was the Texas agriculture commissioner in those days – an important job in the Lone Star State - and described Bush as a "toothache of a man," a cruel but remarkable metaphor.

And he said that Bush behaved like someone who was "born on third base and thought he hit a triple... He is threatening to lead this country from tweedle-dum to tweedle-dumber."

Maybe Hightower didn't originate those lines (as Milton Berle used to say, "When you steal from me, you steal twice"), but he delivered them with a gusto akin to genuine authorship and over the years has come up with enough original material of his own to absolve him - mostly - from the sin of occasional joke-filching.

Now others steal from him. It was Jim, I believe, who came up with the notion that all elected officials be required to wear brightly colored, NASCAR-like jumpsuits with the corporate logos of their biggest campaign contributors, an idea I've heard appropriated by several others without proper attribution.

And I think it was Jim who first said of George W. Bush, "If ignorance ever reaches $40 a barrel, I want the drilling rights to his head." (On hearing that another politician was learning Spanish, Hightower is supposed to have remarked, "Oh good. Now he'll be bi-ignorant.")

These days, Jim Hightower broadcasts daily radio commentaries and edits "The Hightower Lowdown," an invaluable monthly newsletter. With the passing of both Ann Richards and Molly Ivins, he has became the funniest person in Texas politics - intentionally, that is.

But it is his steadfast advocacy of progressive politics, his unyielding embrace of the old time gospel of populism, that made him an especially appropriate guest on the final edition of the PBS series, “Bill Moyers Journal.”

"Here's what populism is not," he told my colleague Bill Moyers. "It is not just an incoherent outburst of anger. And certainly it is not anger that is funded and organized by corporate front groups, as the initial tea party effort [was], and as most of it is still today - though there is legitimate anger within it, in terms of the people who are there.

“But what populism is at its essence is just a determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government. …
"One big difference between real populism and... the tea party thing is that real populists understand that government has become a subsidiary of corporations. So you can't say, 'Let's get rid of government.' You need to be saying, 'Let's take over government.'"

As Hightower's fond of saying, the water won't clear up until we get the hogs out of the creek.

"I see the central issue in politics to be the rise of corporate power," he reiterated. "Overwhelming, overweening corporate power that is running roughshod over the workaday people of the country. They think they're the top dogs, and we're a bunch of fire hydrants, you know?"

Of President Obama he said, "It's odd to me that we've got a president who ran from the outside and won, and now is trying to govern from the inside. You can't do progressive government from the inside. You have to rally those outsiders and make them a force...

“Our heavyweight is the people themselves. They've got the fat cats, but we've got the alley cats."

This weekend, Jim is being honored at Texas State University-San Marcos with an exhibition celebrating his life's work as a populist journalist, historian and advocate. They're calling the event "Swim Against the Current" because, as Moyers says, "That's what he does."

In fact, "Swim Against the Current" also is the title of Hightower's most recent book, subtitled, "Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow." He comes from a long history of flow resisters, a critical, American political tradition.

"I go all the way back to Thomas Paine," he said. "I mean, that was kind of the ultimate rebellion, when the media tool was a pamphlet." The men who wrote the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence "didn't create democracy. [They] made democracy possible.

"What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us.

"These are agitators. They extended democracy decade after decade. You know, sometimes we get in the midst of these fights. We think we're making no progress. But... you look back, we've made a lot of progress...

“The agitator after all is the center post in the washing machine that gets the dirt out. So, we need a lot more agitation....

"We can battle back against the powers. But it's not just going to a rally and shouting. It's organizing and it's thinking. And reaching out to others. And building a real people's movement."

SOURCE: Consortium News

FOOD NOT BOMBS CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF FEEDING THE HUNGRY

2010-05-22T08:32:00.002-04:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 1, 2010

CONTACT: Food Not Bombs Keith McHenry - co-founder 575-770-3377
www.foodnotbombs.net

FOOD NOT BOMBS CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF FEEDING THE HUNGRY IN PROTEST TO WAR, POVERTY, AND THE EXPLOITATION OF THE EARTH

TAOS, NEW MEXICO -  Food Not Bombs is celebrating 30 years of feeding the hungry in protest to war, poverty, and the exploitation of the Earth by holding Soupstock free concerts and gatherings this May in cities around the world.

Food Not Bombs was started by eight activist after the May 24, 1980 protest to stop Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in New Hampshire. Food Not Bombs collects food that can't be sold, prepares food to share with the hungry in over 1,000 communities around the world. This all volunteer movement is dedicated to nonviolent direct action and has no headquarters or leaders.

Each group is autonomous and makes decisions using a process called consensus. The food is always vegan or vegetarian and free to anyone with out restriction.

Soon after Food Not Bombs started it's second group in San Francisco nine volunteers were jailed on August 15, 1988  for "making a political statement" by sharing free food. The  police made over 1,000 arrests in San Francisco from 1988 to 1996. Orlando, Florida, Los Angeles, California and Las Vegas, Nevada and other cities in the United States have also made arrests but were not able to stop Food Not Bombs. Several Food Not Bombs volunteers have been stabbed to death in Russia by neo-nazis while feeding the hungry. Our New Orleans coordinator Helen Hill was shot to death after Katrina.

Amnesty International has designated all Food Not Bombs volunteers prisoners of conscience and worked for our unconditional release when they were imprisoned in the United States, Mexico and the Philippines.  Food Not Bombs also initiated many grassroots projects including Indymedia, Homes Not jails housing occupations, Bikes Not Bombs, Food Not Lawns community gardens and The Really Really Free Markets. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States lists Food Not Bombs as a terrorist group even though volunteers are dedicated to nonviolence and fed the rescue workers in New York on 9/11, organized the food relief effort in New Orleans and other Gulf cities after Hurricane Katrina and feed the hungry every week in hundreds of American cities. Volunteers also fed the tent city protest during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, provided meals at a 600 day farm workers vigil in Sarajevo and cooked for Cindy Sheehan's Camp Casey outside George Bush's summer home in Crawford, Texas. Food Not Bombs fed peace camps on the West Bank in Palestine, and climate change actions in Denmark, Iceland and Tazmania. Food Not Bombs cooked for the June 12, 1982 anti nuclear protest in Central Park, New York, the 1999 Seattle protest against the World Trade Organization and at the protests against the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Three Food Not Bombs cook houses were raided by the F.B. I. and Homeland Security the day before the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis where eight volunteers were charged under the Patriot Act.

Food Not Bombs continues to work for change and provide food to the hungry in over 1,000 communities around the world as well as at many protests including immigrant rights actions, direct actions against coal mining, logging and oil drilling, animal cruelty, corporate domination, economic exploitation and the wars in Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East.

### SOME OF THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY EVENTS REPORTED TO DATE
__________________________ May 23, 2010 Boston, Massachusetts USA
May 23rd from 12-5pm on the Boston Common, Boston, MA 02115 Call
Kassie Carlson at 774-521-9902 or email FNBBoston@gmail.com
__________________________ May 22-23, 2010 at Alice Springs, Australia
Saturday 22nd - from 5pm Free BBQ feast, acoustic music and movies
@ Arid Lands Environment Centre

Sunday 23rd - from 6pm Regular FNB serving, featuring extra super
spectacular free feast & live music Contact tasquoll@gmail.com
__________________________ May 14-16, 2010 in Monterrey, Mexico

The celebration starts with a tour thru points of Activism in this
Northern city of Mexico; followed by a day of Workshops and experiences
sharing, and proposals for linking and strengthening the efforts
of the participating chapters, closing with a Food Not Bombs table
and the Festival for the Active Peace.
Contact otrocomidanobombasmty@gmail.com

I'm Canadian; I Have No Time For This Bullshit

2010-05-20T13:00:00.000-04:00

by Bob King

Ole Ole Olson, writing at News Junkie Post concludes (with graphs!) that what folks like me have been saying all along is true; that the bullshit to the right of us is so deep that you need a diving suit and a support vessel to find any useful nugget of truth. And to the left - well, it's still a challenge, but you don't need life-support.

Now, I'm probably too stubborn for my own good, still shouting out from time to time that I am, indeed a Conservative. An anti-authoritarian, to be sure. A minarchist to a degree. Occasionally I add that I'm a " Progressive Conservative," just to add a Canadian tinge of irony to my quixotic insistence on upholding the values of Burke, moderated by a good span of practice that has given us many ideas that seem well worth preserving. On occasion, this has been in the face of our dearest instincts and assumptions about economics and human nature.

But to a genuine Conservative, facts are facts and the truth is the truth. When something works, it works, and if it works despite your philosophy, it's your philosophy that must adapt.

It's an interesting read and the rest can be found here.

Ralph McGehee, the CIA and Deadly Deceits

2010-05-16T10:40:00.001-04:00

By Wade Frazier

Introduction

Statement for Ralph's Protection

My 1999 Synopsis of Deadly Deceits

Introduction

In 1990, when I was getting educated in the alternative media and other areas, I obtained Deadly Deceits, the memoirs of an ex-CIA operative, Ralph McGehee. When I was writing my original web site in 1996, I wrote a brief synopsis of Deadly Deceits, in a section where I outlined the sources that influenced my worldview. I contacted Ralph before I published the pages, asking him if I could publish the Deadly Deceits excerpts that I quoted on my web pages. He replied that it was OK by him, so I did.

Ralph is an ex-CIA employee who publicly criticized the CIA, and only a handful ever have. McGehee is interviewed on Bill Moyers' Secret Government video. Ralph maintained his CIABASE archives on the Internet for years, exposing the CIA's activities using public domain sources. In running his CIABASE, Ralph was doing something that anyone could do. Still, he endured endless harassment from the CIA as they have tried silencing him. Ralph had more than my respect; he had my awe. After riding in the saddle with Dennis Lee for years, I discovered how rare a Dennis or a Ralph McGehee was. People of conscience, living it at those levels, are one in many thousands.

My web pages came down in early 1997 with no warning, something not entirely in my control. In early 1998, I discovered that some of my work survived and was being reproduced on the Internet. Not only had one person reproduced my entire 600-page web site, I also found that my synopsis of Deadly Deceits was reproduced in several places. I contacted Hank Roth's The Golem web site, one place my synopsis appeared, asking him where he got it. The surprising response from Hank was that he thought Ralph McGehee gave it to him. It turned out that Ralph had published my synopsis of his book across the Internet as the defining synopsis of Deadly Deceits, which is the summary of his career. I was deeply honored.

When I discovered that my hurriedly written synopsis still dominated Ralph's presentation of his work on his new web site, I wrote a version of it using more care. It is below. After escalating harassment by the CIA and friends, leading to bodily injury to Ralph, his CIABASE web site went down in the spring of 2000, and will probably never reappear.

Statement for Ralph's Protection

In August 2001, I received the below statement from Ralph. He wanted to have me post it on my site, and wherever else it can be posted, for his protection.

“I moved to Florida in July 2000. Immediately the harassment I experienced in Herndon transferred here. A major difference is that the FBI here openly advises I am a threat to National Security -- because, I assume, I tell unclassified truths to the American people.

“In 1990 the CIA officially advised me in writing that I may use any information in the public domain -- making the FBI's actions against me false if not illegal as I have never and will never expose secret persons or information.

“Harassment here has grown to such a degree that I fear staged incidents to arrest me for something -- anything.

“I base my actions on what is in the best interests of the United States. This may be difficult to believe given my negative commentary, but I participated in and watched CIA operations in Vietnam and other countries nearly destroy the US/us.

“The CIA said I was an analyst with few peers and awarded me its Career Intelligence Medal. I use this ability and those experiences to inform about the CIA's many opportunities and deficiencies.

“Anyone wishing to know more may find details via a Google search under my name.”

-- Ralph McGehee

Ralph has also asked me to post his letter from the CIA that informed him that his CIABASE activities were perfectly legal, and were no threat to “national security.” Here it is.

Click on image to enlarge

My 1999 Synopsis of Deadly Deceits

Deadly Deceits became a college textbook. After a moving introduction it starts slowly, climaxing with a series of haunting revelations. During McGehee's twenty-five year CIA career, he heartily believed in its stated mission of "fighting communism." McGehee wrote that CIA fieldworker candidates are psychologically screened before being hired, and their most treasured quality is the willingness to blindly follow orders.

Ralph W. McGehee joined the CIA in 1952, after an All-American football career at Notre Dame (where Phil Agee also studied) during their national championship years. He was raised on and believed in the American dream - "the Protestant work ethic, truth, justice, freedom." He signed on as a dedicated cold warrior and spent the next ten years stationed at home and abroad: at Langley (the CIA headquarters in Washington), Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and then Thailand. McGehee was dedicated to stopping the scourge of communism, and enthusiastically helped keep the world free of its taint.

During the mid-1960s, communism was sweeping Southeast Asia. McGehee's job was saving Thai villages from communist insurgency. He viewed his career as a cross between "Peace Corps and missionary work." Building upon a British method used earlier in Thailand, McGehee developed an inexpensive method of intelligence gathering that identified communists and exposed their network. The strategy was partly intimidating the villagers through terror, such as holding a gun to a baby's head to get the mother to talk, yet was benign when compared to other "counterintelligence" methods of the time, among them torture and boiling suspected communists in oil.

The operation's goal was to make communists confess their "crimes," name their cohorts, return to the Thai government's fold and become "good peasants" again. Forgiveness was offered and given to those who talked, with escalating intimidation for those harder to crack. The Catholic Church successfully used a similar carrot-and-stick strategy during its Inquisition days. The Thailand strategy was effective and Machiavellian, something that McGehee crafted and believed in. It obtained a quality of intelligence the region had never seen before. It also reversed communist inroads. The Thai government's brute force response to "communist insurgency," backed by its U.S. sponsors, alienated the villagers, driving them into the communists' arms. McGehee's method was far more subtle and effective.

The operation's results were awarded universal praise in intelligence circles in 1967. McGehee had his career's greatest success and was euphoric. He discovered a way of exposing and defeating the communists, and his future looked bright. He was at the top of his game. In the wake of the accolades, William Colby (future CIA director, and then the Far East division chief) visited, and McGehee briefed him:

"I explained the procedures of the survey and then outlined my general conclusions, including my doubts about previous Agency reporting which said that the communists did not have the support of the local people and that they forced people to support them with threats and terrorism.

"'Such a picture is inaccurate,' I told Colby...'We have found that the Communists concentrate the majority, almost the entirety, of their time winning the cooperation of the peasants.'"

McGehee exposed the communist movement as a grass roots movement with peasant support, mainly because their goal was freeing themselves from colonial and neocolonial oppression, enforced by the Thai ruling class and their industrialized-nation sponsors. The Communist Revolution in Southeast Asia was an exercise in freedom, although McGehee would not attain that realization for years. In 1967, McGehee was ecstatic that his method reversed communist infiltration.

Colby silently received McGehee's presentation, finally muttering, "We always seem to be losing." McGehee was astonished by Colby's response.

Soon after Colby's visit, McGehee was removed from the field, his successful program was canceled, and he found himself behind a meaningless desk at Langley. He was shocked and confused for years. He eventually realized that his intelligence work, although arguably the most effective the West had ever seen in Southeast Asia, produced an undesirable answer. Communism could not be damned as an evil if the people wanted it. If that fact became widely known, our Vietnam adventure could be seen in an unsavory light: killing millions to prevent them from choosing a government we disapproved of. The American experience in Vietnam was an attempt at reconquering the region, keeping it in the capitalistic fold and keeping those people enslaved.

McGehee still believed his indoctrination and volunteered for Saigon, something that no sane CIA employee did in 1968. McGehee was a true believer in America's good intentions, even if their tactics sometimes seemed regrettable. Defeating the communists was his great desire.

One pivotal evening in his quarters near Saigon in December of 1968, McGehee finally figured it out.

"I sat there in agony thinking about all that had led me to this private hell. My idealism, my patriotism, my ambition, my plans to be a good intelligence officer to help my country fight the communist scourge - what in the hell had happened? Why did we have to bomb the people we were trying to save? Why were we napalming young children? Why did the CIA, my employer for 16 years, report lies instead of the truth?

"I hated my part in the charade of murder and horror. My efforts were contributing to the deaths, to the burning alive of children - especially the children. The photographs of young Vietnamese children burned by napalm destroyed me."

McGehee will never lose the memory of the smell of burning Vietnamese flesh. McGehee thought of killing himself that night in Vietnam. He thought of various ways to kill himself to protest what was happening. In the end, however, he committed his life to telling the world what really happened in Vietnam and the true nature of America's fight against communism. McGehee embarked on the hard, lonely road of exposing what his nation was really up to.

When his devastating tour of duty in Vietnam was finished, McGehee left:

"I was glad to be going home. But I knew I would never be the same person again. All of my ideals of helping people, all my convictions about the processes of intelligence, all my respect for my work, all the feelings of joy in my life, all my concepts of honor, integrity, trust and love, all in fact that made me what I was, had died in Vietnam. Through its blindness and its murders, the Agency had stolen my life and my soul. Full of anger, hatred, and fear, I bitterly contemplated a dismal future."

The year was 1970, and McGehee had nearly twenty years of CIA service. He spent mere weeks in the United States before returning to Thailand. He sought somewhere to serve out his career's remaining years; somewhere he could stand living. Ironically, he saw the fruit of his anti-communist efforts in Thailand. The peaceful culture of Southeast Asia was destroyed by American involvement. Where McGehee had earlier witnessed pastoral scenes of Thai and Vietnamese people quietly living their lives, Southeast Asia had been turned into an armed camp, with violence, drug use and prostitution commonplace. A barbed-wire fence surrounded the Thai school that his children happily attended on an earlier tour of duty. The students were bodily searched as they entered the school's grounds. The Thai government destroyed the villages that McGehee had "helped" on his earlier tours. He helped establish the framework that destroyed those that he "helped." He became a squeaky cog in the machine and was put on probation.

McGehee soon returned to Langley, spending several years getting educated in the CIA's archives. He finally understood what communism meant to the communists, and realized that the Western view of communism was a fantasy to justify our violence against them. They were not trying to conquer the world. They sought freedom. For that crime, America murdered millions of them. McGehee retired after spending 25 years with the agency, accepting a career achievement medal so his future work could not be called that of a CIA employee with a failed career. He began his book's conclusion with:

"The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities. [McGehee says he has never once seen a CIA official tell the truth to Congress. Instead comes a steady stream of lies. - Ed.] It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapon capability, to support presidential policy. Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target of its lies.

"As noted in the Church Committee's final report, the Agency's task is to develop an international anti-communist ideology. The CIA then links every egalitarian [which means "all men are created equal" - Ed.] political movement to the scourge of international communism. This then prepares the American people and many in the world community for the second stage, the destruction of those movements. For egalitarianism is the enemy and it must not be allowed to exist."

McGehee called for the CIA's abolition in Deadly Deceits, describing it as an unsalvageable organization. In Deadly Deceits' appendix, McGehee reported on the gauntlet that he ran to publish the book. He did not want to lose his pension, go to jail or leave the country, so he abided by the secrecy agreement he signed when joining the CIA. The appendix begins:

"The secrecy agreement that I signed when I joined the CIA allows the Agency to review prior to publication all writings of present and former employees to ensure that classified information relating to national security is not revealed. This provision seems logical and necessary to protect legitimate interests. However, my experiences in getting this book approved show that the CIA uses the agreement not so much to protect national security as to prevent revelations and criticisms of its immoral, illegal, and ineffective operations. To that end it uses all possible maneuvers, legal and illegal. Had I not been represented by my attorney, Mark Lynch of the American Civil Liberties Union, and had I not developed a massive catalog of information already cleared by the Agency's publication review board, this book could not have been published."

McGehee's dark journey in publishing Deadly Deceits is a damning indictment of U.S. secrecy laws and their enforcement. The CIA tried ambushing McGehee with a room full of lawyers, before they knew he hired a lawyer with the necessary security clearance to represent him. The CIA man assigned to work with McGehee made his feelings plain, telling him, "It's too bad you didn't work for the Israeli intelligence service. They know how to deal with people like you. They'd take you out and shoot you."

McGehee's original manuscript contained nothing that he felt was classified information, and he was careful. The CIA made 397 deletions from his original draft, after retracting hundreds of their more whimsical deletions, made before discovering that he had obtained competent counsel. The legal battle took more than two years, and the CIA went around in circles. They would permit certain passages after battling with McGehee, then they would retract that permission, then grant it again, then take it away once more, and on different grounds each time. The CIA’s effort was an incredible feat of double-talk and duplicity. At one point, Ralph was threatened with prosecution for stealing state secrets if he could not prove that every fact in his book was obtained in the public domain. The published book is riddled with censorship deletions, with text such as "[19 words deleted]" in the middle of a sentence. McGehee states:

"John Marks and Victor Marchetti's book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, published in 1974 (9 years before McGehee's book), was the last approved critical book written about the Agency by an ex-employee. In light of my own experiences the reason is obvious: the secrecy agreement and the way it is abused by the Agency. It is virtually impossible to write in an atmosphere where everything is secret until it is deemed otherwise....It is clear that the secrecy agreement does not halt the flow of information to our enemies, for it does not affect the CIA employee who sells information...What the CIA's secrecy agreement does quite effectively, however, is to stop critics of the Agency from explaining to the American public what the CIA is and does. It is sad to say, but the truth is that the primary purpose of the secrecy agreement is to suppress information that the American people are legitimately entitled to."

For all the mainstream media's rhetoric regarding the First Amendment, freedom of speech in America has had a rough ride. From the Sedition Act of 1798, making it a crime to criticize high-ranking American officials (not dealt with by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1964, in the New York Times versus Sullivan decision), to pre-Civil War Southern laws making it a crime to speak or write about abolition, to the Espionage Act that made it a crime to criticize World War I, freedom of speech has often been more imagined than real in America. During my lifetime, freedom of speech has waxed and waned.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) would be unnecessary if the principle of freedom truly guided the American legal system. The FOIA was originally passed during the Civil Rights days of the 1960s. The Nixon years saw the FOIA erode. The aftermath of the Watergate scandal tipped the scales back toward freedom. The Carter years saw a new openness in government and a focus on human rights, but that is relative. Under no U.S. president have we truly had freedom of information, nor have human rights concerns ever prominently guided America’s foreign policy. Knowledge is power, and keeping information secret is a time-honored method of amassing and maintaining power. The United States is no exception, and there is no reason why it should be. People can wave around the Constitution, but America’s freedom of information is scant for a nation that calls itself democratic, and has gotten worse since the World Trade Center attacks. America’s military and spy establishment has the largest secrecy apparatus of any nation, by far.

The rich and powerful run the Democratic Party, the same as in the Republican Party, but the Democratic Party sometimes has at least an appearance of allegiance to average Americans. The FOIA has endured many vicissitudes in my lifetime, with the Reagan-Bush years witnessing the greatest assaults on the FOIA. The Reagan administration even tried reclassifying previously declassified information used in McGehee's book, to enter bizarre, Orwellian realms. Bludgeoning Central America was one of many dark acts committed during the Reagan-Bush years, and secrecy was its handmaiden, evident in the Iran-Contra scandal, among others. Although the pendulum swung marginally back to freedom's side during Bill Clinton's reign, freedom of speech in America is a farce if one offends or exposes the powerful. Today, the "anti-terrorist" legislation Clinton has championed, and his recent "Fortress America" ideas of protecting America from "terrorists," can easily be used to silence American critics of our government, by calling them "terrorists." Those fears, voiced continually in right wing circles, are not so farfetched (events since the World Trade Center attacks make the above writing quite dated, as Bush, Ashcroft and friends seem to be trying to raise McCarthy from the grave).

To date, Ralph is one of a handful of ex-CIA employees to publicly criticize the CIA. Ralph does not agree with me, but I believe he did not attain his realizations due to his intelligence, which is considerable. He figured it out because he fervently digested his indoctrination and believed that his efforts made the world better. Because he was such a true believer, he chased experiences (such as volunteering for Saigon duty in 1968) that eventually provided him with his devastating revelations. When he realized that his efforts helped murder millions of people in Southeast Asia, his conscience assailed him. His pure heart enabled him to figure it out, not his intelligence.

I can only wonder how often Ralph thinks back to those Southeast Asians that he "helped," abetting their horrific experiences at the United States’ bloody hands. He probably thinks about it every day. His CIABASE and other efforts have been attempts to help balance his scales, while helping us awaken, to help prevent further murders in greed's name. Unfortunately, it is happening in Iraq today, and Armageddon might be just around the corner. Ralph's weathering of the CIA's continuing harassment has been inspiring. John Stockwell (another rare ex-CIA employee who spoke out, and has paid dearly for his efforts) has written, "More effectively than any other ex-CIA author, Ralph McGehee deals with the anguish of a principled man seeking a career in the CIA."

Ralph is the rare individual possessing the integrity to walk his arduous and heartbreaking path. Of the many thousands who have filed through the CIA's ranks during the past fifty years, Ralph is in an elite company of less than ten people who woke up and took a public stance. That list includes Philip Agee, John Stockwell, Victor Marchetti and David McMichael. There are not many more, and probably no others of their stature. They have my admiration, and even my awe. None of them think of themselves as heroes. As Noam Chomsky says, their motivation is partly being able to look themselves squarely in the eye while shaving. They are responding to the insistent call of their consciences, and feel compelled to act. Ralph McGehee and those few others like him rarely see themselves as heroes, but are doing what any decent person would do. The problem is, few will do the decent thing if it might really cost them. I will always be grateful for the "heroic" efforts of McGehee, Chomsky, Agee, Stockwell, McMichael, Marchetti, Dennis Lee and others. They helped me figure out how our system works.

Wade Frazier, Seattle, March 1999 (slightly revised since original publication)

P.S. in 2004, John Perkins spoke out like Ralph did, but from the privatized “middle management.”

SOURCE

WTF?!?

2010-04-07T09:53:00.002-04:00

Let it not be said I operate my vehicle with blinders. If the following video is merely a mistake by Michele Obama then it is one of the BIGGEST blunders in recent political history. In 2008, she very explicity said that the President's home country is Kenya and here is the unambiguous video. I am sure the a...rguments are already in motion that this is no different from me calling Kentucky my home state even though I was born in Michigan, or calling Poland my home country though only my grandfather on my mother's side was born there. It could be merely a declaration of a particular affinity for that nation. I have no idea what is going on but whatever the truth, whether the birthers stand falsely accused or not, this is a blunder of the highest order. She should have known better.

Rachel Maddow: The Un-Mooring of Politics from Fact

2010-04-07T09:40:00.001-04:00

Liberals

2010-03-27T09:21:00.001-04:00

From Matt Santos of The West Wing

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor."

Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet

2010-03-03T07:44:00.003-05:00

By Ryan Singel

The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.

McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.

When he was head of the country’s national intelligence, he scared President Bush with visions of e-doom, prompting the president to sign a comprehensive secret order that unleashed tens of billions of dollars into the military’s black budget so they could start making firewalls and building malware into military equipment.

And now McConnell is back in civilian life as a vice president at the secretive defense contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton. He’s out in front of Congress and the media, peddling the same Cybaremaggedon! gloom.

And now he says we need to re-engineer the internet:

We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.

Re-read that sentence. He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.

The Washington Post gave McConnell free space to declare that we are losing some sort of cyberwar. He argues that the country needs to get a Cold War strategy, one complete with the online equivalent of ICBMs and Eisenhower-era, secret-codenamed projects. Google’s allegation that Chinese hackers infiltrated its Gmail servers and targeted Chinese dissidents proves the United States is “losing” the cyberwar, according to McConnell.

But that’s not warfare. That’s espionage.

McConnell’s op-ed then pointed to breathless stories in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal about thousands of malware infections from the well-known Zeus virus. He intimated that the nation’s citizens and corporations were under unstoppable attack by this so-called new breed of hacker malware.

Despite the masterful PR about the Zeus infections from security company NetWitness (run by a former Bush Administration cyberczar Amit Yoran), the world’s largest security companies McAfee and Symantec downplayed the story. But the message had already gotten out — the net was under attack.

Brian Krebs, one of the country’s most respected cybercrime journalists and occasional Threat Level contributor, described that report: “Sadly, this botnet documented by NetWitness is neither unusual nor new.”

Those enamored with the idea of “cyberwar” aren’t dissuaded by fact-checking.

They like to point to Estonia, where a number of the government’s websites were rendered temporarily inaccessible by angry Russian citizens. They used a crude, remediable denial-of-service attack to temporarily keep users from viewing government websites. (This attack is akin to sending an army of robots to board a bus, so regular riders can’t get on. A website fixes this the same way a bus company would — by keeping the robots off by identifying the difference between them and humans.) Some like to say this was an act of cyberwar, but if it that was cyberwar, it’s pretty clear the net will be just fine.

In fact, none of these examples demonstrate the existence of a cyberwar, let alone that we are losing it.

But this battle isn’t about truth. It’s about power.

For years, McConnell has wanted the NSA (the ultra-secretive government spy agency responsible for listening in on other countries and for defending classified government computer systems) to take the lead in guarding all government and private networks. Not surprisingly, the contractor he works for has massive, secret contracts with the NSA in that very area. In fact, the company, owned by the shadowy Carlyle Group, is reported to pull in $5 billion a year in government contracts, many of them Top Secret.

Now the problem with developing cyberweapons — say a virus, or a massive botnet for denial-of-service attacks, is that you need to know where to point them. In the Cold War, it wasn’t that hard. In theory, you’d use radar to figure out where a nuclear attack was coming from and then you’d shoot your missiles in that general direction. But online, it’s extremely difficult to tell if an attack traced to a server in China was launched by someone Chinese, or whether it was actually a teenager in Iowa who used a proxy.

That’s why McConnell and others want to change the internet. The military needs targets.

But McConnell isn’t the only threat to the open internet.

Just last week the National Telecommunications and Information Administration — the portion of the Commerce Department that has long overseen the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — said it was time for it to revoke its hands-off-the-internet policy.

That’s according to a February 24 speech by Assistant Commerce Secretary Lawrence E. Strickling:

In fact, "leaving the Internet alone" has been the nation’s internet policy since the internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s. The primary government imperative then was just to get out of the way to encourage its growth. And the policy set forth in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was: "to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation."

This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now.

Now the NTIA needs to start being active to prevent cyberattacks, privacy intrusions and copyright violations, according to Strickling. And since NTIA serves as one of the top advisers to the president on the internet, that stance should not be underestimated.

Add to that — a bill looming in the Senate would hand the president emergency powers over the internet — and you can see where all this is headed. And let the past be our guide.

Following years of the NSA illegally spying on Americans’ e-mails and phone calls as part of a secret anti-terrorism project, Congress voted to legalize the program in July 2008. That vote allowed the NSA to legally turn America’s portion of the internet into a giant listening device for the nation’s intelligence services. The new law also gave legal immunity to the telecoms like AT&T that helped the government illegally spy on American’s e-mails and internet use. Then-Senator Barack Obama voted for this legislation, despite earlier campaign promises to oppose it.

As anyone slightly versed in the internet knows, the net has flourished because no government has control over it.

But there are creeping signs of danger.

Where can this lead? Well, consider England, where a new bill targeting online file sharing will outlaw open internet connections at cafes or at home, in a bid to track piracy.

To be sure, we could see more demands by the government for surveillance capabilities and backdoors in routers and operating systems. Already, the feds successfully turned the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (a law mandating surveillance capabilities in telephone switches) into a tool requiring ISPs to build similar government-specified eavesdropping capabilities into their networks.

The NSA dreams of “living in the network,” and that’s what McConnell is calling for in his editorial/advertisement for his company. The NSA lost any credibility it had when it secretly violated American law and its most central tenet: “We don’t spy on Americans.”

Unfortunately, the private sector is ignoring that tenet and is helping the NSA and contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton worm their way into the innards of the net. Security companies make no fuss, since a scared populace and fear-induced federal spending means big bucks in bloated contracts. Google is no help either, recently turning to the NSA for help with its rather routine infiltration by hackers.

Make no mistake, the military industrial complex now has its eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wet dreams of cyberwarfare. Never shy of extending its power, the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race.

And it’s waging a psychological warfare campaign on the American people to make that so. The military industrial complex is backed by sensationalism, and a gullible and pageview-hungry media. Notable examples include the New York Times’s John “We Need a New Internet” Markoff, 60 Minutes’ “Hackers Took Down Brazilian Power Grid,” and the WSJ’s Siobhan Gorman, who ominously warned in an a piece lacking any verifiable evidence, that Chinese and Russian hackers are already hiding inside the U.S. electrical grid.

Now the question is: Which of these events can be turned into a Gulf of Tonkin-like fakery that can create enough fear to let the military and the government turn the open internet into a controlled, surveillance-friendly net.

What do they dream of? Think of the internet turning into a tightly monitored AOL circa the early ’90s, run by CEO Big Brother and COO Dr. Strangelove.

That’s what McConnell has in mind, and shame on The Washington Post and the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee for giving McConnell venues to try to make that happen — without highlighting that McConnell has a serious financial stake in the outcome of this debate.

Of course, the net has security problems, and there are pirated movies and spam and botnets trying to steal credit card information.

But the online world mimics real life. Just as I know where online to buy a replica of a Coach handbag or watch a new release, I know exactly where I can go to find the same things in the city I live in. There are cons and rip-offs in the real world, just as there are online. I’m more likely to get ripped off by a restaurant server copying down the information on my credit card than I am having my card stolen and used for fraud while shopping online. “Top Secret” information is more likely to end up in the hands of a foreign government through an employee-turned-spy than from a hacker.

But cyber-anything is much scarier than the real world.

The NSA can help private companies and networks tighten up their security systems, as McConnell argues. In fact, they already do, and they should continue passing along advice and creating guides to locking down servers and releasing their own secure version of Linux. But companies like Google and AT&T have no business letting the NSA into their networks or giving the NSA information that they won’t share with the American people.

Security companies have long relied on creating fear in internet users by hyping the latest threat, whether that be Conficker or the latest PDF flaw. And now they are reaping billions of dollars in security contracts from the federal government for their PR efforts. But the industry and its most influential voices need to take a hard look at the consequences of that strategy and start talking truth to power’s claims that we are losing some non-existent cyberwar.

The internet is a hack that seems forever on the edge of falling apart. For awhile, spam looked like it was going to kill e-mail, the net’s first killer app. But smart filters have reduced the problem to a minor nuisance as anyone with a Gmail account can tell you. That’s how the internet survives. The apocalypse looks like it’s coming and it never does, but meanwhile, it becomes more and more useful to our everyday lives, spreading innovation, weird culture, news, commerce and healthy dissent.

But one thing it hasn’t spread is “cyberwar.” There is no cyberwar and we are not losing it. The only war going on is one for the soul of the internet. But if journalists, bloggers and the security industry continue to let self-interested exaggerators dominate our nation’s discourse about online security, we will lose that war — and the open internet will be its biggest casualty.

UPDATE: In an interesting coincidence, the Obama administration unclassified on Tuesday portions of the secret Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative it inherited from President Bush, including unclassified summaries all of the 12 initiatives. Note the veiled references to deterrence. See Threat Level’s report from the RSA conference on the release.

See Also:

SOURCE: Wired Magazine

DOD "CLARIFIES" DOCTRINE ON PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

2010-01-28T08:27:00.002-05:00

The Department of Defense has issued a new publication to update and clarify its doctrine on "psychological operations."

Psychological operations, or PSYOP, are intended to "convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives."

PSYOP is among the oldest of military disciplines, but the new DoD doctrine continues to wrestle with basic definitional issues.

It endorses a new, negative definition of the term "propaganda," which had formerly been used in a neutral sense to refer to "Any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly." From now on, propaganda will refer only to what the enemy does: "Any form of adversary communication, especially of a biased or misleading nature, designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly."

The new doctrine also dictates that the term "perception management" shall be eliminated from the DoD lexicon.

DoD acknowledges that PSYOP is limited by legal constraints, including statutes, international agreements, and national policies. Among other things, the DoD doctrine states, there is a "requirement that US PSYOP forces will not target US citizens at any time, in any location globally, or under any circumstances." Yet in a near contradiction, the doctrine also states that "When authorized, PSYOP forces may be used domestically to assist lead federal agencies during disaster relief and crisis management by informing the domestic population." Perhaps the PSYOP forces are supposed to inform the domestic population without "targeting" them.

Fundamentally, psychological operations are tethered to the reality of U.S. government actions, for good or for ill. As the new doctrine notes, "Every activity of the force has potential psychological implications that may be leveraged to influence foreign targets." But PSYOP cannot no substitute for an incoherent policy or rescue a poorly executed plan.

See "Psychological Operations," Joint Publication 3-13.2, Joint Chiefs of Staff, January 7, 2010:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3-13-2.pdf

SOURCE: Federation of American Scientists

Ecoporn: An Oldie but a Goodie!

2010-01-15T13:44:00.000-05:00

The Orly Taitz of Climate Change? 'Lord' Monckton in Copenhagen

2009-12-22T08:26:00.003-05:00

By Nick Berning (cross-posted from Open Left)

A big U.S. congressional delegation is arriving here at the climate summit in Copenhagen next week, and it includes notorious climate science deniers Sen. James Inhofe (R-Big Oil/Oklahoma) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Big Oil/Texas).

But one of the world's most prominent science deniers -- "Nobel Laureate" "Lord" Christopher Monckton, who provides the "scientific" analysis upon which Barton, Inhofe, and other members of the anti-science crowd depend -- is already here and he's already generating embarrassing headlines for their movement.

Before getting into how Monckton is exposing the anti-science movement's truly fringe character in Copenhagen, I should explain my use of quotes in the previous sentence. Monckton did campaign to become a member of the British House of Lords, but he lost and is not and has never been one. He has no formal scientific training (more on that here). And his "Nobel Peace Prize" was awarded to him not by the Nobel Prize Committee but by "the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, New York" (presumably Robert Sproull, a member of the board of the anti-science Marshall Institute), who presented Monckton with a fake Nobel pin made of gold. Monckton now calls himself a "Nobel Laureate" on his organization's website, because he "contributed" to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report sounding the alarm about global warming (even though Monckton claims there is no alarm to be sounded).

'Quarantine for life' everyone with AIDS?

Monckton's lies about his resume expose him as someone who is perhaps out to lunch and not prone to telling the truth, but he also has ideas that are extremely dangerous. In 1987, Monckton wrote this:

For there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life.

Fortunately, that cruel, homophobic proposal never picked up much steam, and Monckton himself apparently later backed away from it (though, if his Wikipedia bio is correct, that was because he thought it "wouldn't work" -- not because of its fundamental injustice).

But for some reason (hint hint: the fossil fuel industry's funneled loads of cash into the anti-science movement) the media and members of Congress are still lending Monckton a platform from which to spew nonsense. It's no surprise that FOX News hosts like Glenn Beck would interview Monckton, but CNN's Wolf Blitzer put him on air with softball questions just this week. And this year Monckton has twice been called to testify as the lead Republican witness at congressional committee hearings. At the Energy and Commerce Committee hearing this March, Rep. Barton (the one who will soon arrive in Copenhagen), was the one who asked Monckton to testify.

An Orly move at Copenhagen: Calling youth climate activists 'Hitler youth'

Back to the climate summit here in Copenhagen, where thousands of dedicated people from around the world are trying to solve the climate crisis, and a handful of fringe attention-seeking denialists including Monckton and Bjorn Lomborg, who makes incredibly illogical arguments about how even though climate change is real, we shouldn't stop it because according to him the short-term costs outweigh the short-term benefits, are now making the rounds at the Bella Center. (What Lomborg ignores are the absolutely catastrophic, poverty-creating long-term consequences that will come from warming if business-as-usual emissions are not checked.)

A day after a group of activists from the amazing global youth climate movement showed up to protest Monckton's denialist message at an anti-science event on Wednesday, Monckton refused to shake youth activist Ben Wessel's hand, saying "I will not shake the hand of Hitler youth" and calling youth climate activists "Nazis." Full exchange here.

Monckton's approach to this issue is reminiscent of Orly Taitz's approach to the debate about President Obama's birthplace, which is as idiotic (with a complete lack of evidence on one side) as the debate about whether the planet is warming. For those who don't know her, Orly Taitz is the "birther queen" -- the leader of the birther movement in the United States. Birthers are conspiracy theorists who claim President Obama cannot be president because he is not a real citizen. They have no factual basis for this claim, yet when confronted with evidence like President Obama's birth certificate, they try to explain it away. The similarities between birthers and the anti-science activists don't end there. Just as Monckton called youth climate activists who disagree with him "Hitler youth," Taitz, when confronted by MSNBC host David Shuster about the lack of evidence for her birther theory, famously said, "The only ones that are on the fringe are Obama's brown shirts in the media." (The term "brown shirts" refers to Nazis.)

Of course, that sort of charge -- particularly when aimed at activists working to save millions of lives endangered by climate change impacts -- is absolutely unacceptable and deeply offensive. But it's all that birthers and science deniers have to fall back on. Factual evidence for their claims doesn't exist.

Giving credence to these claims by presenting them as a legitimate point of view is the same as pretending that people who argue the world is flat, the moon landing was a fake, and Sasquatch was prancing through their back yard have valid points that ought to be considered.

In fact, it's worse. Spreading stories about Sasquatch doesn't cause any harm. Sowing doubt about the alarming conclusions of scientists does. Members of the media need to stop treating anti-science activists as though they're credible, and members of Congress like Joe Barton need to explain why they think it is acceptable to align themselves with radicals like Monckton who are divorced from reality.

The problem with all this

The problem with all this is that there's a real debate to be had. There's no question that human activity is causing the planet to warm, but there are plenty of questions about how to respond. What level of temperature rise is acceptable? How do we ensure that the costs of solving the problem are distributed fairly, and that farmers in Malawi who didn't cause the climate crisis but are being hit hard by it don't have to bear the burden? How many island nations is it okay to put underwater? (I'd argue none, but if you listened to chief U.S. negotiator Todd Stern's press conference yesterday, it sounded like he was telling them to kiss their homes goodbye.)

These are the things that need to be discussed over the next week in Copenhagen. If James Inhofe or Joe Barton want to help out their oil company friends by embarrassing their country and threatening its economic future as part of the dishonest, name-calling, anti-science fringe, we all need to be clear that that's exactly what they're doing.

If you want to know more about what I and my colleagues at Friends of the Earth U.S. are doing to lobby for a fair and effective global climate deal in Copenhagen, visit foe.org/copenhagen.

SOURCE: Friends of the Earth

Denialism and the Power of Fear

2009-12-22T08:12:00.002-05:00

There are two types of pesky partisans on the loose right now who refuse to accept reality due to their ideological blindness—birthers and global warming deniers. This realization struck me last week as I listened to Republicans argue that we should let the world boil over, all while they “dithered” over reading silly emails written between a few climate scientists. The members of the Flat Earth Society may be out of ideas, but they are not out of denials.

The Flat Earth Society is, of course, the climatic analog of the birthers movement, determined to undermine Americans’ confidence in clear facts about climate change. The first fact they deny is that the first American black president was elected last year. The second denial concerns the well-established scientific consensus that the earth is warming and the oceans are acidifying because of human activity.

Both birthers and the climate-change deniers work on a similar premise—that concrete facts can be subjugated to the power of fear. Both movements fear change and contemplate that they can create enough smoke and confusion to fertilize the ascendency of fear. They both enjoy big megaphones and are capable of big noise, but are both fundamentally rotten at the factual core.

So they work to obscure plain and unbridled truth by pointing to the inartful language contained in a bunch of emails from a British research institution. While the obvious truth is that the Arctic is melting, the Greenland glaciers are melting, climate change refugees are moving, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic than in preindustrial times, the seas are rising, and the deserts are expanding—the deniers continue to blow their smoke calling global warming science a “trick.” If this is a trick, it is one that is now undermining the very foundation of the globe’s climate, and perhaps changing it more quickly than any time in the planet’s history, except a couple of times when we were hit by comets or asteroids.

But let’s give the deniers their 15 minutes of fame and consider what the scientific consensus would be even if the British researchers were, in fact, members of some evil international conspiracy on the order of the group “Spectre” that James Bond so nobly fought years ago. Simply put, the impact of concluding that the British were out to lunch is zero. As the National Academy of Sciences concluded, and White House science adviser John Holdren articulated at a congressional hearing last week, we have so many separate threads and data sets that lead to one overwhelming conclusion: we cannot take our eye off the ball in pushing for vigorous CO2 emissions caps.

If you laid out end to end all the emails the deniers now have their knickers in a twist over, they would still not cover up the thousands of square miles of the Arctic Ocean that are now ice free in the summer. You could chop up all the emails and spread them over Greenland, but they would not insulate the island’s massive glaciers enough to stop the rapid loss of volume that have now been confirmed by multiple examinations, all of them independent from the British study caught up in the email non-scandal. It is neat public relations “trick” the deniers are now using in an attempt to fool the public into abandoning efforts to fight this global crisis, but it is going to fail, for two reasons.

First, it is going to fail because there are Republicans who have the courage to stand up to both the birthers and to the deniers. We should be encouraged by the comments of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who recently said that email controversy or not, the fact that the earth is warming due in part to human action is well established. Courage comes in many forms. Insistence upon listening to clear science, even if it disturbs some ideological views of certain groups, is one admirable form of courage.

Second, the deniers are going to fail because their cynical allies, the birthers, are going to fail. The birthers have not been able to stop an American president from going to Copenhagen to lead the world in an effort to stop global warming. We ought to be proud we have a president who can say, “The nation that leads in clean energy will be the nation that leads the world, and I want America to be that nation.”

With an attitude that sees global warming as an economic opportunity as much as an environmental problem, we have a president who can spark a new period of economic growth and leave both the birthers and the deniers where they belong, in the dustbin of history.

SOURCE: Grist

ANOTHER Challenge to Global Warming Skeptics

2009-11-10T08:55:00.001-05:00

This, like my first such challenge, will probably go unanswered. The first is here:

On Global Warming: A Challenge to Skeptics

Here is my latest:

If a couple of degrees can mean huge planetary shifts then it does not matter if five degrees of change come about from natural cycles and only two or three from human activity (for example). It's not a blame game! Two more degrees mean even bigger planetary shifts even faster and an even smaller chance of human survival and an even wider level of mass extinction. That is the part WE CAN AFFECT.

Another way of illustrating the same truth is to remember that few environmentalists say we must not use wood for anything. Just because we need wood does not mean we should say to hell with all of it. This is a self fulfilling course of action in which just because we seem to believe there is no hope, we manifest it by not even trying.

We may end up going down as the species that decided that it does not matter how much of life on earth dies off just so long as we can say that, in the political arena, our opponents never got the better of us.

Alan Keyes Is Off The Deep End

2009-11-02T11:45:00.005-05:00

Get out yer tin foil hats!

Just where was Alan when this stuff was actually happening?!?

Alan Keyes Is Off The Deep End

Submitted by Kyle on October 30, 2009 - 11:18am

Remember back in 2002 when MSNBC ran a program called "Alan Keyes Is Making Sense"? Maybe Fox News should pick that up and put it back on the air because it seems like Keyes would fit in well with their programming at the moment:

Former presidential candidate Alan Keyes has given perhaps his most dire warning yet, saying that the Obama administration is preparing to stage terror attacks, declare martial law and cancel the 2012 elections, which is why they are demonizing their political enemies as criminals and terrorists.

“It is so clear hat we have now put a faction in place – they are not playing by the rules and they don’t intend to play by the rules – if they were playing by the rules they wouldn’t have tried to identify their opposition as criminals,” added Keyes, making reference to the recent controversy surrounding the release of the MIAC and Homeland Security reports, which implied that Americans who exercise and are knowledgeable about their constitutional rights are a threat to law enforcement and potential domestic terrorists.

“It’s obvious that they will stop at nothing,” Keyes told attendees of a reception in Fort Wayne, adding, “We may wake up one day and there’s a series of terrorist attacks, the economy is paralysed… martial law will be declared everywhere in the United States and it won’t end until the crisis ends.”

“The minute they think they can get away with it, they will end this system of government and that is their intention,” added Keyes, noting that everyone acting as if the time we are in was just “business as usual” reminds him of the attitude of politicians in the Weimar Republic when Hitler was rising to power or eastern Europe when the Communists were taking over after the second world war.

Keyes said that because the majority of people are decent-minded, they believe others will play by the rules when this simply isn’t the case, warning that this attitude will allow evil to take over before we can do anything about it.

Keyes stated that the only solution was from the bottom up because our leaders “are so gutless that they won’t even ask that the Constitution be enforced for clear, plain, absolutely unequivocal requirements,” and respond meekly with “their lips shut and their hearts terrorized.”

Keyes also warned of Obama’s agenda to create a civilian security force (which could curtail the restrictions of Posse Comitatus Act) and said it was part of the ultimate agenda to disarm American citizens and create a police state.

Keyes has been a vocal critic of Obama, warning that he is a radical communist who is determined to destroy America, and that if his agenda is not stopped then the country as we know it will cease to exist.

The video itself was shot back in April and the sound quality is bad, but you can watch it here.

SOURCE: Right Wing Watch

Pentagon officials won’t confirm Bush propaganda program ended

2009-11-02T11:27:00.003-05:00

By Brad Jacobson
Thursday, October 29th, 2009 -- 9:36 am

[Read Part I and Part II of this series.]

The covert Bush administration program that used retired military analysts to generate favorable wartime news coverage may not have been terminated, Raw Story has found.

In interviews, Pentagon officials in charge of the press and community relations offices — which worked in partnership on the military analyst program — equivocated on the subject of whether the program has ended.

Last May, the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General issued a memorandum rescinding a Bush administration investigative report on the retired military analyst program because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” The now-retracted report had exonerated officials of using propaganda and referred to the program as just "one of many outreach groups."

Yet Donald Horstman, Pentagon Inspector General deputy director, also stated in the memorandum that his office wouldn’t probe further because the “outreach program has been terminated and responsible senior officials are no longer employed by the Department.”

Raw Story’s investigation, however, has shown that some “responsible senior officials” are still employed by the Defense Department, including Bryan Whitman, who remains a chief Pentagon spokesman and head of all media operations, and Roxie Merritt, who is head of the Pentagon’s community relations office.

Raw Story has discovered that Horstman’s other justification for not reopening an investigation at the time – “because the [retired military analyst] outreach program has been terminated” – remains an open question.

A week after David Barstow’s New York Times expose on the program broke in April 2008, Whitman said the military analyst program’s suspension was only “temporary.”

Reiterating at the time that he thought the program was merely a way to better inform the American public, he also said, “It’s temporarily suspended just so that we can take a look at some of the concerns.”

When Raw Story asked Mr. Whitman if this program was still being run out of the Pentagon, he first replied firmly, “No, not at this point.”

But then, in what seemed an attempt to downplay his role in the program, he quickly added, “Again, it’s not one of my programs and it would be up to the leadership of public affairs, a new assistant secretary of defense, making any sort of determination to go forward if they deemed it appropriate, necessary, whatever.”

“It’s hard for me to tell what future leadership might decide to do,” Whitman continued. “Again, since it’s not part of the media operations aspect of public affairs here, it’s not a program for which I will be making a decision about.”

Raw Story also asked Roxie Merritt if she could confirm that the military analyst program has been officially terminated.

Ms. Merritt, in an email interview, first replied, “[A]t the present time, we don’t have regularly scheduled conference calls with retired military analysts” but that “we would not, however, preclude responding to queries for information from or provide future opportunities for them to talk to defense leaders and program managers.”

Merritt also noted that should there be regularly scheduled conference calls with the military analysts again in the future, they would be shared in various publicly accessible formats.

She added, though, “Obviously, there are operational security and privacy act issues and other government regulations that must be handled carefully, but we make every possible effort to be open and transparent.”

Asked then to confirm if, in the interim, her office has been open to providing information on an individual basis to retired military analysts, Merritt replied, “Sure. If asked, we would provide them with the same information that we would provide you if you had a question about DoD.”

During the interviews, neither Whitman nor Merritt expressed concern about the way the military analyst program was run by the Bush administration.

Iraq then and Afghanistan now

Internal Pentagon documents show that the military analyst program was stepped up in 2005, when US public support for the war in Iraq began to sour. Today, as recent polls show American support for the war in Afghanistan plummeting, the Pentagon and the Obama White House are facing a similar problem.

If the military analyst program, in some form or another, is still being run from the Pentagon, then the two most senior players in the Bush administration propaganda project remaining at the Defense Department, Bryan Whitman and Roxie Merritt, would be poised to step up activities once again.

And they are not currently under the watchful eye of any direct superiors who’ve been brought in by the Obama administration.

While Whitman said that the future of the program would be up to the next assistant secretary of defense, he also confirmed that that position, which is filled by political appointment, remains vacant.

No one, he added, has even been nominated yet.

Merritt is in a similar position of enhanced authority because the position above her has yet to be filled. Currently serving as President Obama’s director of the Pentagon office for community relations, she’s also its de facto chief until a new deputy assistant secretary of defense for internal communications is appointed.

What’s more, Merritt — whose email signature line was “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of All Who Threaten It” (p. 30) — formerly worked as Whitman’s press office director at the time of the military analyst program’s increased activity in 2005.

Whitman and Merritt’s career civil servant status also continue to buffer them from scrutiny regarding political or ideological motivations, regardless of their activities in the Bush administration.

Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, an expert in military strategy and operations who has taught at the National War College, Air War College and Naval War College and has been critical of Bush administration strategy, expressed disgust at the Bush holdovers who took part in propaganda against the American public, regardless of whether they were political or career appointees.

Commenting on Whitman’s presence in the Obama administration, Gardiner said, “He should be so tainted with what the Bush administration did that that in itself would be enough that he should be gone, even if he’s a career appointee.”

“The list of things that Pentagon public affairs participated in during the run-up [to the Iraq war] and immediately after the invasion are horrendous,” Gardiner continued.

But he pointed out that Whitman “serves as a career person as long as his performance is satisfactory to his immediate superiors.”

As to suggestions that Whitman be held accountable by a congressional investigative body for his part in the military analyst program, Gardiner noted, “Congress doesn’t evaluate individual performance of people. It evaluates the performance of organizations.”

Journalist and historian Norman Solomon said he found an “unfortunate logic” to Whitman remaining at the Pentagon.

Solomon, who recently visited Afghanistan on a fact-finding mission, told Raw Story, “A White House that sees fit to continue on with Robert Gates might see no problem with continuing on with Bryan Whitman.”

He added, “The empirical answer [to why he remains] would be that he’s still useful.”

Veteran foreign correspondent Reese Erlich, who is currently independently covering the Afghanistan war, believes that “to some extent, the Obama administration is just simply replicating all the same mistakes of the Bush administration – particularly the war in Afghanistan.”

“And if you’re going to do that,” he explained in an interview with Raw Story, “then you need propagandists who can make stuff up to make the war seem more popular in the short run.”

SOURCE: The Raw Story

Associated Press Debunks Orly Taitz On Obama Birth Article

2009-11-02T11:22:00.002-05:00

by Doug Mataconis @ 1:07 pm on October 28, 2009.

The Associated Press has issued a statement regarding the claim by Orly Taitz that an article it produced in 2004 said that Barack Obama was born in Kenya:

“The AP has never reported that President Obama was born in Kenya. In fact, AP news stories about the state of Hawaii have confirmed that he was born there. The Kenyan paper that you cite rewrote a 2004 AP story, adding the phrase ‘Kenyan-born.’ That wording was not in the AP version of the story."

So will Orly withdraw the pleading she filed based on the article ?

Yea, I’m thinking no too, and that more sanctions will be forthcoming.

SOURCE: Below the Beltway

Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion

2009-10-28T14:42:00.000-04:00

Bush's Interrogators Stressed Nudity

2009-10-27T13:04:00.003-04:00

By Robert Parry
September 12, 2009

The CIA shared with George W. Bush’s Justice Department the details of how an interrogation strategy – with an emphasis on forced nudity and physical abuse – could train prisoners in “learned helplessness” and demonstrate “the complete control of Americans.”

The 19-page document, entitled “Background Paper on CIA’s Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques” and dated Dec. 30, 2004, contains repeated references to keeping suspected al-Qaeda captives – called “high-value detainees” or HVDs – naked as part of the strategy for breaking down their resistance.

The first of several “specific conditioning interrogation techniques” lists “Nudity. The HVD’s clothes are taken and he remains nude until the interrogators provide clothes to him.” [Underline in original.]

The CIA said the prisoner is kept nude (or occasionally dressed in a diaper) while being subjected to other “conditioning techniques,” sleep deprivation and a bland diet of Ensure. Nudity continues while interrogators apply other more aggressive techniques designed to emphasize a prisoner’s helplessness.

The background paper, which was prepared for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and released last month in response to an ACLU lawsuit, described in bureaucratic wording the process used to interrogate a suspected terrorist after his capture and “rendition” to a CIA-run “black site.”

“During the flight, the detainee is securely shackled and is deprived of sight and sound through the use of blindfolds, earmuffs, and hoods,” the report said. “There is no interaction with the HVD during this rendition movement except for periodic, discreet assessments by the on-board medical officer.”

From the start, the goal was to dramatize the prisoner’s vulnerability.

“The HVD is subjected to administrative procedures and medical assessment upon arrival at the Black Site,” the report said. “The HVD finds himself in the complete control of Americans.”

Initially, that control is underscored by an ominous coldness of the reception.

The report said: “The procedures he is subjected to are precise, quiet, and almost clinical; and no one is mistreating him. While each HVD is different, the rendition and reception process generally creates significant apprehension in the HVD because of the enormity and suddenness of the change in environment, the uncertainty about what will happen next, and the potential dread an HVD might have in US custody.”

The prisoner is next subjected to a dehumanizing process in preparation for the interrogations.

“The HVD’s head and face are shaved,” the CIA report says. “A series of photographs are taken of the HVD while nude to document the physical condition of the HVD upon arrival. A Medical Officer interviews the HVD and a medical evaluation is conducted to assess the physical condition of the HVD. … A Psychologist interviews the HVD to assess his mental state.”

Then, if no “contraindications” are found, the interrogations begin, with continued emphasis on stripping the prisoner of his clothing, his self-respect and his ability to resist.

‘Learned Helplessness’

“Effective interrogation is based on the concept of using both physical and psychological pressures in a comprehensive, systematic, and cumulative manner to influence HVD behavior, to overcome a detainee’s resistance posture,” the CIA report said.

“The goal of interrogation is to create a state of learned helplessness and dependence conducive to the collection of intelligence in a predictable, reliable, and sustainable manner.”

The report said a typical “session one” would start as “the HVD is brought into the interrogation room, and under the direction of the interrogators, stripped of his clothes, and placed into shackles.”

After a round of questioning – that would include some slaps and slamming the prisoner against a wall – sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation (which along with nudity are regarded as “conditioning techniques”) are begun.

The report said: “The interrogators, assisted by security officers … will place the HVD in the center of the interrogation room in the vertical shackling position and diaper the HVD to begin sleep deprivation. The HVD will be provided with Ensure Plus … to begin dietary manipulation. The HVD remains nude.” [Underlines in original.]

In the next session, “coercive techniques” are brought into play. The nude prisoner is doused with cold water, repeatedly slammed against a wall and forced into stress positions before being returned to the shackling position for more sleep deprivation and more dietary manipulation, with the recurring advice, “the HVD remains nude.”

Summing up this second session, the CIA wrote, “the following techniques were used: sleep deprivation, nudity, dietary manipulation, walling, water dousing, attention grasp, insult slap, and abdominal slap. The three Conditioning Techniques were used to keep the HVD at a baseline, dependent state and to weaken his resolve and will to resist.”

For session three, the CIA also noted that the prisoner “is nude” before more abusive techniques are added to the mix and then applied in combination. The report stated:

“Interrogators will often use one technique to support another. As an example, interrogators would tell an HVD in a stress position that he (HVD) is going back to the walling wall (for walling) if he fails to hold the stress position until told otherwise. … This places additional stress on the HVD who typically will try to hold the stress position for as long as possible to avoid the walling wall.”

According to the report, wall slamming, which involves putting a harness around a prisoner’s neck and whipping him into a wall, “is one of the most effective interrogation techniques because it wears down the HVD physically, heightens uncertainty in the detainee about what the interrogator may do to him, and creates a sense of dread when the HVD knows he is about to be walled again. …

“An HVD may be walled one time (one impact with the wall) to make a point or twenty to thirty times consecutively when the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question. During an interrogation session that is designed to be intense, an HVD will be walled multiple times in the session.”

After the end of the third session, the prisoner is put back “into the vertical shackling position to resume sleep deprivation. Dietary manipulation also continues, and the HVD remains nude,” the report said.

Cramped Confinement

In later interrogations, the prisoner could also be locked in boxes for differing periods depending on the size of the box. Under guidance from the CIA’s medical personnel, “the duration of cramped confinement limits confinement in the large box to no more than 8 hours at a time for no more than 18 hours a day, and confinement in the small box to 2 hours,” the report said.

According to the report, “sleep deprivation may continue to the 70 to 120 hour range, or possibly beyond for the hardest resisters, but in no case exceed the 180-hour time limit.”

Although “the entire interrogation process outlined above … may last for thirty days,” the report said, “if the interrogation team anticipates the potential need to use interrogation techniques beyond the 30-day approval period, it will submit a new interrogation plan to HQS for evaluation and approval.”

The Bush administration insisted that its “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which earlier also included the near-drowning of “waterboarding,” were effective in eliciting valuable intelligence about al-Qaeda and its plans, but FBI and some military interrogators opposed the techniques as counterproductive.

As early as spring 2002, FBI agents objected to the CIA’s brutal treatment of badly wounded al-Qaeda captive Abu Zubaydah, only to be informed that the tactics had been approved “at the highest levels,” according to a Justice Department Inspector General’s report that was released last year.

FBI interrogators claimed that they achieved better results from rapport-building and other non-violent techniques with Zubaydah than the CIA did later with its use of torture.

For instance, author Jane Mayer in her book The Dark Side wrote that the two FBI agents, Ali Soufan and Steve Gaudin, “sent back early cables [in 2002] describing Zubayda as revealing inside details of the [9/11] attacks on New York and Washington, including the nickname of its central planner, ‘Mukhtar,’ who was identified as Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. …

“During this period, Zubayda also described an Al Qaeda associate whose physical description matched that of Jose Padilla. The information led to the arrest of the slow-witted American gang member in May 2002, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. …

“Abu Zubayda disclosed Padilla’s role accidentally, apparently. While making small talk, he described an Al Qaeda associate he said had just visited the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. That scrap was enough for authorities to find and arrest Padilla.

"These early revelations were greeted with excitement by [CIA Director George] Tenet, until he was told they were extracted not by his officers but by the rival team at the FBI.”

Soon, a CIA team arrived at the secret CIA detention center in Thailand where Zubaydah was being held and took command, adopting more aggressive interrogations tactics, Mayer wrote. The Bush administration approved the full battery of harsh tactics, including waterboarding, in mid-summer 2002.

Mayer's account was backed up last April by one of the FBI agents, Ali Soufan, who broke his long silence on the topic in an op-ed in the New York Times, citing Zubaydah's cooperation in providing information about Padilla and KSM before the CIA began the harsh tactics.

"It is inaccurate ... to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative," Soufan wrote. "Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence." [NYT, April 23, 2009]

After taking office in January, President Barack Obama issued an executive order closing the "black sites" and prohibiting the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The Obama administration also has released documents describing how Bush’s Justice Department issued legal opinions that permitted waterboarding and other torture techniques.

Last month, the Obama administration released a 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, which was critical of the CIA's abusive interrogations. The CIA background paper detailing how the methods were used in combination was part of the package of documents made public at that time.

SOURCE: Consortium News

At Glenn Beck's Call

2009-10-27T12:53:00.003-04:00

By David Swanson
September 7, 2009

Editor’s Note: The strength and breadth of the right-wing media is such that it can put almost any nutty idea into play – from questioning President Obama’s place of birth to claiming that health reform means “death panels” – while simultaneously punishing anyone who does anything similar on the Left.

The latest example of this phenomenon was the ouster of environmentalist Van Jones from a White House job because he signed “a 9/11 truth” petition and was called out by Fox News demagogue Glenn Beck, as David Swanson notes in this guest essay:

Fox News screaming head Glenn Beck now tells President Obama to fire White House employees, and Obama obeys.

If you can't stand to watch Glenn Beck on television and want some idea of how he persuades a noisy minority of Americans of his sanity, one place to look is the #1 best-selling politics book in America: Glenn Beck's Common Sense.

My own book Daybreak briefly knocked Beck's out of the #1 spot on Amazon, but Beck is back there with his extremely short and fluffy book written "with Joseph Kerry" and "inspired by Thomas Paine."

Paine, rather famously, wrote a book denouncing religion and supported the separation of church and state. Beck's book promotes religion as the solution to all our political problems.

And Beck is right about some of the problems, right about people being angry, and right that vague talk of freedom and founding fathers helps his cause. But his specifics are ugly, and his book serves to misdirect people's anger.

His introduction describes his desired readers and makes clear that they are not poor or black or gay:

"You have credit cards, but you can make the payments. You have a home, but with a loan you can afford. . . . You don't have much in savings and your retirement plans have lost a significant amount of money. . . . You don't hate people who are different than you, but you stopped expressing opinions on sensitive issues a long time ago because you don't want to be called a racist, bigot, or homophobe if you stand by your values and principles."

While someone could indeed be falsely accused of such things, would it be false to accuse an author of such things for addressing his book only to this group of people?

Beck loves individual liberty, but opposes it to "transnationalism" as though the illegal spying programs and baseless arrests and denials of the right to assemble come from the United Nations.

Beck rightly denounces the bankster bailouts, but equates and conflates them with safety nets for ordinary people -- which he opposes with equal fury. Beck loves his own words, but equates them with God's. Beck loves freedom but equates it with "the free market."

Beck smoothly denounces government abuses of power and opposes both major political parties, but offers no reforms to diminish the power of parties other than encouraging people to vote for third-party candidates if they can find some who are crazier than the Republicans.

At the top of Beck's list of government abuses are such horrors as: taxation of corporations, failure to swiftly build a 670-mile fence to pretend to keep out the Mexicans, and politicians supposedly "insisting" that groups maintain their cultural identities and languages.

Beck bemoans government spending to no end, especially on education (which I suppose might hurt his book sales), but never ever mentions the greatest expense other than bankster bailouts, namely military and war spending.

You could read this pap and never know there were any wars going on. But Beck wants you to be very angry about government spending on skateboard parks and tattoo removal. He beats up on both Bush and Obama for the bankster bailouts and calls them fascists and socialists, and he supports ending debt and balancing budgets.

But he proposes no steps to get us there, and seems more interested in diverting attention from big expenses to small ones. Well, not all small ones: also Medicare and Social Security.

At one point Beck takes up the possibility of taxing the rich and corporations, but easily refutes it. He lists the profits of four corporations and announces his conclusion that you couldn't find enough money there to pay off our national debt.

Could you not find enough to pay off part of it? Do we not have a bit more than four corporations left in the United States? Beck then says that current income tax is not enough either, but isn't that the point of proposing to raise it on the super-wealthy (and lower it for the rest of us)?

Beck points out that rich people cheat on taxes, from which he concludes that the tax code is too complicated (as of course it is, but is that really the issue?), from which he then concludes that we need a nice simple flat tax.

The fact that a flat tax would radically reduce taxes on the super-wealthy while shifting more burden to the rest of us is presumably overlooked by Beck's readers.

Then Beck finds a list of incidents in which CEO-types have been held to some slight account, such as Congress's silly show of complaining about AIG's bonuses, which was itself cover for the larger problem of having funneled our grandchildren's earnings into AIG's coffers.

Beck turns a list of attacks on executives and banksters into attacks on ordinary citizens, and then includes right in the middle of the list, as yet another attack on working people, the Employee Free Choice Act. This Beck denounces as depriving us of the sacred secret ballot.

Never mind that this bill would still allow secret ballots in unionization, but would impose penalties on companies that cheated.

When Beck finishes a long defense of CEO salaries, he launches into an attack on congressional ones. Apparently a couple of hundred thousand dollars is criminal, but hundreds of millions is entirely appropriate.

But Beck frames all of this as populism and demand for control of our lying cheating so-called representatives. He denounces gerrymandering and other real abuses, sounding very sane, and then dives into an explanation of how climate change is a scam designed to facilitate expanded government control of our lives.

There's also apparently a conspiracy to replace families with international laws and institutions.

An appropriate response to all of this scariness, Beck thinks, is buying guns:

"I want to propose a new American 'trust indicator.' When the sales of guns and bullets goes down, it means that the American people have more trust in their government. When those sales rise, it means their trust in the government to protect them and their property is falling -- it's just common sense, right?"

Let's hope not.

Let's hope instead that Beck reads this line in his own book the next time he talks with or about a war criminal or a torturer:

"If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it."

SOURCE: Consortium News

Hunters, Anglers Lobby for Climate Bill

2009-10-27T12:47:00.003-04:00

By Ed Stoddard and Richard Cowan Reuters Sunday, October 18, 2009; 8:27 AM

DALLAS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An unlikely lobbying group is pressing the U.S. Senate to curb greenhouse gas emissions: American hunting and fishing groups who fear climate change will disrupt their sport.

Hunters and anglers are mainly a Republican Party constituency representing tens of millions of votes in the U.S. heartland and could help swing crucial votes as the Senate tries to pass legislation to cut carbon output.

Twenty national hunting and fishing groups urged senators in a letter last month to ensure "the climate legislation you consider in the Senate both reduces greenhouse gas emissions and safeguards natural resources."

Among those calling for "comprehensive" legislation were groups not usually associated with liberal causes, like the Dallas Safari Club, the National Trappers Association and Pheasants Forever.

One of their worries, for example, is that the fowl they hunt might not migrate as far south if northern U.S. states become warmer.

"If you go out and hunt at the same time in the same season and the same place every year, then you understand the changes that are happening," said Jeremy Symons, senior vice president for conservation at the National Wildlife Federation, which claims a membership 420,000 sportsmen in 46 states.

These groups will be going up against powerful Washington lobbies -- the coal and oil industries, for example -- that are pushing hard to soften any mandatory pollution controls.

Legislation to reduce U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, which scientists link to global warming, is one of President Barack Obama's top domestic policy priorities.

He has urged fellow Democrats in Congress to send him a bill before December's international climate summit in Copenhagen. But the effort has bogged down in the Senate, where most Republicans and some moderate Democrats are loathe to talk about the prospects of higher energy prices that could result.

OIL AND WATER

Hunting and global-warming activism usually mix about as well as oil and water.

Former President George W. Bush, ex-Vice President Dick Cheney and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin are the most prominent on a long list of hunting and fishing Republican politicians who have cast doubt on the link between burning fossil fuels and climate change.

But hunters and anglers spend a lot of time outdoors and notice changes like shifting bird migrations or earlier spring run-offs in rivers from melting snow.

Republicans are mostly skeptical of any move to "cap and trade" U.S. carbon emissions that result from burning coal and oil, decrying it as a massive job-killing tax by forcing the use of more expensive wind and solar power.

The NWF estimates that 42 million Americans hunt or fish and that those sports and other wildlife-related activities contribute around $172 billion to the economy.

A nationwide survey the NWF commissioned in 2006 found that half of all licensed hunters and anglers counted themselves as "evangelical Christians," a heavily Republican group.

A 2008 NWF poll of over 1,000 hunters and fishers found that over half classified themselves as "politically conservative." The respondents were mostly white, male and middle-aged -- classic
Republican demographic.

Even so, 85 percent agreed with the statement: "We can improve the environment and strengthen the economy by investing in renewable energy technologies that create jobs while reducing global warming."

Lindsey Graham, a conservative Republican senator from South Carolina, broke ranks with his party and outlined a compromise to limit carbon emissions in a New York Times opinion piece he co-wrote with Democratic Senator John Kerry.

That won him praise from national hunting groups and local ones in South Carolina, which has a robust outdoor sports culture woven into its rural fabric.

SOURCE: Washington Post

The Suppressed Ideas of Kropotkin on Evolution

2009-10-25T07:29:00.000-04:00

In his book, Bully for Brontosaurus, scientific historian Stephen Jay Gould devotes a chapter to presenting Peter Kropotkin's views on biological evolution. Kropotkin is best known as a Russian revolutionary anarchist who believed in cooperative, rather than hierarchical and competitive, human relationships, and in devolving the power of the central state to local communities. It is less well known that his political views were based on a sophisticated view of evolution.

Kropotkin
Basis for a Cooperative Economy in Russia

By Ronald Logan

Kropotkin's ideas on evolution contrasted sharply with those of Victorian English intellectuals such as Thomas Huxley, who stated: ". . . the animal world is about on a level of a gladiator's show . . . whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day." To the Victorian Darwinists, this view of nature gave substance to Thomas Malthus' belief in survival of the fittest, and bolstered the social Darwinist ethos of competition and unbridled private property rights.

Kropotkin could not accept Huxley's "gladiatorial" Darwinism as a valid account of evolutionary biology, believing instead that the predominant way in which species achieve success is through cooperation, not competition. (Kropotkin acknowledged the prevalence of inter-species conflict; it was intra-species conflict with which he took exception.) He also believed that nature provides guidance for human morality through its emphasis on sociability and cooperation, not unrestrained competitiveness.

Rather than adopt a view of nature which supported his political thesis, as do most social philosophers, Kropotkin's political views evolved from his scientific experience. As a young man, he spent five years as a naturalist studying the geology and zoology of eastern Russia. During this period, he observed that living things coped with the harsh Siberian environment primarily through cooperative behavior. In his book, Mutual Aid, written as a rebuttal to Huxley's essay, "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society," Kropotkin stated: "During the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria . . . I failed to find--although I was eagerly looking for it--that bitter struggle for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution."

Kropotkin abhorred the social vision of the gladiatorial evolutionists: "They conceive of the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another's blood . . . They raise the 'pitiless' struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well." Countering the social Darwinists, Kropotkin asserted, "If we . . . ask Nature: 'who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?' we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization." From his observation that mutual aid gives evolutionary advantage to living beings, he derived his political philosophy--a philosophy which stressed community and cooperative endeavor.

Kropotkin was not alone among Russian intellectuals in questioning British Darwinism. Rather, as Gould points out, "he represented a standard, well-developed Russian critique of Darwin, based on interesting reasons and coherent national traditions." The Russian school of evolution based its criticism of Darwin not only on their observations of natural history, but also out of political antipathy to social Darwinism. Daniel Todes, in his article "Darwin's Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary Thought" (published in Isis, the leading history of science journal), observed that objections to the Western competitive world view were shared by Russian radicals and conservatives: "Radicals, who hoped to build a socialist society, saw Malthusianism as a reactionary current in bourgeois political economy. Conservatives, who hoped to preserve the communal virtues of tsarist Russia, saw it as an expression of the 'British national type.'"

Nineteenth-century Russian evolutionary theory had little impact on the development of biology or political theory in the Western industrial world, but the issues Kropotkin and his colleagues raised remain relevant. Now that Russia is in the process of choosing a new political and economic future, the substance of Kropotkin's vision of nature and society warrant reconsideration.

The Modern View

A century has passed since Kropotkin challenged the British evolutionists. How has a hundred years of accumulated scientific knowledge influenced the debate over fierce competition versus mutual cooperation as the primary mechanism of species survival? Relevant evidence comes mainly from two sources: biology (particularly ecology) and social psychology.

A good analysis of the biological evidence is presented in the book, The New Biology, by Robert Augros and George Stanciu, summarized in their paper, "The Biology of Aggression and Cooperation" (Noetic Sciences Review, Winter 1989). Augros and Stanciu begin their analysis by observing that Darwin relied on eighteenth-century reductionist methodology, which tries to understand the whole through analysis of its parts. "He split nature into all its separate parts, individual plants and animals, and saw that everything was trying to reproduce itself as much as it could . . . Then when he put all those isolated organisms back together, he thought it was clear that such reproduction would lead to a shortage of space, of food, and other necessities of life. There was going to be severe competition, and therefore all of nature was going to be at war." The inevitable conclusion of reductionist methodology is that nature must be ruled by conflict.

The reductionist premise is a core assumption of the Western intellectual paradigm. But this premise has come under sustained attack by a diversity of scientific disciplines, including biology (increasingly influenced by ecology, which focuses on the interactive processes in living systems). Biologists dissatisfied with reductionism are attempting to articulate a new biology, one which looks at wholes, at systems, and at synergisms (as well as at the functioning of parts). From this new biology we find, as Augros and Stanciu report, that "nature uses extraordinarily ingenious techniques to avoid conflict and competition, and that cooperation is extraordinarily widespread throughout all of nature."

Nature avoids competition in various ways: by separating species geographically into differing habitats; by sorting species into unique niches within habits; by spatial division according to gradations of environmental factors, such as oxygen content at different levels of a body of water; by territorial demarcations, as when cats mark out with their scent the space which is theirs; and by establishing dominance hierarchies within social groupings of animals.

Cooperation is fostered through a wide array of symbiotic arrangements. Many plants produce tasty fruits, which animals eat, later depositing the undigested seeds. The intestinal bacteria of grazing animals makes possible the breakdown of cellulose fibers into digestible fatty acids. Egyptian plovers get their food by cleaning parasites off the bodies of rhinoceroses. And clown fish are given protection by anemone, while serving as bait for the fish that the anemone eat. These are only examples of inter- species cooperation--intra-species cooperation is even more commonplace.

At the time Kropotkin challenged British Darwinism, the scientific study of human behavior was in its infancy: Wilhelm Wundt had just begun the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig. In the debate as to whether competition or cooperation is more characteristic of human nature, the young field of psychology was mute. Today, however, there is a vast body of social psychology literature on this question.

Alfie Kohn, author of No Contest: The Case Against Competition, spent seven years reviewing more than 400 research studies dealing with competition and cooperation. Prior to his investigation, he believed that "competition can be natural and appropriate and healthy." After reviewing research findings, he radically revised this opinion, concluding that, "The ideal amount of competition . . . in any environment, the classroom, the workplace, the family, the playing field, is none . . . . [Competition] is always destructive" (Noetic Sciences Review, Spring 1990).

According to Kohn, there are three principle consequences of competition. First, it has a negative effect on productivity and excellence. This is due to increased anxiety, inefficiency (as compared to cooperative sharing of resources and knowledge), and the undermining of inner motivation. Competition shifts the focus to victory over others, and away from intrinsic motivators such as curiosity, interest, excellence, and social interaction. Studies show that cooperative behaviour, by contrast, consistantly predicts good performance--a finding which holds true under a wide range of subject variables. Interestingly, the positive benefits of cooperation become more significant as tasks become more complex, or where greater creativity and problem-solving ability is required.

The second effect of competition is that it lowers self-esteem and hampers the development of sound, self-directed individuals. A strong sense of self is difficult to attain when self-evaluation is dependent on seeing how we measure up to others. On the other hand, those whose identity is formed in relation to how they contribute to group efforts generally possess greater self- confidence and higher self-esteem.

Finally, competition undermines human relationships. Humans are social beings; we best express our humanness in interaction with others. By creating winners and losers, competition is destructive to human unity and prevents close social feeling. In the competitive mode, people work at cross purposes, or for personal gain. Some come out ahead, some behind; some win, some lose. It becomes impossible for people to move together, as is necessary for a harmonious human society.

Biology and social psychology are not the only disciplines which support cooperation as the natural basis for human interaction. Ethnological studies indicate that virtually all indigenous cultures operate on the basis of highly cooperative relationships. Anthropologist Nancy Tanner has presented evidence to show that the predominant force driving early human evolution was cooperative social interaction, leading to the capacity of hominids to develop culture. And industrial psychology now promotes "worker participation" and team functioning because it is decisively more productive than hierarchical management.

Beyond Science

In 1910, while lying in his death bed, Leo Tolstoy dictated his last letter, a letter of advice to his son and daughter. He told them: "The views you have acquired about Darwinism, evolution, and the struggle for existence won't explain to you the meaning of your life and won't give you guidance in your actions, and a life without an explanation of its meaning and importance, and without the unfailing guidance that stems from it is a pitiful existence. Think about it. I say it, probably on the eve of my death, because I love you."

Tolstoy's concerns about the Darwinism of his time were vindicated by history. In America, social Darwinism justified the unbridled economic exploitation of the robber barons. America's first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, ruthlessly built up his Standard Oil monopoly believing that his efforts were sanctioned by the natural order. He said: "The growth of large business is merely a survival of the fittest."

In Germany, social Darwinism supplied justification for German militarism during World War I. Vernon Kellogg, an American biologist stationed during the war at the headquarters of the German Great General Staff, later described the Darwinian views of the German military officers in his book Headquarters Nights: "The creed of the Allmact ["all might" or omnipotence] of a natural selection based on violent and competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals; all else is illusion and anathema.... That human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage . . . should win in the struggle for existence, and this struggle should occur precisely that the various types may be tested, and the best not only preserved, but put in position to impose its kind of social organization on the others, or, alternatively, to destroy and replace them."

We now know that the dominant evolutionary thinking of Tolstoy's day was flawed, and that the minority view of Peter Kropotkin lies closer to the truth. But does this mean that "the new biology" should now become the basis for our moral truths and our social institutions?

It would certainly be unwise to ignore or dismiss the compelling findings of biology and social psychology. The post-reductionist, holistic science of our time can supply us with deep insights into the general laws of nature--our own included. But can materialistic science, even formulated with an enlightened holistic paradigm, provide what Tolstoy wished for his children: a foundation for meaning and guidance for our lives?

The problems with materialism as a foundation for human values are twofold. First, science studies the phenomena of a dynamically changing world, and its theories and paradigms about the world are also constantly evolving. As Paul Samuelson once expressed: "funeral by funeral, theory advances." The truths of science, while often robust, are not permanent, but subject to change. Human society is also part of the changing world, and must progressively adapt to new ideas and institutions. But finding purpose in human life is a different matter. We have innate need, many believe, to find purpose in that which is eternal and infinite.

The second problem with materialism is that mind is subtler than matter. The use of knowledge about the physical universe to define value structures for directed by the mind is inherently limited, as there are realms of human experience that transcend physicality. To limit our understanding of ourselves to that which can be explained materially is to restrict the comprehensive, integrated development of the human personality.

There is a growing consensus that the post-modernist episteme will not have materialist foundations. But neither is there much sentiment for a retreat to idealism. Idealism has been expressed in Socrates' fascistic vision of society lorded over by philosopher kings, in Shankaracharya's philosophy that the world is illusion, in medieval religion's obsession with heaven and obliviousness to suffering, and in Hegel's glorification of individual sublimation to the state. Its long history of defective and detrimental philosophies has discredited idealism as a basis for human welfare. If both scientific empiricism and idealistic philosophy are inadequate, then what alternative faculty of knowing can provide us with meaning and proper moral guidance?

Tolstoy's answer was that truth can only be achieved by looking within oneself, that a transcendent reason and power flows from within us, and that our highest purpose is to do its will. Tolstoy formulated a philosophy of Christian mysticism, but his core ideas are generally consistent with what Aldous Huxley (grandson of Thomas) termed the "perennial philosophies." Huxley perceived that certain common themes have been expressed by humanity's great seers--those who derived their teachings from personal illumination, revelation or mystical experience. Though living in different times and cultures, their teachings share fundamental beliefs and values.

The American humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow studied "peak experiences"--the kinds of experience out of which the perennial philosophies originated. He termed the cognitive state that arises during peak experiences "B-cognition," or cognition of being. He detailed his research in his book, Religions, Values and Peak Experiences, where he wrote that his "most important finding was the discovery of . . . B-values or the intrinsic values of Being." He went on to observe that "this list of the described characteristics of the world as it is perceived in our most perspicuous moments is about the same as what people through the ages have called eternal verities, or the spiritual values, or the highest values."

What do those whose values are derived from B-cognition have to say about the issue of contention between Huxley (the Darwinist) and Kropotkin? The consensus is definite: love and cooperation, not conflict and competition, are the eternal verities which should guide human relations.

Beyond Capitalism

P.R. Sarkar was a twentieth-century philosopher and spiritual teacher who was as concerned with social justice as he was with spiritual liberation. Sarkar, like others who espouse the perennial philosophy, believed that the B-cognition, or intuitional mode of knowing, is inherently synthetic. In contrast to reductionism and the rationalist approach to knowledge, which is analytical in nature, intuitional faculty of mind tends toward wholeness--its ultimate reach being a state of unitary consciousness in which individuals directly identify with the cosmic whole, rather than with a limited ego state.

Those who acquire synthetic knowledge inevitably develop a growing sense of the unity and interconnectedness of life. Based on this universal spiritual perception, Sarkar believed it possible for humanity to recognize its integrated, interdependent existence, and move collectively to achieve its material, psychic and spiritual aspirations. He termed this ideal "universalism."

Sarkar rejected competition and upheld cooperation: "In every field of collective life there should be cooperation amongst the members of society." In this respect, his thinking is not novel; it has been espoused by many people of wisdom. But he went beyond other spiritual philosophers in his use of perennial philosophy values to formulate socio-economic theory.

Sarkar insisted that collective efforts should take the form of "coordinated cooperation," not subordinated cooperation. Subordinated cooperation occurs "where people do something individually or collectively, but keep themselves under other peoples' supervision." Coordinated cooperation occurs "between free human beings, each with equal rights and mutual respect for each other, and each working for the welfare of the other." In relation to this ideal form of social relationships, he observed that none of the present socio-economic systems are based on coordinated cooperation, but on subordinated cooperation, and that this "results in the degeneration of society's moral fabric."

Sarkar formulated a spiritual perspective on wealth: "This universe is created in the imagination of the Supreme Entity, so the ownership of this universe . . . does not belong to any particular individual; everything is the patrimony of us all. Every living being can utilize their rightful share of this property. . . . [T]his whole animate world is a large joint family in which nature has not assigned any property to any particular individual."

Sarkar termed this conception of wealth "cosmic inheritance," and made clear its implications for economic theory: "According to genuine spiritual ideology, the system of individual ownership cannot be accepted as absolute and final, hence capitalism, too, cannot be supported." Cosmic ownership also undermines "state capitalism"--communism's command economy system in which there is state ownership of wealth.

Based on his premises of universalism, coordinated cooperation, and cosmic inheritence, Sarkar formulated an alternative economics which he called "cooperative economics." Cooperative economics is an aspect of his comprehensive socio-economic philosophy, called PROUT.

While Sarkar rejected the rigidities of rationalism and reductionism, he did not reject rationality and empiricism. Though he relied on spiritually derived truth to provide the premises and basic value structure of PROUT, he emphasized that fleshing out this economic theory requires close observation of human nature, and of social and economic dynamics. By insisting that social theory follow from social experience, Sarkar avoided many utopian errors.

For example, while Sarkar agreed with Kropotkin in rejecting capitalism, his economic theory takes a much different position on production incentives. Kropotkin, like Marx, advocated "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs." In Sarkar's view, this high sounding ideal "will reap no harvest in the hard soil of the world." Without suitable motivation, productivity declines, and society as a whole suffers. In PROUT, therefore, "Meritorious people should certainly receive greater amenities"--though PROUT does not sanction material incentives beyond what is needed to promote the common welfare.

New Foundations for Russia

Cartesian reductionism formed the epistemological basis for Malthusianism and social Darwinism, which in turn provided intellectual rationale for the greed of capitalism. Dialectical materialism attempted to create an antithesis to reductionist thinking, but its materialism brought spiritual poverty. And, by promoting such utopian notions as the classless society and production without material incentive, its materialism capitulated to idealism and floundered on its inner contradictions. Both capitalism and communism have failed to adequately serve human welfare, and have eroded the moral, cultural and ecological fabric of the world. The future of humanity must lie with a new economics, erected on sounder foundations.

Economist Jaroslav Vanek, in his paper "Towards a Strategy of Democracy, Political and Economic, in Russia," points out that communal economic activity had deep roots in Russia's pre- Revolution village economies. This tradition of cooperation apparently came to the fore in 1917. According to Professor George Gurvitich, a participating witness to the October revolution, there was a brief nine month period immediately following the Russian Revolution when an embryonic economic system based on democratic cooperation prevailed. This system was supported in early Bolshevik Party congresses--until party leaders imposed political and economic centralism.

As in 1917, Russia finds itself poised at a momentous juncture, with a choice of futures spread before it. Were Russia to choose a cooperative economy to replace communism, there would be much supporting logic: consistency with the traditional values of village life; revival of the initial economic ideal chosen by the people following the downfall of Tsarist tyranny; the vindicated evolutionary views of Kropotkin; contemporary scientific understandings of human nature; and compatibility with the sentiment for social equity which socialism imbued in the Russian psyche.

But beyond the compelling logic of tradition, science, and economics, there is a more profound reason for Russia to adopt economic cooperation: cooperation is supported by spiritual truth. For those, like Tolstoy, who insist that humans need an enduring source of meaning in their lives and the guidance of proper values, cooperative economics is congruent with the eternal verities. It is the economic system Tolstoy would have wanted for his children, and for all of the children of mother Russia.

SOURCE: To the Dome

Hey, Hey, We're the Monkeys...

2009-10-25T06:58:00.001-04:00

When it comes to the state-of-affairs as exists in so many, allegedly free countries (e.g. the USA), one must consider the results of what has been called the “Lesser Primate Committee Thinking Experiment.”

In brief, this consists of:

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Start with a cage containing five apes. In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the Banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the apes with cold water. When any other ape makes an attempt, again spray all the apes with cold water. Then turn off the cold water, and observe. Do not be surprised if when another ape tries to climb the stairs, the other apes will try to prevent the single ape from doing it even though no water sprays them.

Now, remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a new one. Observe that when the new ape sees the banana and starts to climb the stairs, all of the other apes will attack him. After another attempt and attack, the new ape will know that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted. He ceases to attempt to climb the stairs.

Next, remove another of the original five apes and replace it with another new one. Observe the newcomer going to the stairs, being attacked -- with the previous newcomer taking part in the punishment with enthusiasm.

Again, replace a third original ape with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Note that two of the four apes that beat him (the new apes which were never exposed to the cold water) have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest ape.

After replacing the fourth and fifth original apes, all the apes which have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced. Nevertheless, no ape ever again approaches the stairs. Why not?

“Because that’s the way it’s always been around here.”

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

New Rule: Grab the banana and run!

SOURCE: Library of Halexandria

Anarchists Against Terrorism

2009-10-24T16:28:00.001-04:00

This project is dedicated to spreading the idea that terroristic methods are not methods anarchists should use in attaining political goals, from a tactical perspective; pointing out that it is in fact the state that is the real terrorist; and also examining the history and ways in which the misconceptions about anarchy being connected with violence and terrorism came about.

This web page was set up by anarchists for the benefit of the anarchist community, as well as the general public.

"You can't blow up a social relationship. The total collapse of this society would provide no guarantee about what would replace it. Unless a majority of people had the ideas and organization sufficient for creation of an alternative society, we would see the old world reassert itself because it is what people would be used to, what they believed in, what existed unchallenged in their own personalities.
Proponants of terrorism and guerrillaism are to be opposed because their actions are vangaurdist and authoritarian, because their ideas are wrong or unrelated to the results of their actions, because killing cannot be justified, and finally because their actions produce either repression with nothing in return or an authoritarian regime."

-from "You Can't Blow Up a Social Relationship".

"Propaganda by deed inherently failed in its purpose. It led to the public associating violence with the ideals of anarchism. People had difficulty relating to someone they viewed as a murderous fanatic. This in turn alienated people from the 'fanatic's' cause."

-from "Anarchism and Violence - Propaganda By Deed", an essay from "Workers Solidarity", published by the Workers Solidarity Movement.

"... when the movement is strong enough to win by armed insurrection it will be abundantly strong enough to win by the General Strike. In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable."

-from the book "Proposed Roads to Freedom", by Bertrand Russel.

"There are many factors in society that cause people to have mistaken notions about anarchists: the media, schools, government, and so on. The corporate media has been in the forefront of demonizing and lying about anarchists for over a century. Schools, through pro-government "civics" classes, teaches children that government is necessary to the healthy functioning of society. They preach that anarchy, in their minds the absence of government, means chaos and a situation where it is every person for themself."

-from "Chuck0's Thoughts on The Anarchist Cookbook".

SOURCE: Pierre J. Proudhon Memorial Computer

Advocates Warn Against ‘Monsantosizing’ Of Global Food Sources

2009-10-24T15:30:00.004-04:00

By Catherine Saez @ 4:21 pm

As the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food prepares to present his report today at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, a global appeal is being filed by farmers and environmental organisations against patents on plants and animals derived from conventional breeding.

In his report, Olivier de Schutter said that the commercial seed system may jeopardise the farmer seed system, and intellectual property rights on seeds might threaten biodiversity and food security.

The global appeal is being organised by the international coalition “no patents on seeds,” according to a copy of the global appeal from the Berne Declaration, and is aimed at governments, parliaments and IP offices like the European Patent Office. It warns against new patents claiming harvests and derived food products such as milk, butter and bread, according to the appeal. The appeal warns against the “Monsantosizing” of food, which refers to the potential supremacy of a few large international companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta in the whole food chain.

The no patents on seeds coalition is composed of the Berne Declaration, Swissaid, Misereor, No Patents on Life, Greenpeace and the Development Fund (Norway), joined by many farmers’ organisations.

The Enlarged Board of Appeal of the EPO is currently considering a case referred to as the “ broccoli case” involving a patent referring to methods for producing new Brassica plants, in particular broccoli.

The appeal calls for a change in patent legislation and the practice of patent offices so that patents on plants and farm animals are eliminated to stem the risk of patents becoming a major threat to global food security, food sovereignty and innovation, said François Meienberg of the Berne Declaration.

The appeal has been joined by many farmers’ organisations and nongovernmental organisations and will be sent to the European Patent Office and other patent offices in Europe and worldwide in 2010, Meienberg told Intellectual Property Watch.

Meanwhile, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, speaking at the awarding of the World Food Prize in the US, advocated “investments in better seeds, training, market access, and policies that support small farmers,” according to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where Gates has gone to work full-time. Gates announced $120 million in new agriculture grants and warned against ideological positions that threaten to split forces in the fight against hunger and poverty. On one side, he said in a press release, “there are groups that support technological solutions to increase agricultural productivity without proper regard to environmental and sustainability concerns. On the other, there are those who react negatively to any emphasis on productivity.”

SOURCE: Intellectual Property Watch

Stop Domestic Terror!

2009-10-20T15:03:00.003-04:00

9/28/09: New VR Campaign To Stop The Incitement Of Domestic Terror By Extremist Media, Politicians And Religious Leaders: Attorney General Urged To Enforce Laws Stop Domestic Terror

Today a coalition of non-profit organizations led by VR launched an aggressive campaign to address the recent surge in threats and acts of terrorism against Americans. The majority of these acts can be traced to groups and individuals who do not accept the results of our recent election or the laws enacted or proposed by those who have been elected. They seek to undermine the democratic process through threats, intimidation, and even outright murder. They can't accept the legitimacy of the President, or a woman's legal right to make choices about her own medical care, or an immigrant's right to be treated humanely under the law, so they carry out acts that are antithetical to American democracy, values, and both civil and human rights.

Those who commit these acts of terror are frequently exploited by a continuous wave of rightwing media advocating violence, either directly or indirectly, and by commentators amplifying the talking points of extremist religious leaders and extremist political leaders. This fringe is incited on our public airwaves, and urged to take matters into their own hands, with the underlying belief that the Bible and/or U.S. Constitution justify using ‘whatever means’ are necessary to oppose what they believe to be immoral laws.

“We are taking a stand against this dangerous trend towards the incitement of lawlessness and violence,” said attorney and spokesman Kevin Zeese, who directs VotersForPeace.US “We strongly believe in the First Amendment right of free expression and discourse, even when it is abhorrent or contrary to our beliefs. However, the First Amendment does not protect debate where one side includes the threat or act of violence. We urge the Attorney General to quickly address this wave of domestic terrorism by enforcing laws on the books, conducting a review of the relationship between extremist media and the acts of terrorism, and enforcing anti-trust laws against right wing media.”

The campaign urges respect and civility by the media, an advertising boycott against media and commentators that incite or advocate violence, condemnation of violence by media CEOs and religious leaders, federal legislation to require more diversity in the media, and congressional hearings on media monopolies and the responsibilities of media to act in the public interest.

SOURCE: Velvet Revolution

3/20/09: Diebold Lies, Gets Caught With Delete Button, Cancels License, And CFO Resigns

A Movement Hijacked

2009-10-16T13:20:00.001-04:00

It's been brilliant and largely unnoticed - at least not all the dots have been connected. But for now it looks like corporations are solidly in the driver's seat. They have captured the momentum from 2006 and 2008 public angst, turned it on its head, and are now using it to protect their own profits. The clueless tea baggers, birthers, and tenthers don't even realize they are actually helping protect corporate profits when they advocate against government regulations.

2006 marked a turning point where the public was growing weary of the unclear mission in Iraq. The public tired of the hundreds of billions we were wasting, the cost plus no bid contracts, and the rampant corporate abuse of our tax dollars by companies such as Halliburton, KBR, and Blackwater USA.

The People thought we were voting to reign in some of the Bush Republican tyranny by voting in Democrats. As it turned out The People were told there was not enough Democrats in the Senate to get anything done. It also became clear that many Democrats had also cut various deals with the Bush Administration and Corporations to leave well enough alone with they did.

Then came 2008 and it really freaked out corporations. Here was Barack Obama talking about regulating the financial sector and providing heatlhcare for all. He talked about ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan threatening to cut into the profits of several corporations. He talked about reducing CEO pay and promising a fair days wage for a fair days work. He talked about creating good paying jobs here in America.

He couldn't win could he? The corporations freaked at the prospect that the wide sweeping change promised could actually happen if Obama won. They feverishly backed McCain Palin and tried to make themselves believe there was no way Obama could win. They also threw cash at Obama to hedge their bets in case he did win.

Well he won and the corporations shit a brick. What did it mean? Would Obama keep his campaign promises? Would the banking, insurance, and mortgage industries be re-regulated? Would employers be forced to play employers more? Would everyone get affordable heatlhcare?

The corporations needed a push back against Obama and it came from a very unlikely place - working class Americans.

Corporations quickly put up and funded astro turf organizations to pump out anti-government propaganda. They also funded many of the more traditional right wing propaganda outlets. They quickly got Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on board along with Fox News so they had the media landscape covered. They have an army of bloggers and online news outlets they can count on to run their contrived stories.

The message: Government was bad and getting in your face! Take back America! Don't let government run healthcare! Don't let government interfere with corporations! Don't let America become a socialist country! Obama must be stopped!!!

This anti-government message benefits the corporations immensely who fear that government regulation in sectors like banking, finance, insurance, mortgage, and energy would cut into their precious profits. It may be good for America but it's bad for the bottom line. They pointed to the government bail out of AIG, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. They pointed to the government takeover of GM.

Meanwhile they merged this message with a pro-corporate pro-capitalism mantra that the markets do best when left alone.

Conveniently this tea bagger movement dove tailed nicely with the birther and tenther movements. The corporations have successfully captured the attention of a chunk of poor working class Americans to work against their best interest - to oppose government regulation of the very industries that have wrought destruction upon our economy. They have tapped the anti-Obama emotions and used them for their benefit. They have tapped the emotions of those who fear government when it's run by democrats. They conveniently didn't care about the Constitution when Bush was President but now it's all they talk about.

It's really sad to see working class tea baggers actually working for the benefit of the corporations without even realizing it. We need more government regulation specifically of the banking, insurance, finance, and mortgage industries. We won't get it now because the tea baggers are calling any government intervention socialism.

Obama's hands are a bit tied because while we weren't paying attention our treasury department was entirely hijacked by Goldman Sachs. There's not much they are going to do unless it benefits Goldman Sachs. Obama also inherited the bailouts started by Bush Republicans. He should have stopped them but I am not sure he could. We are talking about powerful forces. All one can do really is work with them and hope in the end you out play them.

It's really an odd paradox. Those that push free enterprise and capitalism are usually the first to ask for a government handout (GM, Goldman Sachs, AIG, etc). And while the corporate mantra is free enterprise and unfettered capitalism with no government intervention they are the first to lobby Congress to get laws passed that protect their own markets. It's also funny to me how a large number of successful capitalists rely heavily on government dollars (Halliburton, Blackwater USE (now Xe), and the entire military industrial complex).

So on the one hand the pro-corporate capitalist hates government. Government can't do anything right. On the other hand, they want to get those cost plus no bid contracts. Many of these corporations wouldn't be nearly as profitable if they weren't on corporate welfare.

There was a small window of time where the American People seemed to get it. Things on Wall St got too crazy. We needed some government intervention followed up with new regulations. But now that window has closed because corporations have successfully funded an anti-government campaign.

Now a good chunk of the population wants States to secede and for the Federal Government to fail. They want the government to leave healthcare alone because they don't want the poor healthcare industry to have their profits messed with. These tea baggers don't want any government action on the financial markets cause that would be socialism fascism.

It's really been brilliant and largely unnoticed. The fat cats have to be laughing their asses off spilling their martinis as they puff on their cigars. They have working class people actually working against their own best interest.

We need high paying jobs in this country. Guess what? We aren't going to get them without government intervention. We need affordable healthcare. Guess what? We aren't going to get it without government intervention. We need renewable energy and to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Guess what? We aren't going to get it without government intervention. We need the banking system overhauled and re-regulated. Not going to happen without government intervention.

The very things the birthers, tea baggers, and tenthers want and need they are fighting againts and it's all being funded by the corporations in order to protect their own profits.

Only in America...

SOURCE: Pissed On Politics

Farah Can't Stop Lying About WND's Agenda

2009-10-15T11:50:00.003-04:00

Who does Joseph Farah think he's fooling?

His Oct. 13 WorldNetDaily column is yet another exercise in pretending that WND is a legitimate news organization that doesn't have a political agenda. Taking exception to an article by the Huffington Post's Thomas Edsall in the Columbia Journalism Review listing WND among the "conservative media" that are "explicitly ideological," Farah writes:

WorldNetDaily has disavowed the label "conservative" more times than I can count. Nowhere has WND ever proclaimed itself with such a label. And this apparently bears repeating and further explanation.

[...]

WND is a news agency – the largest independent source of news on the Internet.

It was founded by me – a lifelong journalist with a career spanning four decades and including stints in which I ran daily newspapers in major markets, none of which included any of the "conservative" media mentioned in Edsall's list.

The journalists working at WND all have similar qualifications and experience in the so-called "mainstream media." None of them has ever worked in "conservative media," if that is not an oxymoron.

The label "conservative" has been one placed on us, mainly by our competitors as a way of marginalizing us. Understandable, of course, but hardly "objective" and "neutral."

That's not to say WND doesn't have a unique worldview of its own amid the cacophony of those who like to think of themselves as "mainstream."

We do.

It's no secret.

We've explained it a thousand times.

We believe in doing good, American-style journalism the old-fashioned way – seeking the truth without fear or favor. We believe the highest calling of a free press in a free society is to serve as a watchdog on government and other powerful institutions. That's what American journalism was intended to do. That's why the Founding Father of this great country established for the first time in world history special protections for the free press in the First Amendment of our Constitution – so my colleagues serve as yet another check and balance on government power.

That's what we do – and, I think, we do it uniquely well and with the highest standards.

We've been through Farah's little song-and-dance before. Farah, as he has previously done, is obscuring the fact that he's trying to avoid answering relevant questions.

Farah denies being "conservative," even though his website unambiguously promotes a conservative agenda. The fact is that "conservative" is too mild a term for Farah and WND. They promote a far-right Christian agenda, and Farah himself may best be labeled a Christian reconstructionist -- after all, he supports the blacklisting of actors and condones the killing of adulterers.

Notice that at no point does Farah deny that WND is "explicitly ideological" -- he merely reframes it by claiming WND has a "unique worldview." Also notice that he's careful not to explain what that "unique worldview" is, even though any casual WND readers can see that it is obviously "explicitly ideological."

The "good, American-style journalism the old-fashioned way" boilerplate is pure, unadulterated horsepuckey. "Seeking the truth without fear or favor"? A total lie. WND is afraid to tell its readers about birther lawyer Orly Taitz's increasingly erratic courtroom antics.

A "watchdog on government and other powerful institutions"? Only if it's controlled by Democrats -- WND has little interest in exposing the wrongdoing of Republican politicians.

"The highest standards"? Don't make us laugh. Clark Jones knows all about WND's so-called "standards" -- it took seven years and a libel lawsuit before WND finally admitted it published numerous false claims about him. And, of course, WND has told lie after lie about President Obama and liberal policies.

Farah's delusions to the contrary, WND has long been a journalistic joke, and it remains so today. He's just trying to pander to the folks who haven't figured that out yet.

SOURCE: ConWebBlog

Court Re-Affirms That First Sale Doctrine Can Apply to “Licensed” Software

2009-10-15T11:46:00.003-04:00

Commentary by Corynne McSherry

Building on a prior ruling, a federal court has re-affirmed that a Seattle man was not infringing copyright law by re-selling software he obtained from an Autodesk customer.

The ruling is bound to frustrate the copyright industries, which have struggled for years to convince courts and their customers that the only thing you “buy" when you buy software is a limited and temporary right to use that software under certain conditions. In other words, they claim buyers aren't owners.

The distinction is no mere technicality. Under the Copyright Act, owners of copyrighted material are given substantial rights in the particular copies they purchase. One of the most important of these protections is the "first sale" doctrine, which says that once you've acquired a lawfully-made CD or book or DVD, you can lend, sell, or give it away without having to get permission from the copyright owner. Without the first sale doctrine, libraries would be illegal, as would used bookstores, used record stores, video rental shops, CD-swapping communities and so on. If those books, records, videos etc. were merely licensed, the seller could use the license to could force consumers to always buy new software, even if they would prefer to buy an older, possibly less expensive, version.

Autodesk would like to do just that, which is why it carefully polices secondary markets for its expensive AutoCad design software. After Autodesk repeatedly alleged that Timothy Vernor was violating copyright law by attempting to re-sell copies of AutoCAD software on eBay (which he had obtained from an Autodesk customer), Vernor asked a Washington federal court to declare that his activity was legal under the first sale doctrine. Autodesk predictably responded by insisting that AutoCAD is licensed, not sold, and therefore the first sale doctrine did not apply. The court ruled for Vernor. Autodesk then recruited an expert, put some additional facts on record, and effectively asked the court to reconsider its decision.

Autodesk’s arguments were no more successful the second time around. Judge Richard Jones found that while the sale was subject to numerous restrictions, it was nonetheless a sale, which means the customer had all the rights of an owner, and thus would not infringe AutoDesk’s copyright by re-selling the software. The court noted that while Autodesk imposed typical software industry contractual restrictions on use and transfer, its license agreement allowed the customer from whom Vernor bought the software to keep the copies forever, for a one-time fee. In other words, the transaction looked more like a book purchase (you pay your money, you get a copy to keep) than, say, a music subscription service.

Autodesk is likely to appeal, which means this case is headed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court is already considering similar issues with two other cases: UMG v. Augusto (EFF represents Mr. Augusto, with Durie Tangri LLP) and MDY v. Blizzard. Let’s hope Ninth Circuit takes full advantage of this opportunity to protect the rights and expectations of consumers.

Related Issues: Intellectual Property

SOURCE: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Obama Sides with Republicans: PATRIOT Act Renewal Bill Passes Senate Judiciary Committee

2009-10-15T11:38:00.002-04:00

Legislative Analysis by Kevin Bankston

Well, it looks like most of the Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee weren't swayed by this morning's New York Times editorial, which cited this morning's Committee meeting to consider USA PATRIOT Act renewal as a "critical chance to add missing civil liberties and privacy protections, address known abuses and trim excesses that contribute nothing to making America safer." Instead, the Committee just passed a bill to renew all of the PATRIOT powers that were set to expire at the end of the year, with only a handful of the original reforms that were first proposed by Senators Feingold and Durbin's JUSTICE Act and Committee Chairman Leahy's original PATRIOT renewal bill.

Instead of adding more protections to the bill, as EFF and the Times have been urging (along with many other Americans who have been organizing Facebook and Twitter activism around PATRIOT reform), the Committee this morning voted to accept seven Republican amendments to the USA PATRIOT Act Sunset Extension Act to remove the few civil liberties protections left in the bill after it was already watered down at last Thursday's Committee meeting. Surprisingly and disappointingly, most of those amendments were recommended to their Republican sponsors by the Obama Administration.

After voting on amendments (vote counts and text of the amendments are now available on the Committee's web site), the Committee voted to pass the PATRIOT bill itself, 11 to 8. Some Democrats voted against it, agreeing with us that it didn't protect civil liberties enough, while some Republicans voted against it because of the few meager privacy improvements it did include.

Those who voted AYE:
Leahy, D-Vermont
Kohl, D-Wisconsin
Feinstein, D-California
Schumer, D-New York
Cardin, D-Maryland
Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island
Klobuchar, D-Minnesota
Kaufman, D-Delaware
Franken, D-Minnesota
Kyl, R-Arizona
Cornyn, R-Texas

Those who voted NAY:
Feingold, D-Wisconsin
Durbin, D-Illinois
Specter, D-Pennsylvania
Sessions, R-Alabama
Hatch, R-Utah
Grassley, R-Iowa
Graham, R-South Carolina
Coburn, R-Oklahoma

EFF extends its heartfelt gratitude to the only three Democrats who continually stood up for civil liberties throughout this process and ultimately voted no on the final bill: Senators Feingold, Durbin and Specter. We particularly thank Senator Durbin for doing his best to pass an amendment to reform the government's authority to issue National Security Letters (NSLs) for Americans' records without having to show any connection between the records sought to a suspected terrorist or spy, and Senator Specter for cosponsoring Senator Feingold's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to pass an amendment to let the so-called "lone wolf" wiretapping authority expire. We especially thank Senator Feingold for offering an amendment to stop the government from using last summer's FISA Amendments Act to conduct "bulk collection" of Americans' phone calls and Internet communications, even though that amendment was ultimately withdrawn and not voted on after procedural objections from Chairman Leahy. Finally, we congratulate Senator Feingold on the success of his amendment to require that the government "minimize" the records that it obtains with NSLs.

As for the others on the Committee, and especially the Obama Administration: you let down the American people today, undermining our constitutional rights and endorsing a bill that doesn't do nearly enough to protect our privacy. We look forward to taking this fight to the floor of the Senate.

To do that, though, we need the help of concerned citizens like you: if you haven't already, please contact your Senator now to support the reforms in the JUSTICE Act, which may still be attached to the bill when it is debated by the full Senate. This fight isn't over by a long shot.

Related Issues: PATRIOT Act, Privacy

SOURCE: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Amendment Would Deny Protections to Bloggers

2009-10-15T11:33:00.002-04:00

Legislative Analysis by Tim Jones

Since 2007, Congress has been slowly considering The Free Flow Of Information Act. The bill is intended to prevent reporters from being forced to reveal the identity of anonymous sources. It was proposed in the wake of the Valerie Plame scandal, in which New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to reveal a source.

It's a critically important bill which unfortunately contains some rather large loopholes. A source can be exposed in cases where corporate trade secrets have been revealed, where national security could be harmed, or even where it's simply deemed to be in "the public interest."

Despite these flaws, the bill remains insufficiently dismantled for the tastes of some lawmakers. Senator Chuck Schumer last week introduced an amendment that would exempt bloggers, freelancers and other non-salaried journalists from the protections.

This is just baldly nonsensical. As EFF successfully argued in Apple v. Does in 2006, the goal of a shield law is to protect the free flow of information, not the the people we historically think of as journalists. Freedom of speech shouldn't be dependent on employment status.

When pressed by blogger "Kos" Moulitsas on the issue, Senator Schumer's office claimed that the amendment was a mere procedural ploy, and said he would "work to make sure" bloggers are protected in the final bill. Let's hope he's sincere.

EFF has fought long and hard to ensure that bloggers have the same legal protections as journalists, and will be watching this bill closely. If the anti-blogger amendment moves forward, we'll be working to defeat it.

To learn more, I recommend reading this recent article on the Schumer amendment by Jason Linkins, and/or this 2007 article on the shield law by EFF's Jennifer Granick.

Related Issues: Bloggers' Rights

Related Cases: Apple v. Does

SOURCE: Electronic Frontier Foundation

This is getting more and more frequent...

2009-10-14T13:38:00.000-04:00

I am hearing this not just on the tube or on the internet. More people are saying this crap to each other. I live in a largely Christian, right wing area and like it or not, that accounts for a large portion of the country. Right now, I can't help thinking that it's too bad more leftists aren't forming their own version of the NRA and getting ready. These fuckers are violent!

Why Won't Birthers Die? Scientists Point To "Implicit Social Cognition"

2009-10-13T11:09:00.003-04:00

By LatoyaPeterson, 1:00 PM on Tue Oct 6 2009, 17,360 views

Despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, Southern California dentist/lawyer Orly Taitz is busy clogging up the legal system to prove that Barack Obama is not a citizen of the United States. Why? Scientific American has a theory.

Today's Washington Post has a profile on Taitz, and it is clear the reporter thinks she is more than a little off:

Taitz has drafted voluminous court pleadings, filing at least five Obama-related cases; a hearing on a California case took place yesterday. In addition to making appearances on radio and television, she blogs and travels the country speaking. She has drummed up supporters at a gun show; joined "tea party" demonstrations against taxation; shouted at, and been shouted at by, MSNBC hosts.

All of which is not to say that her effort is going well. In September, U.S. District Judge Clay D. Land dismissed a Georgia case that Taitz brought on behalf of a military doctor, Connie Rhodes, which held that Rhodes should be spared deployment to Iraq because Obama is not constitutionally qualified to be commander in chief. More than just rejecting it, he excoriated it.

"Unlike in Alice in Wonderland, simply saying something is so does not make it so," Land wrote scathingly in his order dismissing the action. Singling out Taitz for criticism, he accused her of using the legal system to further a political agenda.

Taitz, breathtakingly, reacted by accusing the judge of treason and comparing herself to Nelson Mandela. She fired off a response that suggested the judge was bowing to "political pressure" and "external control." Land promptly issued another order requiring Taitz to tell him why he should not fine her $10,000 as a sanction for her misconduct. Today, a copy of that order lies on the floor of her car.

But as ridiculous as Taitz and others are in their quest to discredit the President, what other motives are at play here?

Scientific American writes that strongly held biases may be the reason for this type of fact-avoidance. Opening the article with an example of when Lena Horne refused to perform at a GI event when German prisoners of war were seated in front of African American servicemen, Steve Mirsky explores how implicit social cognition research summarizes this problem:

At a talk [Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji] gave in October 2008 to a group of science journalists, Banaji discussed research she did with Thierry Devos, now at San Diego State University, that examined bias against Asians. They found that volunteers linked white Americans more strongly than Asian-Americans with, well, America. Banaji and Devos then decided to do what even they thought was a "bizarre" study: they had people gauge the "American-ness" of famous Asian-Americans, such as Connie Chung and tennis player Michael Chang, versus European whites, such as Hugh Grant.

The study found that white Europeans are more "American" than are nonwhite Americans in most minds. [...]

That result helps to explain how MSNBC's Web site in 1998 could have run the remarkable headline "American Beats Out Kwan" with a story on how Tara Lipinski defeated fellow American Michelle Kwan in a figure skating competition. A Seattle Times article quoted the then director of the Japanese American Citizens League, reaching for a silver lining: "Maybe there's a little progress in that they don't see Lipinski as a foreign name anymore."

Little surprise, then, that in a study done during the 2008 election campaign, Devos found that John McCain (who, ironically, was born in Panama, albeit at a U.S. naval base) was seen as more "American" than Obama. But even British ex–prime minister Tony Blair was seen as more "American" than Obama, a finding that nearly made me spit out me bangers ‘n' mash.

As Mirsky points out, bias does play a heavy role in what we accept as "fact." So, it is as Liza Mundy - who has also written a biography of Michelle Obama - writes in the Post:

There are those who say that even if Obama were to provide every last record down to dry-cleaning receipts, no proof could satisfy birther proponents. In Taitz's case, there's what she calls "a two-prong test." Bucking the common view that "natural born citizen" — the constitutional requirement for a U.S. president — means, generally speaking, born on American soil, she argues that to be president a person must not only be born here but must also be the child of parents who were both U.S. citizens at the time of his birth. She allows that her decidedly non-mainstream interpretation would knock out her two older sons, born when she had only a green card, before she became a U.S. citizen.

Who needs facts and figures if we can just reinvent reality?

Burden of Proof on Obama's Origins [Washington Post]
Birth of a Notion: Implicit Social Cognition and the "Birther" Movement [Scientific American]

Earlier: Orly Taitz Just Wants To Save Your Tax Dollars
Esquire Takes On Obama 'Birther' Insanity
MSNBC Brings Birther Circus Into Full Public View

SOURCE: Jezebel

White House vs Fox News

2009-10-13T11:03:00.000-04:00

October 12, 2009 - Posted by Deborah Jones

Is the U.S. White House "attacking the messenger" -- or refusing to pretend that the Fox News Channel news is performing journalism, when it's really part of the partisan opposition?

U.S. online media outlet Politico broke news of the dispute between the American administration and TV business earlier this month, noting that White House officials "expressed pique with what they consider heavy coverage of Obama critics by opinion shows on the news channel." Fox News was shut out from a series of interviews that President Barak Obama gave to other TV shows, Politico reported, "while the Fox broadcast network declined to carry Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress, or his most recent prime-time news conference."

The New York Times reported on escalating tension between Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and the presidential administration.

The White House side is clear: Fox is not a legitimate news organization. Reported the Times: '“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” '

Fox's response is equally hard-line: "“Instead of governing, the White House continues to be in campaign mode, and Fox News is the target of their attack mentality,” Michael Clemente, the channel’s senior vice president for news, said in a statement on Sunday. “Perhaps the energy would be better spent on the critical issues that voters are worried about.” '

The nub of the dispute seems to be where, and how, Fox draws a line between reporting news and spouting opinion.

Their news reporting team seems to have at least some respect; the Times said spokesperson Dunn called Fox's White House chief correspondent "fair."

Fox's big-name, far-right-wing, polarizing -- and in my opinion often crazed -- commentators are another matter.

The big question is whether Fox's viewers can tell the difference between the two. Maybe media outlets need "nutritional content" guidelines like the mandatory labels on food -- but instead of the percentage of transfats and salt, the media outlets would declare the amount of reportage and opinions.

SOURCE: The Canadian Journalism Project

A Message to America’s wealthy, from the Working Class

2009-09-07T23:40:00.001-04:00

by Sharon Knight

Dear Republicans, extreme capitalists, greedy rich, robber barons, anti-government extremists, hate mongers, money launderers, and others of dubious ethics,

We, the working classes of America, have heard your message loud and clear – “Get your own!” We understand that you have no desire to contribute anything of your hard earned money to ensuring that all Americans, regardless of class, race, or economic status, have access to health care.

We understand that even though in many cases your wealth has been built with our sweat and tears, it would be unfair and burdensome for you to have to pay any taxes to ensure our well-being. Indeed, we acknowledge that America has always been about every man for himself, and that to have to contribute to the well-being of those other losers who didn’t figure out how to get rich off the system is just downright un-American.

We, being patriots ourselves and hardly wishing to be called un-American, understand your dilemma, and respect your assertions that we must all “get our own”.

Therefore, as the people who mow your lawns, clean your houses, answer your phones, drive you around, give you pedicures, walk your dog, teach your kids music and art, pick them up after school, change their diapers, wax your car, etc. etc. etc., we must inform you that we are raising our rates.

We are simply unable to continue to wipe your lily-white asses for the slave wages you have grown accustomed to paying.

Since many of us are contract workers, required to pay everything out of our own pockets – (God forbid you’d have to chip in for our taxes, or, gasp, health care, as an employer would) – we must adjust our rates based on this fact. Therefore we now require a minimum yearly salary of $100,000. (To be reassessed with the birth of each new child – we would hate to offend your religious sensibilities by using birth control).

That’s right. It will now cost you 1,000 benjamins to have your lawn mowed twice a week. And another 1,000 to have your pool cleaned. Another 100 grand for your massage therapist, and yet another so your wife can maintain her delicately lacquered toenails, another to keep your car waxed, etc. ad nauseum.

We understand it will get quite expensive for you to continue with all these luxuries, but you know, it’s just not our problem. We need to look out for number one, after all. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.

Perhaps you’ll even figure out how to wipe your own asses.

Taking a Look at Obama's Allegedly Non-Existent Birth Certificate

2009-07-22T15:10:00.000-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

For Mothers on this Father's Day

2009-06-21T15:44:00.001-04:00

TESTING YOUR FILTERS

2009-06-10T11:44:00.001-04:00

The 9/11 Psyop

Peru Faces its Tiananmen

2009-06-08T09:22:00.002-04:00

Survival International today called on all oil companies operating in the Peruvian Amazon to suspend operations as the country comes to terms with the worst political violence since the Shining Path insurgency in the 1980s.

The companies include Anglo-French Perenco (a major gas supplier to the UK), Argentina’s PlusPetrol, Canada’s Petrolifera, Spain’s Repsol, Brazil’s Petrobras and many others.

Violent clashes on Friday between Amazon Indians blockading roads and rivers, and police and army units intent on breaking up the protests have left dozens of Indians, and at least 23 policemen, dead.

The Indians have been protesting for two months against a series of laws which open up their communal rainforests to oil and gas companies. In the last few years more than 70% of the Amazon has been parcelled out to oil and gas companies for exploration, and a series of large-scale finds threaten to transform much of the Indians’ virgin forests. Similar schemes in neighbouring Ecuador have had a devastating effect on the rainforest, and led to chronic pollution and ill-health amongst the Indians who live there.

The government’s response to the protests has been dismissive: President Garcia has rebuffed attempts by Congress to debate the laws at the centre of the controversy, labelling the protests ‘a conspiracy’ and the protesters ‘ignorant’. Peruvian Indian leader Alberto Pizango, speaking before he went into hiding, said, ‘We feel that the government has always treated us as second-class citizens’.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘Peruvian Indians are being driven to desperate measures to try and save their lands which have been stolen from them for five centuries.

‘Their protests signal that the colonial era has finally drawn to a close. No longer are Amazon Indians prepared to put up with the illegal and brutal treatment which has been routine. That’s finished. This is the Amazon’s Tiananmen. If it finishes the same way, it will also end Peru’s international reputation.

‘Oil companies operating in Peru should suspend their operations until calm is restored and the Indians’ communal land rights are properly respected – only then can they negotiate as equals.’

For more information and images please contact Miriam Ross at Survival International on (+44) (0)20 7687 8734 or (+44) (0)7504 543 367 or email mr@survival-international.org

SOURCE: Survival International

I'll never vote in a presidential election again.

2009-06-02T20:49:00.002-04:00

It only encourages the bastards.

Monday June 1, 2009 05:02 EDT

Obama's support for the new Graham-Lieberman secrecy law

It was one thing when President Obama reversed himself last month by announcing that he would appeal the Second Circuit's ruling that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) compelled disclosure of various photographs of detainee abuse sought by the ACLU. Agree or disagree with Obama's decision, at least the basic legal framework of transparency was being respected, since Obama's actions amounted to nothing more than a request that the Supreme Court review whether the mandates of FOIA actually required disclosure in this case. But now -- obviously anticipating that the Government is likely to lose in court again (.pdf) -- Obama wants Congress to change FOIA by retroactively narrowing its disclosure requirements, prevent a legal ruling by the courts, and vest himself with brand new secrecy powers under the law which, just as a factual matter, not even George Bush sought for himself.

The White House is actively supporting a new bill jointly sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman -- called The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009 -- that literally has no purpose other than to allow the government to suppress any "photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States." As long as the Defense Secretary certifies -- with no review possible -- that disclosure would "endanger" American citizens or our troops, then the photographs can be suppressed even if FOIA requires disclosure. The certification lasts 3 years and can be renewed indefinitely. The Senate passed the bill as an amendment last week.

Just imagine if any other country did this. Imagine if a foreign government were accused of systematically torturing and otherwise brutally abusing detainees in its custody for years, and there was ample photographic evidence proving the extent and brutality of the abuse. Further imagine that the country's judiciary -- applying decades-old transparency laws -- ruled that the government was legally required to make that evidence public. But in response, that country's President demanded that those transparency laws be retroactively changed for no reason other than to explicitly empower him to keep the photographic evidence suppressed, and a compliant Congress then immediately passed a new law empowering the President to suppress that evidence. What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people? Read the language of the bill; it doesn't even hide the fact that its only objective is to empower the President to conceal evidence of war crimes.

That this exact scenario is now happening in the U.S. is all the more remarkable given that the President who is demanding these new suppression powers is the same one who repeatedly vowed "to make his administration the most open and transparent in history." After noting the tentative steps Obama has taken to increase transparency, the generally pro-Obama Washington Post Editorial Page today observed: "what makes the administration's support for the photographic records act so regrettable" is that "Mr. Obama runs the risk of taking two steps back in his quest for more open government."

What makes all of this even worse is that it is part of a broader trend whereby the Government simply retroactively changes the law whenever it decides it does not want to abide by it. For decades, we had laws in place authorizing citizens to sue their telecommunication carriers if the telecoms allowed government spying on their communications in violation of the law, but when it was revealed that the telecoms did exactly this, the Congress simply changed the law retroactively so that it no longer applied. For decades, we had laws imposing civil and criminal liability on government officials who engaged in or authorized torture, but when it was revealed that our government did that, the Congress just retroactively changed the law to protect the torturers. And now that courts have ruled that our decades-old transparency law compels disclosure of this torture evidence, the Congress is just going to retroactively change the law -- again -- this time to empower the President to suppress that evidence anyway.

Other than creating an illusion of transparency and accountability, what's the point of having laws that purport to restrict what the Government can do if political officials just retroactively waive those laws whenever they want? What's the point of having a FOIA law if the Government will simply pass a new law exempting itself from FOIA's mandates any time it loses in court and wants to conceal evidence anyway? And what conceivable rationale is there for limiting the President's new secrecy powers to post-9/11 photographs? Given that anything which reflects poorly on our Government can be said to endanger our troops and American citizens, why stop here? Why not just have a general power of suppression whereby the President can keep any evidence secret as long as his Defense Secretary decrees that its disclosure will "endanger" the troops?

The debate over whether there is value in disclosing these specific photographs is entirely misplaced. That isn't how open government works. The burden isn't on citizens to prove that there is value in disclosure. Everything that government does is supposed to be transparent to the public unless there is a compelling reason for secrecy -- and the whole point of FOIA always has been that mere embarrassment, the mere fact that information reflects poorly on our government, isn't a legitimate ground for concealment. That's a critical principle for open government. This new law explicitly guts that principle. It institutionalizes the pernicious notion that secrecy is justified where disclosure would reflect badly on the Government and thus "endanger" American citizens and/or our troops.

Combine all of this with the increasingly disturbing spectacle taking place in a California federal court in the Al-Haramain case -- where the Obama DOJ is on the verge of being sanctioned by a federal judge for defying the court's order to make available documents relating to Bush's illegal eavesdropping activities -- and the infatuation with excessive presidential secrecy, the linchpin of government abuse, appears alive and well in the new administration. Is there really anyone who wants to argue that defiance of a federal court's order and enacting a new law authorizing suppression of torture evidence -- the disclosure of which is compelled both by courts and FOIA -- are remotely consistent with anything Obama said he would do, or remotely consistent with what a healthy democratic government would do?

-- Glenn Greenwald

SOURCE: Salon.com

Same Top Ten Campaign Contributors for McCain and Obama = SAME OLD SAME OLD

2009-05-19T15:09:00.002-04:00

We always love it when the good cop comes into the room after eight years of being beat up by the bad cop, don't we?!?

Obama administration threatens Britain to keep torture evidence concealed

Ever since he was released from Guantanamo in February after six years of due-process-less detention and brutal torture, Binyam Mohamed has been attempting to obtain justice for what was done to him. But his torturers have been continuously protected, and Mohamed's quest for a day in court repeatedly thwarted, by one individual: Barack Obama. Today, there is new and graphic evidence of just how far the Obama administration is going to prevent evidence of the Bush administration's torture program from becoming public.

Read the story here.

Baiting Nigerian Scammers for Fun (not so much for profit)

2009-05-19T14:59:00.002-04:00

Who are scam baiters, and why do they bother trying to give scammers the runaround? Ars explores the flourishing communities of scam baiters who help each other do everything they can to waste scammers' time, including enticing them to get ridiculous tattoos and sending them on treks across Africa for nonexistent cash.

By Jacqui Cheng | Last updated May 11, 2009 10:18 PM CT

When your hobby is baiting 419 scammers (also known as Nigerian scammers or advance-fee fraudsters), a death threat isn't cause for concern—it's a trophy worth bragging about to your friends.

Scam baiters are the vigilante enforcers who come together to waste hours, weeks, or months of 419 scammers' lives for nothing more than the satisfaction of knowing that they are distracting them from real victims. Though the world of 419 scams has existed since long before the Internet, people continue to fall for scammers in droves—certainly, scammers are making millions of dollars every year by promising money, goods, and romance that they never deliver on. That's part of why scam baiting has actually become a somewhat popular pastime online, with thousands of users flocking to scam baiting forums to share stories and ideas on how to string along more scammers. And hey, why not? Most of us end up spending too much time screwing around on the Internet anyway—these folks just use that time to make scammers miserable.

But when you hear stories like this, it makes you wonder. "I get death threats on regular basis," a student who goes by -C- told Ars. "Death threats are not uncommon and are actually considered achievements: they are a testament to the fact that the baiter managed to annoy his/her scammer nicely."

Why would you want to start baiting scammers?

When the scammer sends you a fake passport that looks like it was made by a blind hamster with a piece of charcoal in ten seconds, you praise it and say it really helps you to build trust.

Who are these people? As it turns out, the scam-baiter demographic is more diverse than one might think, though much of the reasoning for participating is the same. "My initial reason for baiting was to give myself an outlet for the practical jokes that I am 'too old' to play on my dog/little sister/friends/neighbor's cat," a 32-year-old baiter who goes by blah told Ars. "But after I joined 419eater, I realized that we actually do make an impact on the entire scamming business by running interference and wasting these scammer's time."

Other scam baiters we spoke to (all of which wished to remain anonymous for their own safety) echoed this sentiment, many relaying feelings of boredom or frustration with scammers. They also had heard humorous stories from experienced baiters and wanted to get involved. And, of course, there's always those who simply do it because they feel like it's payback. "I'm an absolute stickler for justice and hate any form of abuse," a UK production company owner who goes by Paddy told Ars.

The things baiters do to scammers range from "boring," menial tasks like seeding false information or questionable wording into the scamming community (tasks that don't necessarily bring the glory, but are equally necessary) to sending scammers on full-on safaris across Africa—or sometimes, the globe—in search of money that will never come. The baiters we spoke with said that they spend anywhere from a an hour per day (usually arranged around other things, like TV or just casual Internet surfing) to a full 8 to 10 hours per day, especially if they are working on a collaborative safari. We'll get to that in a minute.

Some of the more menial tasks involve posing as experienced scammers trying to befriend newbies in order to give them sage advice. "For example, scammers like idioms, but many of their native idioms are different to those of English language and they may not know that many from the latter. Teach them a new one: tell them that 'take this offer of mine with a huge grain of salt' means 'this is the chance of your life time and I am very serious about this,'" -C- says.

-C- describes another way of "de-educating" scammers: giving feedback on their fake documents in order to make them look less realistic. -C- explains: "When the scammer sends you a fake passport that looks like it was made by a blind hamster with a piece of charcoal in ten seconds, you praise it and say it really helps you to build trust. Then, hope he is encouraged by this to send it to real victims too, who on the other hand will hopefully recognize it's a fake."

We're going on a surfin' safari

Every minute the scammer I'm communicating with is spending on me is a minute he is not scamming a real potential victim.

On the more extreme end of the scale, the tales from baiters are both horrifying and hilarious, depending on where your sympathies lie (and how much you enjoy tales of lengthy snipe hunts). 28-year-old manny relayed a story wherein he and several other baiters talked a scammer into traveling from Port Harcourt, Nigeria to Darfur to pick up a nonexistent $500,000. The 3,000-mile roundtrip got the scammer stranded for two weeks before he managed to make it home. Craig, a professional airline pilot, said that he and three other baiters got a scammer to travel from Lagos, Nigeria to Paga, Ghana—a total of 3,800 miles.

blah had fun with a scammer and airport security in London, resulting in his being detained for several hours. "He was waiting for me to arrive on a flight that I wasn't actually on. I told him to show up with a black backpack and hold it very very close to his chest (that's how I would know that it was him). Airport security didn't find it amusing, apparently, and thought he was acting suspicious," blah said. "My plane fictitiously arrived after he had been detained and I ended up chewing the scammer out for being so inconsiderate as to get detained and leave me waiting for an hour until I finally just hailed a cab and went to my hotel. When airport security finally released him, he went and waited in the lobby-bar of the hotel for four additional hours while I 'freshened-up' in my room."

Do ethics apply to this game?

There are many other stories easily found online—ones that none of our baiters were willing to fess up to—about having scammers get tattoos saying ridiculous things, or sending them into truly dangerous regions of Africa that have almost gotten them killed. The general consensus among the baiters we spoke to, however, was that they feel even the most dangerous of safaris is payback for all the scammers do. "The scammer makes the decision to put themselves in harm's way; if something happens to them, so be it. Most of them would have no problem with you dying if it meant that they would make a dollar," said manny. "One baiter's character recently told the scammer that he had a choice between sending the scammer $5,000 or using the same money to pay for his baby daughter's cancer treatment—I think you can guess which option the scammer chose."

Craig agreed. "Making a lad sweat it out in Niger, 100° heats, with the need to drink two gallons of water a day or die, is petty punishment for their crimes," he said. "A lad returning from a long journey, financially worse off, demoralized completely, may lose interest in scamming."

That's really the end goal—to keep the scammers' attention directed away from real victims and hopefully frustrate them to the point of quitting. "Every minute the scammer I'm communicating with is spending on me is a minute he is not scamming a real potential victim," manny told Ars.

Others agreed wholeheartedly. "Whether he is wandering through the desert hundreds of miles from home, or making yet another fruitless trip to the Moneygram office, that's all time he is not behind a computer scamming someone's elderly parents." Many of the baiters also spend time working with other sites to warn victims and help educate people about 419 scams (Paddy told me he spends a lot of time warning victims at scamwarners.com, for example). "I love to hear is someone ripping up a fake check they just received from the scammer and/or telling me that we just saved them their life's savings."

SOURCE: ars technica

Peru Army Moves into Amazon after Tribes Blockade Rivers and Roads

2009-05-18T13:35:00.002-04:00

Ecology and culture at stake say environmentalists, as government plans to exploit rainforest for oil, gas and timber

Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 May 2009 12.54 BST

Huge parts of Peru's rainforest is threatened by its government's deals with several multinationals. Photograph: Paul A Souders/Corbis

Peru's army is poised to deploy in the Amazon rainforest to lift blockades across rivers and roads by indigenous people opposed to oil, gas, logging and mining projects.

The government has authorised the military to move into remote provinces where a state of emergency has been declared in the wake of a month-long stand-off between indigenous people and police.

President Alan Garcia said the state had the right and responsibility to develop mineral and hydrocarbon wealth to benefit all Peruvians. "We have to understand that when there are resources like oil, gas and timber, they don't belong only to the people who had the fortune to be born there because that would mean more than half of Peru's territory belongs to a few thousand people."

In the past two years the centre-right government has signed deals with multinationals to open swaths of rainforest, including a £1.3bn agreement last month with the Anglo-French oil company Perenco.

Indigenous groups, backed by environmentalists and Catholic bishops, have protested that the developments will devastate the area's ecology and their culture.

About 65 tribes have mobilised 30,000 people to disrupt roads, waterways and pipelines, leading to skirmishes with police. Up to 41 vessels serving energy companies are stuck along jungle rivers, paralysed by the protests, one private sector source told Reuters.

One of the most tense areas is along the Napo river in northern Peru, said Survival International, a London-based rights advocacy group. "After local indigenous people blockaded the river with a nylon cable, a naval gunboat and three boats belonging to Perenco broke through the blockade, sinking some of the protesters' canoes in the process."

The National Organisation of the Amazon Indigenous people of Peru said last week's declaration of a state of emergency, which suspended some constitutional rights in four jungle provinces, amounted to a declaration of war by the government.

The group responded by calling for an "insurgency" but retracted the term on Saturday after being threatened with 10 years in jail for sedition. Protests will continue but within the rule of law, it said.

The Peruvian rainforest is the largest swath of Amazon outside Brazil. According to one study oil, gas and timber deals would cover an estimated 70% of the forest.

The government says such developments are needed to boost economic growth and state revenues in one of South America's poorest countries. The projects, which could turn Peru into a net oil exporter, are in line with a free trade deal with the United States.

Alberto Pizango, an indigenous leader, said the tribes – who claim the forest as ancestral land – were not seeking a blanket ban on projects. "What we want is development from our perspective."

Each side has blamed the other for breakdown in negotiations.

SOURCE: UK Guardian

Armed Forces Enlistment High - Bad Economy Insures That

2009-05-04T15:57:00.002-04:00

Mystery or Obfuscation: The Enigma of Freemasonry

2009-05-03T01:32:00.005-04:00

Through all the voluminous lore that we see on the world wide web regarding the nature and history of freemasonry, through all the mystery and darkness that seems to shroud the truth of this organization or organizations, I find it both intriguing and entirely unsurprising that an anarchist writing a well over a hundred years ago seems to shed the clearest light into such shrouded depths. Consider that true anarchism has been suppressed by ruling elites for a very long time, deliberately framed in the garb of chaos and irresponsibility.

Whatever you think of today's self professed anarchists who channel the discontents of youth through what sanctioned society has given them as a mask to wear, that of a drunk and destructive, anti-social renegade, the anarchism that was a threat to the established order is another animal.

Here, Mikhail Bakunin gives us a lens with which to see:

Mikhail Bakunin 1869

To The Comrades Of The International Workingmen's Association Of Locle And Chaux-De-Fonds

Source: The following letters are taken from a series of articles Bakunin wrote in the spring of 1869 for the journal El Progress of Geneva.

First Letter

Friends and Brothers,

I feel the need, before leaving your mountains, to express to you once again in writing my profound gratitude for the fraternal reception you have accorded me. Is it not a wonderful thing that a man, a Russian, a one-time noble, completely unknown to you when he arrived here, found himself surrounded by hundreds of friends almost the very moment that he set foot in your country? Such miracles no longer happen these days, except at the hands of the International Workingmen's Association, and that for one simple reason: the International alone represents today the historical life, the creative power of the social and political future. Those who are united by a living body of thought, by a will and a great passion held in common, are truly brothers, even if they do not realize it themselves.

There was a time when the bourgeoisie, endowed with the same power of life and exclusively constituting the historical class, offered the same spectacle of fraternity and union, in its acts as well as its thoughts. It was the finest hour of this class, ever respectable to be sure, but since that time impotent, stupid and sterile; it was the epoch of its most energetic development. Such was the case before the great revolution of 1793; such was still the case, although to a much lesser degree, before the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. In those days the bourgeoisie had a world to conquer, a place to take up in society, and, organized for battle, intelligent, audacious, feeling itself strong because it bore the principle of right for everyone, it was endowed with an irresistible omnipotence. It alone made three revolutions against the monarchy, the nobility and the clergy united.

In this epoch the bourgeoisie too had created an international association, a universal and formidable one, Freemasony. It would be a substantial error to judge the Freemasonry of the last century, or even that of the first part of the present century, by what it is today. The bourgeois institution par excellence, Freemasonry, in its development, in its growing power at first and later in its decadence, represented in a way the development, power and moral and intellectual decadence of the bourgeoisie. Today, fallen to the sad position of a senile old intriguer, it is a useless, sometimes malevolent and always ridiculous nullity, whereas, before 1830 and especially before 1793, having gathered together at its core, with very few exceptions, all the minds of the elite, the most ardent hearts, the proudest spirits, the most audacious personalities, it had constituted an active, powerful, and truly beneficial institution. It was the energetic incarnation and implementation of the humanitarian ideal of the eighteenth century. All those great principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, of reason and human justice, elaborated theoretically at first by the philosophy of that century, became in the hands of the Freemasons practical dogmas and the foundations of a new moral and political program, the soul of a gigantic enterprise of demolition and reconstruction. In that epoch, Freemasonry was nothing less than the universal conspiracy of the revolutionary bourgeoisie against the feudal, monarchical and divine tyranny. It was the International of the bourgeoisie.

It is known that all the principal actors of the first revolution were Freemasons, and that when this revolution broke out it was able to find, thanks to Freemasonry, friends and devoted and powerful collaborators in all other countries, a fact that was assuredly of great help in its victories. But it is equally clear that the triumph of the revolution killed Freemasonry, for once the revolution had largely fulfilled the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, and had enabled it to displace the old nobility, the bourgeoisie went on quite naturally, after having been an exploited and oppressed class for such a long time, to become in its turn a privileged class, a class of exploiters, oppressive, conservative and reactionary in nature, the most reliable friend and supporter of the State. After the coup d'Etat of the first Napoleon, Freemasonry became an imperial institution throughout a large part of the European continent.

The Restoration resuscitated it somewhat. Seeing itself threatened by the return of the Old Regime, forced to concede to the coalition of Church and nobility the place that it had conquered through the first revolution, the bourgeoisie became of necessity revolutionary once again. But what a difference between this reheated revolutionarism and the ardent and powerful revolutionarism that had inspired it at the end of the last century! In the old days the bourgeoisie had been of good faith, had believed seriously and naively in the rights of man, had been driven along and inspired by the genius of demolition and reconstruction, had been in full possession of its intelligence and at the height of its powers. It had as yet no fears that an abyss might be separating it from the people; it felt itself, believed itself, to be the people's representative, and it really was. But the Thermidorean reaction and the Conspiracy of Babeuf deprived it of this notion forever. The abyss that separates the toiling people from the exploiting bourgeoisie, from the dominant class that takes everything for itself, has opened, and it will take nothing less than the entire body of the bourgeoisie, their whole privileged existence, to fill it in again. Furthermore, it was no longer the bourgeoisie in its entirety, but only a part of it that returned, after the Restoration, to the task of conspiring against the clerical and aristocratic regime, and against the legitimate monarchs.

In my next letter, I shall, if you will be so good as to permit me, develop my ideas on this last phase of constitutional liberalism and bourgeois carbonarism.

You can find the rest here.

A History of Marijuana Prohibition in the U.S.

2009-04-29T08:15:00.002-04:00

Has the Intelligence Community Tamed American Colleges?

2009-04-22T13:14:00.004-04:00

by Isaac Elster / The South End Published: Sunday, March 15, 2009

The Intelligence Community — made up of the CIA, FBI, and fifteen other government agencies — is hoping to expand its presence on college campuses more than ever, including Wayne State.

This goal is now in the process of being realized with the Intelligence Community’s Centers of Academic Excellence Program in National Security Studies. The Program focuses on building relationships between colleges, students and the IC.

According to Vaneé Vines, a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Program is one of many necessary academic-outreach initiatives stemming from the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.

“The nation faces increasingly complex global threats,” Vines said.

“As a result, the Intelligence Community must have a work force that reflects America's diversity and has a deep understanding of global cultures; foreign languages; science, technology, engineering, math, and economics; plus other key issues.

“Clearly, the CAE Program is needed to build a work force that will help the nation tackle national security challenges.”

Interestingly enough, this planned enlargement of the IC work force has largely been met not with hostility or protests, but with apathy. Several American college campuses have been hostile to the presence of CIA recruiters at some point in time, even towards the later years of the Cold War.

Social and political activist Abbie Hoffman was quoted in the Fall 1988 edition of “Business Today” as saying in “the last three and a half years, 102 universities have been forced to join the divestment movement … because of organized pressure by students.”

Ten college universities were designated to make the launch of the Program: WSU, California State University - San Bernardino, Clark Atlanta University, Florida International University, Norfolk State University, Tennessee State University, Trinity University, University of Texas – El Paso, University of Texas - Pan American and University of Washington.

WSU’s program is the Center of Academic Excellence-National Security Intelligence Studies. While applications for the Scholars Program were being collected, a Teachers Workshop in which middle and high school teachers learned about Middle Eastern languages, the High School Engineering Training Institute and the Study Abroad Grant were put into action.

Not a single voice was raised in public protest of these developments. Why has WSU — a university that was listed in Ami Chen Mills’ book “CIA Off Campus” as a college where anti-CIA actions took place between 1987-1991 — accepted this program?

WSU student Sicily McRaven said the program hasn’t been protested because it is still relatively new to students. McRaven, a member of Detroit Students for a Democratic Society, said that people might negatively react to the CAE-NSIS if news of it spread to WSU’s various colleges (the program is grounded in the university’s College of Engineering).

“WSU is a commuter's school, so not that many people are aware of what is happening outside of their college,” McRaven said.

“It is possible that through our desperation for funding, we may start to become more beholden to these agencies and allow them to shape the agenda and type of learning that students experience.”

Is it because of the economy’s downturn, and people’s subsequent willingness to explore new options for employment?

“If students get in the program, they will have a greater chance of finding a career than with the Big Three [automakers],” said Michelle Reaves, Program Manager for the CAE-NSIS.

“Not many people are getting hired into the Big Three anymore.”

Is it because the CAE-NSIS and its sister programs at other colleges highlight the need for diversity in the IC?

James Robbins, Director of Trinity University’s Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence — a sister program of the CAE-NSIS — emphasizes that increased diversity in the IC is in America’s best interest.

“The challenges of the War on Terror have demonstrated that the Intelligence Community needs to draw on the full diversity of our country and not just select groups,” Robbins said.

“Its challenges are so diverse and globally based that we are going to need diverse and globally based solutions to this issue. So it only makes sense to reach out to previously underrepresented communities in the Intelligence Community.”

Although many dissenting voices cannot be found at universities where the Program is present, there are many individuals who visibly protest IC presence on their campuses.

Rochester Institute of Technology student Kenneth Love is a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Campus Antiwar Network — a grassroots network that has protested the IC’s presence at American college campuses — and a former Army ROTC cadet.

Love objects to the CAE-NSIS because it is essentially no different from other IC recruiting efforts. Love argues that no matter how overt the recruitment is, students who graduate from this program will be offered the same jobs that they would have if the recruitment was instead covert.

“I know students that created technology using mathematical algorithms to detect terrorist activity among radical minded students on the popular social networking website Facebook … students who created through computer science technology better programs to catch dialect on the telephones, especially Arabic,” Love said.

“This egregious exploitation of students’ educational capacities is actually directly counter-posed to their own interests.”

Love suggests that students who object to the IC’s presence on campuses should contact the CAN. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is a graduate student in sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of the CAN.

She believes that the IC’s methods to attract students remain nefarious despite its more open recruitment policy.

“I consider it the height of cynicism for intelligence agencies to say they're providing much needed jobs for graduates or much needed educational funding for schools,” Wrigley-Field said.

“The government is taking away educational funding with one hand and holding out the military with the other. It amounts to holding schools hostage, and I think students need to fight back.”

Chris Dols, a fellow UW-Madison student and a member of the CAN’s National Coordinating Committee, agrees that the IC’s use of funds to attract college students is inappropriate and harmful to all universities involved.

“The idea that these programs cannot hurt your school depends on believing that your school and its community are somehow detached from the rest of the world,” Dols said.

“That in order to gain a foothold in higher education, the Intelligence Community is exploiting the lack of employment opportunities available to students and the similar lack of research grants available to their schools should be proof enough that they have no interest in solving these problems. It is precisely the opposite.

“They rely upon the desperation of our schools in order to get in the front door. They have an immediate interest in limiting our options so that they're our only alternative.”

Those involved in the IC’s programs say that they have not heard any objections to this project, but they believe that those who might raise their voices in protest are wrong to do so.

“Those who oppose this kind of approach are not thinking clearly, even based on their own interests,” Robbins said.

“If you make everything open and transparent, you make it less likely that anything bad is going to happen.”

Gerald O. Thompkins, Program Director for WSU’s CAE-NSIS program says that he does not believe that his college will ever see demonstrations against this program because it is just as harmless as government agencies’ individual attempts to recruit students.

“This is no different than if a student decided to go into the National Guard,” Thompkins said.“You are working for the federal government.

"The main thrust of this program is to create employment opportunities at the federal level.”

Reaves takes another approach, justifying the CAE-NSIS, saying that students can take the skills that they have learned in the program to any other type of job.

“This program’s courses that are set up increase the critical skills that are necessary for an employer,” Reaves said. “These skills are necessary whether you work for the IC or the IBM.”

So why is there no public outcry now that the IC is attempting to install programs that expose students to each of its agencies on a national level? Will this acceptance of the Program continue if it expands to private and community colleges?

Or has America, for the most part, become used to the IC’s presence in its colleges? Has the IC tamed the beasts that are colleges, or will the beasts struggle to remain wild?

Our Backward Ways

2009-04-17T22:18:00.000-04:00

On Selective Reporting

2009-04-15T22:00:00.003-04:00

The protest Fox News couldn't wait to cover (taxes on the upper crust):

The anti-war protest in D.C. that they never did cover:

Humans - Traumatized at the Very Onset of Life

2009-04-14T22:22:00.001-04:00

Is it any wonder we end up like we do? Remember, the state of worldly affairs is made up of the decisions of huge sums of people many of which are scarred in this way.

...And You're Buying Aspirin?

2009-04-10T03:41:00.001-04:00

Those headaches you've been having aren't symptoms of fatigue, they're labor pains. Your dreams and ideas have been boiling for years, just below the surface, and now your mind is ready to give birth. But they are watching. They know how your brain cells are blossoming towards transformation. And they're scared. Eyes follow you from dark corners, hidden cameras track your movements. And what about that old man peering at you from behind his paper...?

For now, it's okay; they've got you quarantined on a college campus, or wearing yourself out at some crappy job, or following the latest media scandal. But when your intelligence-tumor threatens to burst your skull and spill out into the environment, then watch it! The most dangerous cancer is that which is contagious. The most dangerous contagion leaps from head to head beyond their control.

When your neurons start to replicate themselves, in your head or in your actions, then you start to threaten their sterile dream of law and order. You threaten to become unpredictable. That's when they put the red tag by your file:

"CARCINOGENIUS"

You've been marked for observation.
Wear your stigma with pride.

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME A MEXICAN CUT YOUR PENSION OR HEALTH BENEFITS?

2009-04-10T03:33:00.001-04:00

SAM SMITH - Whenever a new crisis develops in an election year and it's not nature's or the stock market's fault, the odds are pretty good that it's not a crisis.

Witness the sudden discovery of immigrants, a much more comfortable topic for some than Iraq, global warming, globalization, or runaway corporate greed.

The debate, however, has its bizarre aspects. For example, the Texas Rangers, who should know, list their last serious concerns with Mexican terrorists as occurring nearly 100 years ago when "when authorities in McAllen, Texas, arrest Basilio Ramos, Jr. Ramos is carrying a copy of the Plan of San Diego, a revolutionary manifesto supposedly written and signed at the South Texas town of San Diego. It calls for the formation of a 'Liberating Army of Races and Peoples,' of Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Japanese, to 'free' the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Colorado from United States. Versions of the plan call for the murder of all white citizens over 16 years of age. The goal is an independent republic, which might later seek annexation to Mexico.' Since then things have been pretty quiet, although some guerillas from another continent did considerable damage in 2001 by using the border crossing technique known as "buying airline tickets."

But it's not really about terrorism. It's about finding a scapegoat for America's increasing problems. What America's white elite is doing is just what its southern branch did under segregation: teach non-elite whites to blame their problems on a minority. It worked well then and it seems to be working now.

But those wishing to test the extent of the immigrant problem might want to conduct this quick test:

1. Has a Mexican ever fired or laid you off?

2. Was the plant you worked for until it was sent overseas been bought by Mexicans or is it still owned by the same people you used to work for?

3. Has a Mexican ever cut your pension or health benefits? Outsourced your job to India?

4. How much does Latin America contribute to global warming and its results - such as bigger hurricanes and more tornados - compared with the United States?

5. Was Enron run by Mexicans?

6. Are Mexicans responsible for NSA's spying you?

7. Do you think Mexicans or the pharmaceutical corporations are more responsible for high drug costs?

8. How much of the corruption in Washington has been instigated by the Mexicans?

9. Did the Mexicans' make us invade Iraq?

10. Are the Mexicans responsible for George bush being so dumb?

Chances are most your answers will be in the negative which is a clue to stop spending so much time worrying about immigration and turn your attention to something else.

SOURCE: Undernews

THE DAY OUR BRAINS STOOD STILL

2009-04-07T19:05:00.004-04:00

I've just finished watching The Day the Earth Stood Still, which I thought a fine film as far as modern science fiction goes. I didn't know what to expect but I can see now the source of some people's objections to it. It never fails to amaze me how people can smear something so passive aggressively. For example, there are fine actors that will always be called poor actors by some simply because they have spoken up about certain political, social, economic, and even environmental realities. Critics of film seem, by and large, to value their own reputations enough to avoid this trapping, as fine acting will always be discernible. Some, like Sean Penn and George Clooney, enjoyed very high approval among the movie going public until they tried to use their influence to affect positive, cross-cultural change. I know people, personally, that cannot any longer admit that Penn, for instance, is any good at all and these same people felt very differently before the man took any kind of a political stance.

Did his social awareness somehow, mysteriously diminish his acting ability or is it a simple matter of pettiness, like the look I am bound to draw from someone if they hear any middle eastern music emanating from my home, as if only the enemy would acknowledge that another with whom we have differences is capable of anything good?

It's called demonization and it was a rhetorical question, by the way.

I find critiques of The Day the Earth Stood Still to be largely devoid of any merit. While this film is by no means some bastion of fine acting, it is up to par with the better Hollywood blockbusters and would have enjoyed much higher appreciation if Bruce Willis had been in it and the day had been saved, instead, by some oil engineers or space cowboys or some other facsimile of the rugged American male. I am sure that the earth being saved by compassion itself doesn't sit well with real men.

I do really wish folks would grow up already.

Sniveling Ass Kissers

2009-04-05T15:52:00.003-04:00

If John Smith says, "Vote for me for I am for the people," and I don't believe him, that does not mean I am going to vote for Jack Jones for saying, "He only pretends to be for the people. I am for big companies and preserving their right to trickle down or not to trickle down but I am honest so vote for me!"

If America's mandate explicitly becomes, "Do what you want big business and I will be happy groveling for scraps like a good little peasant," then trust me - it will get worse. The mandate, at least, must be maintained.

The man who says he built an empire and has not a callous on his hands is not only lying but probably a leech of the highest order. Don't beg for a trickle of what your own blood and sweat produced! Such sniveling ass kissers are disgusting and make life harder on all the rest.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ~ Upton Sinclair

Fascism Defined

2009-04-05T15:17:00.002-04:00

"Fascism has always been about ensuring the rights of capital. The police and army are necessary to protect corporations, human services aren't. Thus, the Right-in all its forms, regardless of what it calls itself - wants less government in areas that serve human beings, but just as much or more in areas that protect capital and the pursuit of private profit."

Defining Our Terms
by Richard Curtis
Toward Freedom magazine, February 1998

The word democracy is used a lot these days. We're told that the Cuban system isn't democratic, and that Fidel Castro is a dictator. We're also told that the Right-wing business interests in Miami and elsewhere bent on destroying the Cuban Revolution are democrats. Does this make any sense?

To find out, let's look at two other popular labels - Right and Left. During the French Revolution, the Right referred to those in the original revolutionary assembly who physically sat on the right side of the hall. The ones with money and historic influence, they were suspicious of including the masses in decision making.

Those on the Right felt that people with money and property should make the decisions. Like the "Founding Fathers" of the US, they were concerned that a government representing the unpropertied could challenge their freedom of action. On the other side of the hall were those who. thought the franchise should be extended to all, regardless of property holdings. Since then, we've come to use the terms Left and Right to define, positions on government and its relationship to property-more properly capital.

The Right claims to be concerned about the rights of individuals (they just don't mention that they only care about individuals with wealth). As representatives of capital, they have always been suspicious of democracy. In fact, they believe that democratic government represents a threat to freedom -that is, the freedom to pursue individual economic interests. Of course, when the wealthy get together and vote on policy, that is a kind of democracy-democracy of the few, or oligarchy.

Removing power from its traditional roots in the aristocracy meant granting some to small property holders, and over time to those with no property. But this extension of the franchise (and democracy) threatened the freedom of capital. And so, these days we hear that the problem is big government. As it's always done, the Right says that the government is a threat, that it ruins things and controls us.

In fact, government is the compromise the ruling class makes with the working class. The ruling class retains power, but gives up some freedom, like the freedom to pollute, use child labor, or make dangerous products. Mainly, however, the Right claims that the market will sort all this out, and that government just gets in the way. Some working people and small farmers have been persuaded to agree.

The Right, which in modern history is known as fascism, advocates a system in which those with wealth are free to do as they please and the functions of government are limited to policing and war. Some self-described conservatives reject the term fascism, claiming that the fascists were actually statists who believed in retaining the power of government. But that just suggests an ignorance of history.

Fascism has always been about ensuring the rights of capital. The police and army are necessary to protect corporations, human services aren't. Thus, the Right-in all its forms, regardless of what it calls itself - wants less government in areas that serve human beings, but just as much or more in areas that protect capital and the pursuit of private profit.

Ironically, the political philosophy of the Right, fascism, has been so discredited by history that contemporary so-called conservatives refuse to identify their politics with its roots in European history. Even 70 years ago, the leading German exponent of conservatism, Adolf Hitler, called his fascist party the National Socialist German Workers Party. It was national in the sense that the Nazis were ultimately protecting large German corporations from those of other nations. But the word socialist was used only because Hitler felt he could appeal to working people by appropriating the language of the Left.

Today, capitalists call themselves democrats. As a result, Right-wing groups in Miami can advocate the overthrow of a government in Cuba while lining up for money to pursue what they call ''democracy building." But capitalists claiming to be democrats rings as true as fascists claiming to be socialists. Big capitalists are and always have been fascists-Rightists who believe the rich should be free to do as they please. Socialists are and always have been democrats-Leftists who believe every citizen should have power.

As Jim Hightower puts it, there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos!

SOURCE: Third World Traveler

Ward's Cheap Solar Power System

2009-04-05T12:50:00.002-04:00

We've been asked the same question over and over, ever since Otherpower.com was created: 'How cheaply can I build a solar power system?' The answer, of course, is 'it depends on what you want to run!' If you want to run a normal house in town off of solar, you're in for a investment of tens of thousands of dollars, thanks to a house that's almost certainly full of power-wasting, inefficient lights and appliances. But if you can start from scratch...that's a different story! The awesome little 7-sided log cabin Ward bought has never had an electrical system...in fact it was built back the 1960s using NO POWER TOOLS of any kind. The builder didn't believe in power tools...It's located only a mile from Otherpower.com headquarters.

Total cost of Ward's cabin solar power system : Less than 700 Bucks!

Ward thought carefully about what electrical appliances he needs to run at his new home. It's important to do this before planning and purchasing your power system! He's a bachelor, but still wanted enough 'stuff' for a comfortable lifestyle. Here's what he came up with for essential items:

Lighting--all lights to be high-efficiency. 120 VAC compact fluorescent (CF) lighting was chosen because bulb cost is so cheap compared to 12VDC CFs ($50/ea for 12VDC, $9/ea for 120VAC)

120 VAC CF room light, 9 watt
120 VAC CF light over kitchen counter area, 6 watt
12 VDC halogen light in bedroom, 20 watt (this way he can turn off the inverter before bed to save power, and still have light to get back to the bedroom). Plus, halogen lights are better for reading
120 VAC Halogen outdoor spotlight, 50 watt....there's bears, cougars, and rogue moose up here all the time. Better to see them first when you have to visit the outhouse at 3 AM!

TV/VCR--We have about zero TV reception up here...so it's hard to waste much power on television. So Ward bought a little 13 inch color TV, rated 54 watts (though in normal use it draws only about 25 watts), and brought up his VCR from town. Winter nights up here are long and dark, and movies can save you from serious depression!
Boom Box--Get the CHEAPEST one available. Why? Because Fancy stereo/TV equipment that lets you turn it on and off with the remote will draw power even when it's turned off!!! The inexpensive model he bought has a hard-wired on/off switch, and wastes no power (called a 'phantom load') when off.
Future Needs--always remember to factor these in when designing a system! Eventually he might put in pressurized water (with a 12VDC pressure pump), more lights, etc.
Non-Electric Appliances--these can save you lots of money on solar panels and batteries. The 'downtown' versions suck up electricity fast, but these simple alternatives are far more efficient.

Refrigerator--Propane, RV size. Less than $200 used from an RV dealer, uses very little propane so it can be run off of 40 lb. portable tanks. Ward's road is too rough for propane trucks.
Heating--Woodstove, from Harbor Freight.
Cooking--Propane cooktop, used from an RV dealer.
Water Heating--A big pot of water on the woodstove!
Plumbing--Maybe a pressurized water system in the future, but just a sink with an outside drain and 5-gallon buckets for now.
Outhouse--The outhouse works just fine, is not subject to mechanical breakdown, and uses no electricity. TIP: During winter when it's 20 below zero outside, keep the toilet seat in your house near the stove, and bring it with you when you have to visit the outhouse!

South Side of Cabin Showing Solar Panel. Shading is from trees...Ward's planning on some chainsaw work, both for solar exposure and wildfire protection! That's DanF's dogs, Kodiak and Tarmac, in the picture.

System Components

Battery Bank--4 golf cart batteries. 6 VDC, 220 amp/hours, only $45.99 each from Sam's Club. Wired in series and parallel, these give 440 amp/hours of storage. That's more than enough for the minimal loads in the cabin, especially when you consider that the owner is away from home at work during the day, giving the system time to charge back up.
Solar Panel--BP 75 watt, from an internet distributor. $310 new, plus $20 for shipping. Wired to contoller and battery bank with #10 Romex.
Solar Panel Mount--Home built from 1 inch aluminum angle, adjustable for summer and winter positions. About $20 total for aluminum stock, nuts, and bolts.
Charge Controller--An industrial model from Jade Mountain, rated for 16 amps (to provide room for adding more solar panels later), and cost only $62. Ward had to buy 2 fuse holders and 20 amp fuses, mount this controller on a home-made aluminum heat sink and build a cover himself....but for the price he'll be able to add 2 or 3 more solar panels without a new controller.
Inverter--A 350-watt Wagan from Harbor Freight, only $40. Includes fuse on main power cable and overload shutdown. DanB has used one of these for a year, heaping abuse and neglect on it, and it's performed like a champ. The only drawback of this model is that the fan is on all the time, and produces a little noise. Ward plans to to turn the inverter off at night, and during the day while he's at work.
Metering--Cheap digital multimeter, only $10. Not real accurate, but enough to determine general battery state of charge. Plus, the controller has an LED to indicate full charged condition.

TOTAL SYSTEM COST: Less than 700 bucks!

Battery Bank -- 4 Golf Cart Batteries

Power Panel with Inverter and Charge Controller

BP 75 Watt Panel

It would be impossible to power a home down in town with a system of this size...but this design goes to show that if you are conservative with your power use, realistic with your expectations, and thrifty with your equipment purchases, you can power up a home for under a grand. Just don't try to plug in that damn air conditioner!

SOURCE: Other Power

On why we are in such a mess...

2009-04-02T13:37:00.000-04:00

Budget Currently on Floor: Increase Defense Spending by 125%

2009-04-02T12:27:00.005-04:00

It is quite often I find myself in a political discussion wherein I state that I think that both major political parties are essentially corrupt but I find it extremely annoying when a democrat seizes on this to focus on my allusion to republican corruption, agreeing with me momentarily but jumping right back, usually within minutes, to using this as evidence that democrats are altruistic while their colleagues across the aisle are not. This is the bipolar nature of our minds it seems. Agreeing that both sides are corrupt as a premise for a later statement that one side is not is evidence of mental disorder if anything.

Now, I think I just might have you here. Today, I would like to talk about this from the opposite perspective. Today, I will rant against this dynamic as it is employed by the right.

While both sides of congress are known to try to sneak things through legislation without fully divulging themselves, today we find this disingenuous posture being taken by Senator McCain and others. While they tell the American people, in one media spot after another, that their budget is fiscally conservative and that this is the big difference between it and the other budget being considered (it is true that it reduces the deficit in comparison to the democratic effort by four tenths of a percent), another difference that is, by the numbers, much bigger is that the McCain offering suggests an increase in defense spending over the next five years by 125%!

Even if you think that is necessary, why is it glossed over? That is enormous! Why is this not cited as a big difference between the two budgets? Well, I have the answer for you: because republicans know that the mandate demonstrated by the American people is not in unison with their aims. Just as in the 2000 election and in the 2004 one (where one of the founders of Diebold - an executive with the biggest manufacturer of electronic voting machines promised to "deliver Ohio"), the will of the people is seen as something to be avoided by what passes for republicanism these days.

Do democrats have a habit of misleading people in pursuit of some goals? Yes. Is their power based on a mandate from the people without the necessity of calling in a conservative body like the 2000 Supreme Court to manufacture it? Yes.

I voted in 2008 for the first time in my life and I voted for Barrack Obama, knowing full well that up to a point, if not completely, he just might be as corrupt as all the others but I was not voting for him; I was voting for a mandate. Without a clear statement by Americans as far as what they stand for, we might as well have abandoned all hope.

The mandate matters, people. It is the thing that these bastards are answerable to. Even if it is answered to by most politicians merely as a posture or on the surface, it is still something they cannot stray too far from lest the discrepancy between word and deed become such a chasm as to be undeniable. This is what happened to the republicans in the last twenty or thirty years. Hooked on ideas of how to project populist adoration, they forgot that such things are most easily put forth by folks who actually do feel the pain of the people and not just studied how to appear to feel.

Obama won because he stood closely enough to the mandate of the American people that he was actually able to speak at enormous length without cue cards, off the top of his head, the very things we were all thinking and this reeked of legitimacy. We shall see I suppose.

Again, I say that the mandate matters for these very reasons and right now, as I type, the McCain crew is trying to shove through a budget whose biggest difference, by far, with the other one being considered is that it more than doubles our military budget. Why hide this fact?

They are appealing to their very constituency and this is where their whole house of cards might come down for good, which would be a sad blow to traditional conservative republican principles (not ones based on corporate greed and race but the original republicanism). This ought to be a good indicator of whether they are behind the people or the defense contractors and now, clearer than ever, is the fact that the agendas of the people and the defense and intelligence community differ markedly.

Still, I must ask why did this footnote pertaining to a vast increase in military expenditures not get reported by the media or the democrats? Why did I discover this as scrolling text at the bottom of my television screen while viewing C-Span?

How shit happens

2009-04-01T00:49:00.000-04:00

In the Beginning was the plan.
And then came the assumptions.
And the assumptions were without form.
And the plan was completely without substance.
And the darkness was upon the face of the workers. And they spoke among themselves saying: "It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh."

And the workers went unto their supervisors, and sayeth: "It is a pail of dung, and none can abide the odor Thereof"

And the supervisors went unto their managers and sayeth unto them, "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, Such that none can abide it."

And the managers went unto the directors and sayeth, "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none can abide its strength." And the directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another: "It contains that which aids plant growth, and is very strong."

And the directors went unto the vice presidents and sayeth to them, "It promotes growth, and is very powerful."

And the vice presidents went unto the president, and sayeth unto him, "This new plan will actively promote growth and efficiency of this company, and certain areas in particular."

And the president looked upon the plan, and saw that it was good.
And the plan became policy.
And this is how shit happens.

Ghost Dance

2009-03-31T02:10:00.000-04:00

The next time someone lashes out as you try to pry them out of their box, remember this article.

2009-03-28T13:20:00.003-04:00

Has anyone ever told you during a conversation: “Stop, that`s too much information?” Well University of Queensland psychologists have discovered just how much too much information actually is. Emeritus Professor Graeme Halford and his colleagues from UQ`s School of Psychology have discovered most humans cannot represent relations between more than four variables.

How much information is too much information?

February 15th, 2005

Their study, How Many Variables Can Humans Process?, pushed a group of 30 academics to their mental limits.

Participants were given incomplete descriptions of interactions between variables, with an accompanying set of bar graphs representing the interactions. They were then required to complete the descriptions so that they correctly described the graphs.

“At the level of the four-way interactions, participants made comments such as “Everything fell apart and I had to go back”,” Professor Halford said.

“Only chance levels of performance were obtained for five-way interactions.”

The results have implications for the design of high-stress work environments such as the coordination of fire-fighting operations.

“If the number of variables to be considered exceeds human processing capacity then the worker will drop his or her mental bundle and become unable to proceed,” Professor Halford said.

“More seriously, the worker may revert to a simplified version of the task that does not take all aspects into account and therefore may make the wrong decision.

“This type of problem is particularly acute in tasks that have to be performed under time pressure or where unusual combinations of circumstances are likely to arise.

“Modern high-technology industries produce many situations of this kind because of the number of variables that have to be taken into account in decision making.”

Professor Halford`s team included Dr Rosemary Baker and Dr Julie McCredden from UQ`s School of Psychology and Professor John D Bain from Griffith University.

Their results showed that as the complexity of the interaction increased, performance and confidence levels dropped significantly.

“While all levels of complexity are logically possible, the evidence suggests that they are not cognitively manageable,” Professor Halford said.

Professor Halford said complex ideas were conceptual structures built in the temporary working area of the mind called the working memory. His findings are the outcome of a decade of research, investigating tasks that push cognitive processing to the limits.

“Four way interactions require humans to represent relations between relations between relations between pairs of bars; which can be reframed mathematically as a four-dimensional task,” he said.

“We found that four dimensions are the most that humans can conceive of.

“Therefore, if the world was five-dimensional, rather than three, we would not be able to understand it.”

Source: The University of Queensland

Resistance is Fertile

2009-03-27T11:31:00.003-04:00

If we owe over a dollar to the Federal Reserve (a private entity with regulatory powers over our economy) every time value is assigned to a rectangular piece of paper and then loaned to us, which they are not even in charge of printing (we pay for that), then overcoming our debt becomes physically impossible.

Zeitgeist: Addendum

Eye on Palin: Her Anti-Wolf, Anti-Wildlife Agenda

2009-03-26T23:19:00.005-04:00

When you get rid of the national treasures, there becomes less political leverage to stop the extraction industries from moving in and DONATING TO CAMPAIGN FUNDS. The biggest interest lobbying against wolves in Alaska has been Exxon.

Palin Administration Calls in the Helicopters for Sweeping Wolf Massacre

Legality of program challenged as state personnel in helicopters aim to kill hundreds of wolves despite objections from the National Park Service

WASHINGTON − The Palin administration considerably escalated its aerial wolf killing spree this past weekend, with full details only becoming clear in the hours after the killing initiated. At least 58 wolves have been killed in the Upper Yukon/Tanana area of Alaska over the past 4 days by Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) staff, which indicates that their target of approximately 250 wolves will be easily met.

The key ingredient is the decision by the governor and her appointed Alaska Board of Game to use helicopters as part of the state's wolf killing program in this region. The Board of Game approved the use of agency helicopters and personnel at its most recent meeting, which ended March 9, 2009, but those new regulations are not yet in effect, making the current helicopter wolf killing program in the Upper Yukon/Tanana region illegal. It is on these grounds that the board now faces a law suit, filed today by Defenders of Wildlife calling for an immediate injunction on the aerial wolf killing occurring in this area.

“While the media obsesses over Governor Palin’s private family life, she is getting away with illegally slaughtering large numbers of wolves from the air,” commented Defenders Action Fund president, Rodger Schlickeisen. “The governor is even encouraging the killing of wolves that reside and den mostly on federal land, which belongs to all of us, not just Alaskans. There is no biological emergency in Alaska that warrants such measures.”

The ADF&G gave the National Park Service just a few hours notice before the killing began and as of Tuesday morning, at least 58 wolves were already known to have been killed, in addition to at least 27 that had already been killed by private hunters. According to the National Park Service’s March 15 briefing statement (attached), if ADF&G is successful in reaching its goal, “this would leave one-to-two wolves per 1,000 square kilometers in the Upper Yukon Wolf Control Area, approximating the lowest known wolf population densities in Alaska.” Upon learning of the state’s plans, the Service requested a no-wolf kill buffer zone around the preserve, but the state refused, putting at risk many of the members of seven wolf packs that reside mostly within the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, many of which are part of an ongoing wolf study conducted by the park, at federal taxpayer expense.

“The Palin administration has created the least scientific Board of Game in the state’s history and this board will stop at nothing to reach its arbitrary and overblown goals for moose and caribou populations. They don’t even play by their own rules!” continued Schlickeisen. “Removing such huge numbers of predators from a region will do untold damage to all the wildlife that depends on that habitat. Governor Palin is recklessly pursuing policies that could turn America’s last frontier into nothing more than a large game farm.”

During the recent spring Board of Game meeting, the board also approved a proposal to allow to the use of gas bombs to kill wolves and wolf pups in their dens. The consistently unanimous votes for unprecedented and increasingly extreme methods of killing wolves have caused many to question the make up of the board and the magnitude of their vendetta against wolves. Each of the seven members have been appointed or re-appointed by Governor Palin, who has consistently chosen her appointees from the hunting lobby, excluding all other interests from the board.

###

The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund (www.defendersactionfund.org) provides a powerful voice in Washington to Americans who value our conservation heritage. Through grassroots lobbying, issue advocacy and political campaigns, the Action Fund champions those laws and lawmakers that protect wildlife and wild places while working against those that do them harm.

Contact:
William Lutz (202) 772-0269
Jessica Brand (202) 772-0239

SOURCE: Eye on Palin

Real Reality

2009-03-25T16:20:00.004-04:00

Of course, this trailer is intended to sell DVD's, which is why the focus on guns and controversy. In fact, the film bears the same flaw. That old man you see with the long beard, the gentle soul, is the kind of person that first attracted me to the mesa. I am betting he squirms when he sees the film.

It is an indie classic already but while some of the folks that live there love seeing the film the way it is, for reasons varying from personal glory to keeping some people out altogether, I am quite sure that others, instead, writhe in response.

I call this film entertaining - and bad press.

OFF THE GRID: LIFE ON THE MESA TRAILER

A Message to 911 Researchers and Theorists

2009-03-24T23:29:00.002-04:00

You know, it seems that as a community, the 9/11 truth movement is far past proving its case beyond a reasonable doubt and has been for a long time. The issue now, it seems to me, are how to get past the institutional corruption in government and media. We may, honestly, be well past the point of being able to accomplish anything as far as bringing the perpetrators to justice but we can, I believe, subvert the media and the elites NOW in real time, at every turn, by exposing lies as they come out.

This is one of the reasons that I finally stopped with 9/11. It was becoming a ball and chain for me eating up my energy and time and preventing me from stopping these groups from what they are doing right now.

In fact the perpetrators may get theirs if we stop using an enslaving monetary system, get used to the idea of doing with less technology, store seeds and tools, and heed the info in films like those listed below. As long as we remain ignorant to the specifics of what is contained therein, little will change.

Money as Debt

Zeitgeist: Addendum

The following film, though some of its predictions politically, have passed the time of coming true, is still based on an important reality:

From Freedom to Fascism

There may be nothing else that really matters. Even environmental destruction has received an injection of steroids from the fact that EVERYONE is working overtime to produce enough goods to satisfy their debts, debts that are largely scams to feed the rich.

Why is all the money in the hands of those that manufacture not a damn thing? When those whose hands bleed and brows sweat have the least then tyranny reigns.

They're getting away with murder right now!

JOHN TRUDELL SPEAKS AT JUDI BARI MEMORIAL - 04/26/1997

2009-03-24T13:23:00.006-04:00

Friends,

A thousand or so activists met at Martin Luther King Jr. School in Berkeley CA on Saturday April 26 to commemorate Judi Bari's life and to rejuvenate ourselves. [S.I.S.I.S. note: Judi Bari was a long-time Earth First!er, union activist, feminist, and fiddler. She and Darryl Cherney filed a lawsuit against the F.B.I. for its involvement in a 1990 bombing of Judi's car that shattered Judi's pelvis. Judi recently died of cancer. The lawsuit against the F.B.I. continues.]

There were many wonderful moments, and it was, as Utah Phillips described it, "Nourishing, just nourishing."

It is my hope you will treat yourself to a quiet reading of the following transcription of John Trudell's speech and that it brings clear fuel to your own struggle.

Dan Scanlan

INTRO
Our next speaker burned an American flag on the steps of FBI Headquarters.

And 12 hours later a fire killed his wife, his three children and his wife's mother. The FBI declined to investigate. This man had 17 thousand pages in his FBI file. He's former national chairman of the American Indian Movement: John Trudell.

JOHN TRUDELL
I'm pleased to be here and I'm glad that you're here and I'll attempt to be as clear as I can while I'm up here.

It's about our D and A. Descendants and ancestors. We are the descendants and we are the ancestors. D and A, our DNA, our blood, our flesh and our bone, is made up of the metals and the minerals and the liquids of the earth. We are the earth. We truly, literally and figuratively are the earth. Any relationship we will ever have in this world to real power -- the real power, not energy systems and other artificial means of authority -- but any relationship we will ever have to real power is our relationship to the earth.

So whatever Judi was doing and what Earth First! does, they were establishing connection with the basic reality, that we must take care of the earth. Our power comes from the earth.

And because we are made up of the earth -- our common ground, so to speak -- we are all the descendants of tribes. Each and every one of us is a descendant of a tribe. We have genetic memories. Inside of our genetic memories, that power connection exists to our ancestral past. We are all descendants of tribes.

But the tribes of the planet earth have encountered a technological religious mind set that removes all spiritual value and real value about life from the earth and puts it into theoretical heavens or hells. And it does it under a male image of a male dominator god.

In our tribal ancestry each and every one of our ancestors resisted that notion, that imposition. Tribes of Europe, tribes of Africa, tribes of here. Every tribe resisted it. It started in different time frames in different parts of the planet. It's almost like a disease. A virus, a virus, a disease that lives in the human. A disease of the spirit. It's almost like a diseased spirit affects the perception of reality of the carrier of the disease, the human being.

Power. It's very important that we understand who we are in relationship to power, because we have been tricked and lied to, almost in a way one would say, "brainwashed", into looking at authority as power. It is very important that we make this distinction because we need to have something to pass to the next generations.

Authority is not power. Authority is authority. All authority is usually based upon aggression or implied aggression or active aggression. Authority is authority. Power is something else. Power is what we come from. It is a part of the natural order of the universe -- power.

Authority is something that man creates. It's limitation is that it was created by man. Power has no limitations.

Our relationship to the earth, DNA. We are different shapes and forms of the earth. We are different trees. We are no more or no less than the tree. We are different stones. We are just different shapes of the life of the earth.

As human beings we understand in this technologic religious mind set that the authoritarian system, the industrial fascism, the industrial Reich that we live under, we understand that they can mine the other natural resources of the earth, and through refinement processes take old dinosaurs out of the ground and turn them into energy to run the machine world that we're very addicted to and partly enslaved to.

We have to make the connection that we are just a different shape but our value is no more or no less than the rest of the natural resources of the earth, the rest of the DNA of the earth. So it's very possible that we are being mined in the same way that the dinosaurs are, out of the ground. Human being, human physical, being spirit. Human physical, being spirit. Human physical, being spirit.

And we live under an authoritarian system, an industrial technologic mind set that has discovered and developed a way to mine, to take the being part of human, the spirit part of human and convert it into energy and then use that energy to power their system, to run their system. They are literally eating our spirits.

Literally eating our spirits.

Our spirit is eaten when we do not understand the distinction, the difference between authority and power. If they tell us money resembles power, then whoever has the most money has the most power.

But that is a lie.

Whoever has the most money has the ability to get authority. But that is not power. But if we believe that, if we believe that money is power, or that it can take us to power, then we will always understand that power is something removed from us and is not a natural part of us.

It is just so subtle, and so blatant.

If we believe that political systems are power, they're manipulative. That's all they are: a political system is a way of mining the spirit, in just the same way as the definition of authority: mining our spirit.

This is where someone like Judi [Bari] becomes a threat, because she understands she has power, and she understands the reality of responsibility that goes with power. She understands that. We can't communicate with her now the way that we used to, but we can communicate with her. That's life. That's spirit.

In the ways of the tribes and in our common ancestry, we understood the play with our ancestors. We understood the ones before us, the ones that we were the descendants of. This was our power connection to knowledge. This was our power connection to the past and our power connection to the future. So as we enter into this, whatever has to come down in the future -- I don't really have time to go into too far! --

But the antibiotic to dealing with these people, these vampires -- and it t is, it is vampires, cannibalization -- the antibiotic to this disease is our intelligence. We were given intelligence by the creator. We have intelligence. That is the antibiotic.That is the cure. There is no existing cure to the problem other than the one we will create by using our intelligence as intelligently and as clearly as we possibly can.

To use our intelligence as intelligently as we possibly can.

To have clarity. Because this beast that feeds and eats our spirit does it by the confusions that are in our minds.

But we understand the pollution of the air, of the water, we understand the pollution of the environment has come from this plundering and mining of the planet in an irresponsible manner. But you think about every fear, every doubt, every insecurity, every way that we ever beat ourselves up inside of our own heads -- that is the pollution left over from the mining of our spirit.

Another word I hear used a lot -- I don't "believe" anything. I tried to believe but there was a "lie" in the middle: B, E, LIE, V, E. Again, use our intelligence very intelligently. There are certain words that we should use very, very, very carefully and I think that's one of those words, because either we know or we don't know.

We should think -- anything in between us knowing and not knowing -- we should think.

Thank you.

- John Trudell at Judi Bari memorial and fund raiser at Martin Luther King Jr. School in Berkeley CA, April 26, 1997

SOURCE: Native Web

"What we have to understand is that in order for Europeans to do what they have done to virtually all non-Europeans, all non-Westerners on the planet, they had to colonize themselves. These colonizers are colonized.

They too are indigenous people. Not here. But somewhere they are indigenous people, with indigenous traditions and understandings of the land, and all the things we counterpoise to the predator reality that engulfs us now. They need to get back in touch with that, you see. They must recover that which has been taken from them in the process of colonization, taken in the same fashion that things are being taken from us, now."

~ Ward Churchill in an Interview with Derrick Jenson

Psychological Operations Quotes

2009-03-23T17:46:00.007-04:00

A hearty thank you to Psywarrior for maintaining this website over the years. Below I provide only snips from his more complete list here:

"Credibility and truth do not necessarily march in step in psychological warfare. What is said, written, printed or broadcasted in the field must be credible within the terms in which it is projected; it need not necessarily be the truth in every instance. In fact the truth can in certain circumstances defeat credibility." ~ Psychological Warfare, by Charles Roetter, B.T. Batsford, Ltd. London, 1974

"If your opponent is of choleric temper, try to irritate him. If he is arrogant try to encourage his egotism. (If the enemy troops are well prepared after reorganization, try to wear them down. If they are united, try to sow dissension among them." ~ General Tao Hanzhang, translated by Yuan Shibing, Sun Tzu's The Art Of War

"All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself." ~ Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), Vol. I

"...there was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, 'and this will always be the man in the street.' Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology...Hatred and contempt must be directed at particular individuals." ~ H. Trevor-Roper (ed), The Goebbels Diaries, p. XX, cited in Regan, Geoffrey. 1987. Great Military Disasters. New York: M. Evans and Company.

"The real target in war is the mind of the enemy command, not the bodies of his troops. If we operate against his troops it is fundamentally for the effect that action will produce on the mind and will of the commander; indeed, the trend of warfare and the development of new weapons – aircraft and tanks – promise to give us increased and more direct opportunities of striking at this psychological target." ~ Captain Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart, 1944

"The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to have its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards." ~ Sir William Francis Butler

"If you give a man the correct information for seven years, he may believe the incorrect information on the first day of the eighth year when it is necessary, from your point of view, that he should do so. Your first job is to build the credibility and the authenticity of your propaganda, and persuade the enemy to trust you although you are his enemy." ~ A Psychological Warfare Casebook Operations Research Office Johns Hopkins University Baltimore (1958)

"In effect, the human being should be considered the priority in a political war. And conceived as the military target ... the human being has his most critical point in his mind. Once the mind has been reached, the 'political animal' has been defeated without necessarily receiving bullets." ~ US Central Intelligence Agency training manual

"Truth is the best PSYOP." ~ Colonel Fred Walker, USSOCOM