This Thing Called Courage

From Boston Metro

2011-05-04T13:53:00.000-04:00

we love this!

The secret life of Boston bees

BOSTON

01 May 2011 07:08

NICOLAUS CZARNECKI/METRO

Urban beekeeper Mike Graney tends to his bees in Mattapan.

Beekeeping conjures up images of rolling fields on farms in Western Massachusetts, not concrete sidewalks in Mattapan.

But according to some city dwellers and state agricultural officials, there’s a population of beekeepers who raise bees, tend to hives and cultivate honey between the Hub’s brick buildings and city streets.

Mike Graney is one of those urban beekeepers.

He considers his hobby an obsession and maintains 12 hives along the Neponset River in Mattapan.

“It’s quite the urban lot. It’s tucked in between a gas station and a liquor store. It’s pretty rough and tumble, but a great spot for cultivating bees,” said Graney, a Cambridge chef.

Graney leases the spot from a gardening organization that owns the land, and last year he produced more than 100 pounds of honey. He sells the honey at local grocery stores and claims demand is high because of the belief that pollen in the honey helps to inoculate people from allergens.

“You are giving your body a small dose of what you are allergic to, and the next time you are exposed you don’t have the same reaction,” Graney said.

Graney’s hives are home to more than 50,000 bees, and he said there’s never been a complaint from a neighbor or a rogue sting reported from a passing pedestrian.

“Bees don’t go out of their way to sting people. The aggressive bee thing is hyped up,” said Graney, who himself has sustained hundreds of bee stings over the past few years.

Currently, the city lacks beekeeping regulations or permitting requirements. The state has an apiary department, but inspectors don’t enforce mandates in Boston, according to the Mass. Department of Agricultural Resources.

Up on the roof

There’s a new residence for 90,000 bees in Boston — the Seaport Hotel.

The hotel has recently made its roof home to two hives in order to produce honey for specialty dishes in its two restaurants.

Love is the Answer, Said the Broccoli

2011-04-23T08:16:00.004-04:00

OKAY SO ABOUT A MONTH AGO, actually longer than a month ago, I was transplanting itty-bitty broccoli seedlings from very small peat pots into bigger ones. All was going well-- and then it happened! Snap! One of the broccoli snapped as I was carefully lifting it from its pot. Not so good! Instant death sentence, as a plant cannot live once it's been seperated from its root system.

Or can it?

Alas, this has occasionally happened in the past, and ordinarily I'd just toss the plant away with a sigh. But taking a cue from my friend Dan Shea, who chants to injured plants, I transplanted the wee thing anyway, even though it had no root system, and then began bathing the plant in love. I sang to it, sent it loving energy (not hard to do-- I love plants anyway, and consider them fellow beings) and then to top it all off, I colored a big red heart on its peat pot.

The plant has not only survived in the weeks since then, it has thrived. 'There is no problem to which love is not the answer...' Happy Earth Day everyone, and if you live in the Boston area, please join us next Saturday as a contingent from the Malden Drum Circle helps clean up the Malden River (and eneterains fellow cleaners with drumming!) from 11 am to 3 pm. Meeting at 195 Canal Street, Malden, MA.

Right Whales off Provincetown

2011-04-16T07:51:00.001-04:00

PROVINCETOWN (CBS) – Dozens of endangered whales are taking up residence in Cape Cod Bay.

On Thursday, environmental officials spotted close to 30 right whales, just 500 yards off the coast of Provincetown.

Officials are planning an aerial survey in the next few days to get a more accurate number.

Right whales typically show up every spring in the waters off of Cape Cod to feed.

The state has issued a warning for boaters in the area to use extreme caution.

It’s against the law for boaters to approach within 500 yards of a right whale.

The Right Whale is the most endangered in the North Atlantic.

Only about 450 remain in the entire ocean.

Right Whales

2011-04-16T07:50:00.000-04:00

Right Whales

Cleaning Up Lawrence

2011-04-10T08:06:00.001-04:00

LAWRENCE — Anthony Nuñez was tired of the words he kept seeing in headlines about his hometown: drugs, arson, insurance fraud; ailing, underfunded, understaffed, unemployed.

The 24-year-old mechanical engineer knew there was little he could do on his own to fix all that. But he figured he might be able to do something else to clean up the city’s image: Get its residents to clean up its streets.

On Saturday, Nuñez expects hundreds of volunteers to help him attack the layers of rubbish that line city parks; the empty bottles that clutter playgrounds; the rusted mufflers, leaking oil cans, and jagged scrap metal that clog empty lots. He is calling on residents to step outside and clean their sidewalks and blocks.

Spiffing up an entire city would be a challenging enough task, but this Don Quixote of detritus has set an even more daunting agenda. He hopes that the sight of people tidying up their neighborhoods will inspire others to join in. He wants the idea to go viral, interrupt the drumbeat of bad news, and improve the mood of a city.

“Maybe we can change Lawrence’s negative image,’’ Nuñez said. “Maybe we can change the mind-set of the people. I hope we can boost morale, maybe change the outlook people have.’’

Nuñez is the first to acknowledge that he may be jousting at wastebins, that his idea could fail to catch on. He has no experience organizing mass cleanups — he is just a citizen who was angry when he saw a reader’s comment on a local paper’s website that suggested “they should build a wall around Lawrence and let them all kill each other off.’’

Rather than respond to the post, he said, “I figured actions speak louder than words,’’ and Clean the Trash Out of Lawrence Day was born. A Facebook site Nuñez has dedicated to the event has attracted more than 400 people, many of whom have said they will heed his call to grab some work gloves and pitch in. Nuñez said public-works officials have promised to help by providing a garbage bin in a central park for the bags of trash collected by the volunteers.

Gilda Duran, the city’s neighborhood planner, said she welcomed Nuñez’s initiative.

“Though it is a small city, there’s a lot of ground to cover,’’ she said. “Sometimes it takes someone to take the lead.’’

The city does try to maintain its streets, but its workers do not get to all of the trash. On a recent Thursday, Nuñez pointed out garbage trucks rumbling through Lawrence neighborhoods. Workers tossed bags from barrels lining residential streets, but they did not pick up litter. “Not our job,’’ said a man in a neon-yellow vest as he worked on Poplar Street. A few other workers, who said they had been hired by the city, were plucking pieces of litter from a small city park. Sweeper trucks worked the larger roads, but missed objects like crushed bottles wedged against curbs.

Lawrence is not the only dirty city, but the pervasiveness of waste is striking. Nuñez stood on a particularly blighted section of Erving Avenue along the Spicket River, amid discarded rags, vodka nips, hand purifier bottles, Planters Peanuts wrappers, Tropicana orange juice jugs, and a plastic container oozing a mysterious, milky liquid. More distressing than this riot of flotsam and jetsam was the empty trash container in the middle of the block: In tossing their refuse, no one bothered to walk the few feet to the receptacle.

“It doesn’t mean there is no point in trying,’’ Nuñez said. “But it is definitely possible that this might not work and people are going to stay the same.’’

Some posters on the Facebook site expressed their doubts more colorfully.

“HAHAHA GOOD LUCK!!! YOUR BETTER OFF PACKING UP AND MOVING LOL.’’

“You pick it up, it’s clean for five minutes, and then they trash it so why bother??????’’

The last poster has a point. City cleanups tend to be negated pretty quickly by litterbugs. And Lawrence is dirty despite the efforts of other volunteer groups. One of them, Groundwork Lawrence, is holding a spring cleaning in collaboration with Comcast on April 30.

“The more the merrier,’’ Nuñez said when he was informed of this event. “Usually when these things happen it’s like 50 or 60 people in one place. What I hope is that if people go out in their neighborhoods, other people will say ‘Oh, my neighbor is cleaning, I will, too.’ ’’

Other Lawrence residents think the idea might catch on. Ana Avellan, 36, an administrative assistant who has lived in Lawrence since 1989, said she has taught her teenage sons and baseball teams she coaches to clean up after themselves. But she has watched with dismay the accumulation of “all the trash that’s in each crevice and corner.’’

When she received an invitation on Facebook to the cleanup, she said, “I thought, ‘this is a really good idea.’ ’’

“It’s been like that so long you feel that nothing is going to change,’’ she said. “But if we all pitch in, little by little it is going to change.’’

First Homosexual Stone Age Man Found?

2011-04-10T08:00:00.001-04:00

10:00PM BST 06 Apr 2011

The male body – said to date back to between 2900-2500BC – was discovered buried in a way normally reserved only for women of the Corded Ware culture in the Copper Age.

The skeleton was found in a Prague suburb in the Czech Republic with its head pointing eastwards and surrounded by domestic jugs, rituals only previously seen in female graves.

"From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake," said lead archaeologist Kamila Remisova Vesinova.

"Far more likely is that he was a man with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transsexual," she added.

According to Corded Ware culture which began in the late Stone Age and culminated in the Bronze Age, men were traditionally buried lying on their right side with their heads pointing towards the west, and women on their left sides with their heads pointing towards the east. Both sexes would be put into a crouching position.

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The men would be buried alongside weapons, hammers and flint knives as well as several portions of food and drink to accompany them to the other side.

Women would be buried with necklaces made from teeth, pets, and copper earrings, as well as jugs and an egg-shaped pot placed near the feet.

"What we see here doesn't add up to traditional Corded Ware cultural norms. The grave in Terronska Street in Prague 6 is interred on its left side with the head facing the West. An oval, egg-shaped container usually associated with female burials was also found at the feet of the skeleton. None of the objects that usually accompany male burials Â such as weapons, stone battle axes and flint knives Â were found in the grave.

"We believe this is one of the earliest cases of what could be described as a 'transsexual' or 'third gender grave' in the Czech Republic," archaeologist Katerina Semradova told a press conference on Tuesday.

She said that archeologists had uncovered an earlier case dating from the Mesolithic period where a female warrior was buried as a man.

She added that Siberian shamans, or latter-day witch doctors, were also buried in this way but with richer funeral accessories to appropriate to their elevated position in society.

"But this later discovery was neither of those, leading us to believe the man was probably homosexual or transsexual," Semeradova said.

The Corded Ware culture takes its name from the frequent use of decorative cord impressions found its pots and covered much of North, Central and Eastern Europe.

It is also known as a single-grave and battleaxe culture due to separate burials and the Mena s habit of being buried with stone axes.

How about that?

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Live from New York!

2011-04-07T10:23:00.002-04:00

April 6, 2011, 2:06 pm

Hawk Cam | Watching Bobby and Violet

By ANDY NEWMAN and EMILY S. RUEB

Christopher James/N.Y.U. Bobby, left, and Violet at home at N.Y.U.’s Bobst Library. Go to Live Video Stream »

Hawk Cam

Live coverage from a nest on a ledge at N.Y.U.’s Bobst Library.

Who knew the spectacle of a bird sitting on a nest could be so gripping?

Outside John Sexton’s 12th-floor president’s office at New York University, Violet the red-tailed hawk sits. She sits some more. She turns her head to the right, cleans a feather. She pecks at a twig. The breeze ruffles her head.

Violet gets up. She rolls a speckled egg ever so gently with her curved, pointed black beak. She settles back down slowly with a satisfied shimmy.

Once in a while, she tilts her head toward the camera.

Halfway across the country at a fish hatchery in Decorah, Iowa, a bald eagle has been tending her fuzzy chicks before a camera. Here in the middle of Manhattan, home to Pale Male and many fellow members of his species, there is now a hawk cam.

Its stars are Violet (named for one of the university’s colors) and her mate, Bobby (named for Bobst Library, atop which Dr. Sexton’s office sits). And in a few weeks, if all goes well, their hatchlings.

Dr. Sexton said that about nine months ago, before he caught sight of the birds, he started noticing twigs accumulating on the sandstone ledge outside his picture window. Soon they formed a nest — “A little bigger than a good-size Christmas wreath.”

Then he saw the hawks. They startled his guests. “One of them would come in to land, and it gave the effect of flying right at you at the window. I learned to warn people.”

For a while, the nest was home to only the two adults. “The question on my mind was, was this a pied-à-terre or their main house, so to speak,” Dr. Sexton said.

Emily S. Rueb/The New York Times Violet at work.

Colin Jerolmack, an assistant professor of environmental studies and sociology at N.Y.U., had noticed the hawks too. First he saw one, on the roof of another university building. Then the other flew up.

“We thought they were going to fight,” said Dr. Jerolmack, who gave the hawks their names. “Instead, they started mating.”

The hawks’ behavior has changed in recent days. They stopped leaving the nest unattended, Dr. Jerolmack said. On Saturday, shrieking, they chased off another hawk over Washington Square Park.

The reason, of course, was in the nest: three dull-white eggs, two flecked with dark patches. Dr. Sexton and others in his office say the eggs appeared around March 23 or 24.

Red-tailed hawk eggs incubate for about 30 days, yielding an expected hatch date of April 22, give or take.

On Tuesday, Dr. Sexton allowed City Room to mount a camera inside the curtains lining his window. It went live Wednesday; viewing is limited to daylight hours only, at least for now. (The hawk cam joins another city raptor feed, a peregrine falcon camera mounted outside 55 Water Street downtown.)

Life on the nest proceeds slowly. Female hawks do most of the egg-sitting; once or twice a day, Bobby, who is about a third smaller than Violet but otherwise hard to distinguish, will take over for a bit so she can stretch her legs and wings and grab herself a rat or a pigeon. For one agonizingly long moment around 6:15 p.m., the nest was left unguarded, the eggs naked to the world.

Other than that, said Bobby Horvath, a wildlife rehabilitator and hawk specialist, “you’ll see that this mother does not a heck of a lot of anything.”

This, though, is part of the charm: the chance to bear witness, in real time, to the ritual of patience that constitutes expectant motherhood on a window ledge high above Manhattan, through rain, cold and feather-disheveling winds.

“Until,” he continued, “that imminent moment when something starts happening underneath her.”

Stay tuned.

Support Humane and Environmental Groups? The Government Thinks Your a Terrorist Groups

2011-04-05T07:36:00.001-04:00

How I Almost Got Put on the Domestic Terrorist List for Handing Out Leaflets

By Will Potter, Conari Press
Posted on March 28, 2011, Printed on April 5, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150412/how_i_almost_got_put_on_the_domestic_terrorist_list_for_handing_out_leaflets

The following is an excerpt from The Next Eco Warriors: 22 Young Women and Men Who Are Saving The Planet, edited by Emily Hunter (Conari Press, 2011).

Eco-Terrorism 101

If you’ve got a blacklist, I want to be on it. —Billy Bragg

It started with a knock on the door. Someone had pounded three times. I turned the knob without looking through the peephole. It must be the landlord, I thought. He had gotten into the habit of arriving unannounced with prospective tenants to show our apartment, one of the freshly renovated studios in a 70-something-year-old building in Chicago. Before I had opened the door, though, I knew it was not Steve the Landlord. Our dogs were barking. Wildly. The dogs, Mindy and Peter, were snarling, and they never snarled, they never growled. I opened the door anyway.

The guys behind it—gruff-looking early-30s guys with manicured goatees, navy suits, ties with outdated geometric patterns, scuffed black shoes, broad shoulders, hardjaw lines, wholesome haircuts, and eyes looking for fights—were just naturally FBI agents. I didn’t even need to see the badges.

I just said I was in a hurry, that I had to get ready for work, and then I started to close the door. The good cop—well, I will call him the good cop, only because he looked less eager to kick my ass—put his left palm on the gray steel door, firmly enough to put pressure but not firmly enough to make any noise. I could either come downstairs, he said, or they could make a visit to my place of work, the Chicago Tribune.

Dogs barked. Panic. I was not afraid of them, but I was afraid of a spectacle in the newsroom. I relented and then closed the door to get ready.

“What’s going on?” my girlfriend, Kamber, asked from the futon, half asleep.

“It’s the FBI,” I said matter-of-factly, as if it had been Steve the Landlord.

A few minutes later, we crammed into the freight elevator, good cop, bad cop, and me. The elevator ground to a halt, the latticework steel door creaked open, and we walked through the dark hallway to the alley. It was a gloriously sunny Chicago summer day, but the sunlight could not overcome the condominium towers of steel and glass, could not swim through the cracks in the walls, and so I stepped into an alley shrouded in gray.

In college, I had learned about government operations like the counter intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), and the FBI’s history of harassing and intimidating political activists. False names, phone taps, bugs, and infiltration were used in attempts to disrupt groups like the Black Panthers, American Indian movement, and Students for a Democratic Society. I had learned from books, professors, and Law & Order episodes that if approached by the FBI, for any reason, you should never talk. Nothing good can come of it.

Both good cop and bad cop had heard that line before. The shorter, “nicer” cop started talking anyway.

“Look, we just want to talk to you,” he said. “We want you to help us out. We can make all this go away.”

---------------

Working long hours on the metro desk at the Chicago Tribune, covering shooting after shooting, murder after murder, had turned me into the type of reporter I never wanted to become. I felt detached, apathetic, and cynical. Just before the visit from the FBI, I wrote in my journal, “I’m tired of writing meaningless stories, I’m tired of going to sleep at night feeling like I left the world the same way I saw it in the morning.”

After only a few months at the Tribune, I had already built a spectacular wall of emotional detachment. It felt as if it were made of broken bottles and concrete chunks, sharp and gray. I thought I would never survive this beat, unless i found some way to keep a toehold on my humanity. So I decided to go leafleting.

When I worked at the Texas Observer, I wrote a story about an animal rights activist who was prohibited from protesting fur stores as a condition of her sentence for nonviolent civil disobedience. In my research of other draconian legal attacks on activists, I also learned about Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, an international campaign that had formed for the sole purpose of closing the notorious animal-testing lab Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Five undercover investigations had exposed animal welfare violations in the lab. I remember sitting in the Texas observer office, downloading a clip of undercover video filmed inside of Huntingdon. It showed animal experimenters with beagle puppies. The puppies’ veins were too small, and one of the experimenters could not insert a needle. He grew frustrated. He shook the dog and then suddenly punched the puppy in the face, hard enough to knock a grown man down. I will never forget that dog’s punctuating wails.

When if decided I wanted to do something positive to balance out the futility I felt at the Tribune, I decided to leaflet about Huntingdon. one month prior to FBI agents knocking on my door, Kamber and I met six local activists at the a-zone (or autonomous zone) in Chicago, which was part independent bookstore and part rabblerouser gathering place. it offered titles on topics including the Zapatistas, herbal medicine, and bicycle repair, and it smelled like punk rock.

From there, we caravaned to a suburb north of Chicago and the home of a corporate executive with Marsh, Inc., an insurance company for Huntingdon. Once out of the van, I hung leaflets on front doors, urging their Marsh neighbor to cease doing business with Huntingdon Life Sciences. The fliers made no suggestions of violence or property destruction, they made no threats. Instead, they spelled out what went on in the lab, how Marsh is connected, and why readers should ask their neighbor to use his power wisely.

After about twenty minutes of leafleting, police arrived. They radioed back and forth with their headquarters, trying to decide what to do. Then they handcuffed us.

------------------

After the FBI agents followed me out of the apartment building and into the alley, bad cop started needling. He asked if I knew the type of people involved in the campaign to close Huntingdon. He said they were “extremists.”

“I can tell you’re a good guy,” he said. “You have a lot going for you.” he said he could tell by the way I dressed, where I lived. “You don’t want this to mess up your life, kid. We need your help.”

He told me I could help them by providing more information about the other defendants and other animal rights groups. I had two days to decide. He gave me a scrap of paper with his phone number, written on it underneath his name, Chris.

“If we don’t hear from you by the first trial date,” he said, “I’ll put you on the domestic terrorist list.”

Wait, what? I felt as if I was staring blankly ahead, but my eyes must have shown fear.

“Now I have your attention, huh?” he said.

Put me on a terrorist list for leafleting?

“Look,” Chris said, “after 9/11, we have a lot more authority now to get things done and get down to business. We can make your life very difficult for you. You work at a newspaper? I can make it so you never work at a newspaper again.”

I replied that people who write letters, who leaflet, are not the same people who break the law. As I walked away, I crumpled his phone number and tossed it in a nearby dumpster, and just before I left the shadows and could reach the sunlight, Chris said, “have a good day at work at the metro desk.

Say hello to your editor, Susan Keaton. And tell Kamber we’ll come see her later.”

I wish I could say the visit did not affect me. But the history nerd in me could not help but think about all the times when the government had targeted political activists. I could not help but think about the deportation of Emma Goldman and the relentless spying and harassment of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I thought of the White Rose, a group of students my age who covertly printed and distributed anti-Nazi leaflets and, when caught, when interrogated and tortured, refused to show fear. They were beheaded. I had always hoped, as we all do after reading stories like this, that if I were ever put in a similar position, I would not flinch.

But I was afraid. Even though I never considered, even for a moment, becoming an informant, I could not stop thinking about how I was on a domestic terrorist list. I was convinced my journalism career was over. Even worse, I was convinced these FBI agents would somehow pass the word to my parents, who would be so disappointed in me, and to my little sister, who would stop looking up to me. These thoughts burrowed somewhere deep behind my eyes and, no matter how irrational they sound, I began to see them as truth.

I did not know it then, but this experience would mark the beginning of both a personal and political journey. After the initial fear subsided, I became obsessed with finding out why I would be targeted as a terrorist for nothing more than leafleting. The focus of my life would shift to investigating how animal rights and environmental activists had become, according to the FBI, the “number one domestic terrorism threat.”

--------------------

In hindsight the path from that FBI visit to my current life seems completely straight and natural. In reality, I spent years straddling fences, cautiously poised between “unbiased” reporting and advocacy journalism, between my career and the passions I have labeled side projects.

I made some small efforts to climb down. I left an “unbiased” newspaper job covering politics in Washington, DC, to use my writing for very biased purposes at the American Civil Liberties union, ghostwriting op-eds and speeches on the Patriot Act and government surveillance. At night, I continued researching and writing about activists being labeled terrorists. Through my work at the ACLU, and my freelance reporting, the true scope of the attacks on political activists came into focus.

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. Not one.

Meanwhile, the department of homeland Security does not list right wing terrorists on a list of national security threats, and the FBI omits right wing attacks in its annual terrorism reports. Those groups have been responsible for the Oklahoma city bombing, the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, violence against doctors, and admittedly creating weapons of mass destruction.

Through my reporting, I learned that environmental and animal rights activists are being labeled terrorists not because of violence, but because of their beliefs. Corporations and the politicians who represent them have waged a coordinated campaign to push their political agenda.

They have sent out press releases accusing mainstream organizations like the Sierra club, PETA, and Greenpeace of supporting “eco-terrorism.” the children’s movie Hoot has been dubbed “soft-core eco-terrorism for kids.” American Idol star Carrie Underwood was smeared as supporting terrorists when she encouraged her fans to support the Humane Society.

Examples like this would be funny if they had not worked their way into the top levels of government. In 2006, politicians proposed “eco-terrorism” legislation similar to bills that had been introduced at the state level for years. Because of my reporting, colleagues at the ACLU recommended that I testify at a hearing by the house Judiciary committee. Leading democrats on that committee agreed. Suddenly, the fears that I thought I had overcome began to crawl back into my head.

If I challenged this legislation, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, would I be smeared as an “animal rights terrorist”? Would FBI agents fulfill their promises from years ago and tell members of congress that I am on a domestic terrorist list? Would the representative from Wisconsin turn to me and ask, “Mr. Potter, are you now, or have you ever been, a vegetarian?”

The historian Howard Zinn always advised his students, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” the committee staff explicitly told me that democratic leadership supported this bill; I was to speak about my reporting but not challenge the legislation. Meanwhile, corporations and industry groups wanted nothing more than for their bill to proceed unchallenged. The train was moving, I thought, whether anyone liked it or not.

I decided I would not be a token gesture of dissent in their spectacle of democracy. Rather than propose modest tweaks to the bill, I testified that lawmakers must reject it in its entirety. I said that scarce terrorism resources should not be exploited to protect corporate interests. In my testimony, I compared the “eco-terrorist” legislation and scare mongering to one of the darkest periods of U.S. history, the communist witch hunts of the Red Scare.

As I awaited questions from members of congress and braced myself for the reaction from the democrats who invited me, I looked down at my notes and at my hands. It struck me that they were perfectly still. It was an empowering feeling, to have my words and my actions completely in line with my beliefs. Never in my life had I felt so calm.

Immediately after the hearing, I began calling activist groups and urged them to notify their members about the legislation. I began to write regularly for a Web site I created, GreenIsTheNewRed.com. And I began speaking at law schools, conferences, churches, potlucks, punk rock shows—anywhere I could to raise awareness about the law and help stop it.

Months later, the law was rushed through the House of Representatives with only six members of congress in the room. Most lawmakers were breaking ground for a new memorial honoring Martin Luther King Jr. when legislation was being passed that labeled King’s tactics—including nonviolent civil disobedience—as terrorism.

It was a major defeat, and for the corporations who supported the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, it was only the beginning. Since then, similar legislation has been introduced in many other states.

In Utah, a lawmaker said legislation is needed to target people like Tim Dechristopher, the University of Utah student who disrupted an oil and gas auction by bidding on parcels of land. In Tennessee, Rep. Frank Niceley argued before the general assembly for eco-terrorism legislation, saying, “Eco-terrorists are left-wing eco-greenies. It’s a different type of terrorism. They don’t have Osama Bin Laden leadin’ them.”

So how have these “eco-terrorism” laws been used? In California, four activists were arrested under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act for protesting animal experimentation outside of the experimenter’s home. Their indictment lists that they chanted, protested, made fliers, and wrote slogans on the ground in children’s sidewalk chalk. As I write this, they are awaiting trial.

For those who have been convicted as “terrorists,” the label follows them from the courtroom into prison. for example, Daniel McGowan was arrested in 2005 for his role in two arsons by the Earth Liberation Front. He targeted genetic engineering and a timber company that logged old-growth forests. In a court hearing, the lead prosecutor called the Earth Liberation Front a terrorist organization and compared the property destruction of McGowan and his codefendants to the violence of the Ku Klux Klan.

McGowan pleaded guilty to his charges and was sentenced to prison as a terrorist. He is now incarcerated in a secretive prison facility on U.S. soil, called a communications management unit (CMU). He was transferred there without notice and without opportunity for appeal.

The CMUs radically restrict prisoner communications with the outside world to levels that rival, or exceed, the most restrictive facilities in the country, including the Supermax ADX-Florence. Inmates and guards at the CMUs call them “Little Guantanamo.” they have also been described as prisons for “second-tier” terrorists.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, these inmates “do not rise to the same degree of potential risk to national security” as other terrorism inmates. Most prisoners are Muslim, and the secretive prisons have also housed Andrew Stepanian, an animal rights activist convicted of “animal enterprise terrorism” charges.

Through interviews with attorneys, family members, and a current prisoner, it is clear that these units have been created not for violent and dangerous “terrorists,” but for political cases the government would like to keep secret.

-------------------

My experiences with the FBI pales in comparison to what many activists have endured, both during this “Green Scare” and in other eras of government repression. I have not been threatened with prison time, terrorism enhancement penalties, or anything like that. However, my experience has prompted the stark realization that the overly broad use of the word terrorism affects many more people than those who set foot in a courtroom.

Few activists will be visited by the FBI, even fewer will be arrested. The real purpose of all this—the FBI visits, the public relations campaigns, the legislation—is to instill fear and make everyday people afraid of speaking up for their beliefs. The scare-mongering has had what attorneys call a chilling effect: it has made everyday people feel as if they must choose between their activism and being labeled a terrorist, and that is not a choice anyone should have to make.

It can be unsettling and frightening to learn how far the government has gone to attack political activists, and sometimes I wonder if spreading this information simply makes more people afraid. But time and again, in dozens of venues, from the New York City Bar Association to anarchist bookstores, I have seen an incredible thing happen when people learn about these issues and then turn to their neighbors. Their conversations are never about how they are afraid; they are about how they are angry and want to take action.

The best way to handle the fear these scare tactics create, I learned, is to confront it head on. “Never turn your back on fear,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote. “It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.”

--------------------

The leafleting case in Chicago was eventually dismissed, and we decided to move back to Texas. Kamber and I packed our few belongings and prepared for the journey home. I dreaded moving day. Not because of any attachment to the city, but because I did not want to walk downstairs, through the marble lobby with its Corinthian columns and Victorian couches, and enter Steve the Landlord’s office to turn in our keys. He knew, I thought. He must.

The building was old, but secure. The FBI agents did not kick down any doors when they visited our apartment. They flashed badges and were escorted inside. They probably told Steve that Kamber and I were suspected terrorists, and that this was a national security matter that needed urgent attention. Perhaps they showed him my photo, film noir style. Would he even buzz me into his office? I wondered. Would he ask me to slide the keys under the door, to keep me at a safe distance? Would he refuse to return my security deposit, because there was a “no terrorist” clause in the fine print of the lease?

I opened his door and walked up to his desk as he spoke with a couple of prospective tenants. I tried to silently slip the keys across the desk, but they jangled like jailer’s keys, and the sound of metal on wood echoed up into the vaulted ceiling. I turned, exhaled, and walked away. He called after me when I was almost to the doorway. Here it comes, I thought. Steve the Landlord is going to say how disappointed he is in both of us. How he is going to take custody of the dogs because they should not live with such terrorist scum.

“Hey, will,” he said. I turned to face him. “Give ’em hell.”

Support AlterNet by purchasing your copy of The Next Eco Warriors: 22 Young Women and Men Who Are Saving The Planet through our partner, Powell's, an independent bookstore.

Will Potter is an award-winning independent journalist based in Washington, DC. He has just released his first book, Green Is The New Red, from City Lights Books.

© 2011 Conari Press All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150412/

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Finding Indian Rock

2011-04-04T12:13:00.001-04:00

"The address," my dear friend Vonn said, "is 33 Indian Rock Road." He was speaking of a Pilates and Yoga studio in the town where he lives (with his partner Barry), in the hopes that when the current yoga class Vonn and I are taking (in Medford, close to where I live) runs its course, we could take yoga closer to where he lives. But the name of that street abducted the topic of conversation at hand.
"Indian Rock Road?" I asked. "Why do they call Route 111, home of the strip mall, Indian Rock Road? In tribute? In mockery? Is it an ironic gesture, which is what most architecture and literature has been reduced to nowadays?"
"No," said Vonn in his matter of fact way. "That's the original name of the street. Before it was designated New Hampshire Route 111." Vonn comes from western Maryland in Appalachia. He ran away from home to join, not the circus, but the Navy, which he left 16 years ago. I met him shortly after he came to Boston. He's a very unusual, and a very wonderful, person.
"Oh. So, why Indian Rock Road?" There is Native American blood in the family way back, and I've always been fascinated by things Native American, especially now when I've been exposed to different elements of it with the drumming I do throughout New England.
"I guess somewhere back there in the hills there's a rock with Indian hieroglyphics painted on it," he answered.
"There is?"
"Yes." Now, who could ever resist something like this? Sounding for all the world like like the opening of a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys mystery. Further inquiries revealed that Vonn, who is pretty much a homebody when he isn't visiting Clothing Optional Resorts half a world away, had never sought said Indian Rock and couldn't say exactly where it was, except for a rather broad sweep of his hand as we rode by the hills sloping up precipitously across from Cobetts Pond.

Vonn and I occasionally work out together, and also I go to see him most every Saturday, for a long hike on the wonderfully bucolic Windham Bike Trail, which runs through unspoiled conservation area; I also do my laundry up there while I'm at it. This was a recent Saturday, when this conversation took place, apres hike, and me still itchy and restless (I quit smoking two months ago and must keep busy constantly, to the annoyance of my intimates).
"While I'm out," I said, heading out the door in search of dog food for Fionn (Woof It Down dog food store, voted the Best in New Hampshire, is right down the street from Vonn) "see if you can find out where Indian Rock is from the web," I asked. "And then call me." Thirty minutes later Vonn reported that there was a reference to a map, and the legend for the map said that Indian Rock was located in 'Grid 17' on the map-- but the map itself was located at the Windham Public Library. So after a brief but unfruitful reconnaissance of the lower end of Route 111 (aka Indian Rock Road) to the library we did go. Despite it being a modern, newly constructed building, we found the Nesmith Library (as its called) nevertheless replete with that wonderful library smell of, 'Books, books, books!' as Scarlett O'Hara said, when she was complaining about the well-read Wilkes family. There was that sibilant hush too, and a cadre of smiling women of a certain age fussing and clucking behind the front desk, or floating solo like bespectacled owls through the stacks and along the thickly-carpeted floors-- because, after all, this was suburbia-- no old creaky wooden floors here, thank you.

Flinging Manure

2011-03-30T07:37:00.002-04:00

OKAY SO WE STILL LIKE Fr. Fritsch's book more than the article above :) and if you haven't read it yet, go here for a free copy given to the world with love:
http://www.earthhealing.info/garden.htm

In the meantime the cold weather continues here; nights have routinely been slipping down into the mid-twenties, and days struggle to reach 45F, even with the strong sun now-- which is pretty phenomenal, considering that the sun is as strong now as it is in early September.

Garden As If Your Life Depends Upon It, Because It Does

2011-03-30T07:17:00.001-04:00

(from this morning's AlterNet)

By Ellen LaConte, AlterNet
Posted on March 29, 2011, Printed on March 30, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150428/

Spring has sprung -- at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it -- and the grass has 'riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food -- all of which are also becoming more expensive -- or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can't afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it's 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops 20 percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!

In some cases this round of price hikes on everything from cereal and steak to fresh veggies and bread -- and even the flour that can usually be bought cheaply to make it -- will be temporary. But over the long term the systems that have provided most Americans with a diversity, quantity and quality of foods envied by the rest of the world are not going to be as reliable as they were.

What's for Supper Down the Road?

As they move through the next few decades Americans can expect:

The price of conventionally produced food to rise and not come down again;
Prices to rollercoaster so that budgeting is unpredictable;
Some foods to become very expensive compared to what we're used to;
And other foods, beginning with some of the multiple versions of the same thing made by the same company to garner a bigger market share and more shelf space, to gradually become unavailable.

Tremors in food supply chains and pricing will make gardening look like a lot more than a hobby, a seasonal workout, a practical way to fill your pantry with your summer favorites, or a physically, spiritually and mentally healing activity, or all four. Gardening and small-scale and collective farming, especially of staple crops and the ones that could stave off malnutrition, could become as important as bringing home the bacon, both the piggy and the dollar kind. Why?

Why Is Gardening So Important Now?

There are at least five reasons why more of us should take up spade, rake and hoe, make compost and raise good soil and garden beds with a vengeance, starting this spring and with an eye toward forever.

1) Peak oil. Most petroleum experts agree that we shot past peak oil in the U.S. around 1971. Lest you've missed the raging, that's the point at which more than half the readily, affordably retrievable oil in reserves has been used up, what remains is more expensive to retrieve, and the dregs are irretrievable. We've shot or are about to shoot past peak worldwide, estimates of when ranging from 2007 to 2013, with many oil company execs agreeing to at least the latter. There are no new cheap-easy oil fields coming on line. Any new fields you hear about or new methods, like tar sands drilling are expensive, water guzzling, dangerous, environmentally disastrous and unlikely to produce more than a few years worth of oil, and that a decade or more down the line. That means abundant, cheap oil is about to be history. What difference does that make?

For one thing, there is no replacement for oil that can do all that oil has done as cheaply and universally as oil has done it. I offer an exercise in Life Rules, "The ABC's of Peak Oil" which helps readers imaginatively subtract from their lives everything that depends in one way or another on cheap easy oil. It doesn't leave much. (See Beth Terry's Web site, for example, for what subtracting plastics may entail.)

The global economy that presently supplies us with our food, runs on cheap oil and lots of it. It runs slower and less predictably on expensive oil that's hard to get because it's located in hard-to-reach or high-risk conflict-ridden zones. Cheap, abundant food on the shelves of grocery and big box stores and food banks, on our tables and in our bellies depends on cheap abundant oil for fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and to power farm machinery and transport food from fields to processors and packagers and then to purveyors and consumers, around the world. Past peak, that system's going to have the half-life of the strontium 90 that's escaping the Fukushimi Dai-ichi reactor: 29 years, or thereabouts. One good global crisis, and not that long.

2) Peak soil & space. A couple of links between peak oil and peak soil: First, it matters that one of the proposed alternatives to oil is biofuels. Acreage around the world is being converted from production of corn, wheat and soy for human and animal consumption -- i.e. food -- to production of ethanol and biofuels to put in trucks and cars and ... which makes remaining corn, et al., more expensive. Some energy economy geniuses are proposing that Afghans, for example, convert the fields of opium poppies that are their primary agricultural export, not to growing grains or legumes or other staple foods, but to biofuel, which would, not coincidentally, make the gasoline that goes in American military equipment much cheaper and provide Afghans with a profitable market item rather than food.

According to a 2009 National Geographic staff report, "The corn used to make a 25-gallon tank of ethanol would feed one person for a year." Tell that to Archer-Daniels-Midland, Al Gore's deep-pockets friend and mega-ethanol and corn products producer. Second, the huge oil-gluttonous machinery that has made factory farming possible has compacted soils, literally crushing the life out of them.

Arable land in the developing or so-called Third World has been at a premium since time immemorial, thanks to geographic location and/or persistent plundering by empires old and new. Revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East are occurring not just to obtain more democratic governments but also to obtain more food and more affordable food. Revolutionaries are barking up a tree that's seen better days.

In the United States and elsewhere in the developed, read "First" world, arable land has reached peak production. All those petroleum-based products that fueled the Green Revolution of the last century, also produce so many crops, constantly, with support from toxic chemicals and without concern for the microbes that make soil a live, self-regenerating system, that most American farmland -- if its farmers didn't go organic a while back -- is comprised of dead soils. Peak oil makes a repeat of the petroleum-driven 20th century Green Revolution impossible, which is good for soil and other living things, not so much for food prices and supplies.

After peak, in soil like in oil, comes descent. Adding insult to injury, every year farmers lose thousands of acres of arable land to urban and suburban sprawl and more tons of topsoil than they produce of grain and other field crops to attrition. Half the Earth's original trove of topsoil, like that which once permitted the American Midwest to feed the world, has been lost to wind and erosion. Millions of years in the making, it has been depleted and degraded by industrialized agriculture in only a couple of centuries. China's soils ride easterly winds across the Pacific to settle out on cars and rooftops in California while the American Bread Basket's soils are building deltas and dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi. Like oil, that soil isn't coming back. We can only build it, help it to build itself and wait.

3) Monoculture. We can cut to the chase on this one. The food we eat is produced on industrial-strength, fossil-fuel-driven super farms. Those farms practice monoculture: the planting one crop, often of one genetic strain of that crop, at a time and sometimes year after year over vast landscapes of plowed field. When thousands of acres of farmland are sown with the same genetic strain of grain, uncongenial bout of weather, disease or pest to which that strain is susceptible can wipe out the whole crop.

At present the Ug99 fungus, called stem rust, which emerged a decade ago in Africa, could wipe out more than 80 percent of the world's wheat crops as it spreads, according to a 2009 article in the L. A. Times. Recent studies follow its appearance in other countries downwind of eastern Africa where it originated, including Yemen and Iran (where revolutionaries are already protesting rising prices and shortages), which opens the possibility of its emergence further downwind in Central and Eastern Asia. The race is on to breed resistant plants before it reaches Canada or the U.S. But it can take a decade or more to create a universally adaptable new genetic line that is resistant to a new disease like stem rust that can travel much faster than that. The current spike in the price of wheat is due in part to Ug99 which might properly be renamed "Ugh."

4) Climate instability. Bad -- uncongenial -- weather has lately devastated crops in the upper Midwest, Florida, Mexico, Russia, China, Australia, parts of Africa and elsewhere. Many climate scientists believe we've passed the equivalent of peak friendly and familiar weather, too. And while increasing heat will bedevil harvests, intense cold, downpours and flooding, drought and destructive storm systems will make farming an increasingly hellish occupation if profit is what's being farmed for.

The transitional climate will be unpredictable from season to season and will produce more extremes of weather and weather-related disasters, which means farmers will not be able to assume much about growing seasons, rainfall patterns and getting crops through to harvest. If the past is precedent, the transition from the climate we've been used to for 10,000 years to whatever stable climate emerges out of climate chaos next, could take decades, centuries or even millennia. Especially if we keep messing with it. When a whole nation's or region's staple crops, especially grains, are lost or on-again-off-again, everything down the line from the crops themselves become more expensive, from meat, poultry and dairy to every kind of processed food. I.e., the food we shop for as if supermarkets were actually where food comes from.

5) The roller-coaster economy. This isn't the place for me to offer my explanation for the probability of global economic collapse. (More on that here.) No pundits, talking-heads or economic analysts (well, very few) deny there are rough economic times ahead. Even many of the cautious among them acknowledge that we may be looking at five or six years of high unemployment and many of the lost jobs won't be coming back. The less cautious, like me, predict the collapse of the whole fossil-fueled, funny-money, inequitable, overly complicated global economic system in the lifetimes of anyone under 50. Well, at the rate we're going in all the wrong directions politically and economically, I hazard the guess, anyone under 80.

Clearly, depending on the present system to provide us with most or all of our food reliably or long-term, is unwise in the extreme. Which is how we get back to why we need to garden as if our lives depended on it. Bringing food production processes and systems closer to home is going to prove vital to our survival. We need to take producing our own and each other's food as seriously as we've taken producing a money income because growing numbers of us won't have enough money to buy food in the conventional ways and there will be less of it to buy. So what's our recourse?

Gardening Like Everybody's Business

Under the influence and auspices of the prevailing economy, most Americans have forgotten how to provide for themselves. We've become accustomed to earning money with which we buy provisions. That process is about to have the legs kicked out from under it. Instead of earning money (or its funny-money kin like credit cards) to buy the things we need, we'll need to start providing more of those things for ourselves and each other locally and (bio)regionally. Gardening -- and small-scale farming -- while they will need to be undertaken in a businesslike fashion will be less about doing business than about everyone's having something to eat and more people being busy providing it. And while not everyone will be able to garden or farm, we are all able to get up close and personal with those who do.

Ellen LaConte, an independent scholar, organic gardener and freelance writer living in the Yadkin River watershed of the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina, is a contributing editor to Green Horizon Magazine and the Ecozoic. Her most recent book is Life Rules (Green Horizon/iUniverse, 2010). LaConte publishes a quarterly online newsletter, Starting Point.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150428/

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Earth Hour Pics

2011-03-29T08:01:00.003-04:00

DID YOU PARTICIPATE in this past Saturday's Earth Hour? Whether you did or didn't, here's the good news: Earth Hour can be celebrated every day (or perhaps I should say every evening) by shutting off lights, unplugging 'instant on' appliances (like many TV's, stereos, and computers) and making a major effort to reduce the old carbon footprint. Reducing light at night also helps migrating birds, who often get confused/disoriented at night by bright lights, and/or slam into brightly lit buildings, or are guided to cities by the lure of bright lights (I sense a Jay M. novel here somewhere). Something, too, has atrophied in our collective soul, since we have banished the night and its sacred mystery. There are millions upon millions of people who have never even seen Venus, Jupiter, Orion. Although I live on a four-lane state highway, there are four acres of woods behind the barn behind the house, and the difference in the amount of stars one can see is amazing. There are also fireflies between me and the stars out there, and when I lay on my back and look up, after a while it seems all the stars are swirling and dancing. Nature repeats her successful patterns.

Here are some great shots of Earth Hour, with the added feature of clicking on the photo (beginning with the second photo) to see the lights fade.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/03/earth_hour_2011.html

Burt's Bees Owner Wants to Found National Park in Maine

2011-03-28T09:03:00.003-04:00

(This is good, though we still abhor snowmobiles, and think they have no business whatsoever in the wild. And who knew Burt's Bees was owned by Clorox? And yes, Ms. Quimby DOES look cold-- but why shouldn't she, it's still freezing here, at the end of March...)

TOWNSHIP 3, RANGE 8, Maine — The state’s sportsmen were outraged when Roxanne Quimby, the conservation-minded founder of Burt’s Bees cosmetics, bought up tens of thousands of acres of Maine’s fabled North Woods — and had the audacity to forbid hunters, loggers, snowmobiles, and all-terrain vehicles on the expanses.

Quimby confronted the hornet’s nest she had stirred up head-on — calling one of her sharpest critics, George Smith, then-executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine. Smith couldn’t believe his ears. The back-to-the-earth advocate who made millions with her ecofriendly line of personal care products was calling him at home, on a Saturday morning?

“I thought someone was playing a joke on me when she called,’’ Smith said.

That call in 2006 opened a face-to-face dialogue with some of her biggest critics over the land she bought — more than 120,000 acres of woodlands.

Quimby wants to give more than 70,000 wild acres next to Maine’s cherished Baxter State Park to the federal government, hoping to create a Maine Woods National Park. She envisions a visitor center dedicated to Henry David Thoreau, the naturalist who made three trips to Maine in the 1800s.

The park would be nearly twice the size of Maine’s Acadia National Park.

In a giveback to sportsmen, her vision is to set aside another 30,000 acres of woodlands north of Dover-Foxcroft to be managed like a state park, with hunting and snowmobiling allowed.

“There’s enough land that we can all get what we want,’’ said Quimby.

The multimillionaire disarmed her critics, who thought they would have to deal with a patchouli-scented eccentric. What they found was a woman who thinks big, but is a pragmatic problem-solver; someone who has strong ideals, but is willing to compromise; a self-made businesswoman who is willing to put up millions to achieve her conservation goals.

Smith, for one, came to respect and admire her.

“I was one of her harshest critics, so it’s really rather remarkable,’’ he said. “In the end, it’s her land, and she’ll do whatever suits her. But at least she’s listening.’’

Leaving a legacy

If she can win support, Quimby wants to time her donation in five years with the 100th anniversary of the creation of the National Park Service. It would be her gift, her legacy.

The Park Service is intrigued by Quimby’s idea. The last time a large national park was created was in Alaska in the 1980s under the Carter administration.

“The National Park Service would like to see additional opportunities for preserving these beautiful places and creating recreational opportunities in the Northeast,’’ said spokesman David Barna. “The proposal would be exciting for the National Park Service to evaluate.’’

The proposed national park land occupies a wild sprawl east of Baxter State Park. Much of it is covered with saplings as it recovers from logging operations that ended five years ago. Mountain ridges offer breathtaking views of Mount Katahdin, Maine’s tallest mountain and the northern end of the Appalachian Trail.

At the eastern boundary is the East Branch of the Penobscot River, on which Thoreau enjoyed a ride in a flat-bottomed bateau on his last visit to the region in 1857.

Animal tracks crisscross the snow-covered land, evidence that it’s teeming with wildlife, even during Maine’s harsh winter. Moose have made figure-8’s in the snow during their playful jousting. Smaller tracks indicate snowshoe hares, fisher cats, and coyotes. Endangered Canada lynx also prowl the area.

A business maverick

A native of Massachusetts, Quimby was the black sheep of a family in which her father was an engineer and a salesman and her sisters both earned their MBAs. Foregoing the business track, she went to art school in San Francisco, where she joined the “good life’’ back-to-the-land movement led by Helen and Scott Nearing.

With $3,000 in savings, she and her boyfriend ended up in Maine in 1975 — not because of the state’s rugged natural beauty but because the land was cheap.

They bought 30 acres in Guilford and built a cabin with an outhouse. They cut their own firewood. What staples they didn’t grow, they bought in 60-pound bags.

Eventually, Quimby met beekeeper Burt Shavitz, the namesake whose bearded face appears on the labels of Burt’s Bees lip balm, moisturizers, and shampoos. Quimby used Burt’s beeswax to create candles she sold at craft fairs in 1984. In the first year, her company made $20,000. In 1991, Burt’s Bees introduced what remains its most popular product — lip balm made from beeswax.

As the business grew, Quimby moved her business out of Maine, which she said was a punishing place to do business. She relocated to a North Carolina industrial park, and eventually bought out Shavitz’s shares.

As Burt’s Bees grew, she began buying land for conservation. Once again, she chose to buy in Maine. In 2003, she sold 80 percent of Burt’s Bees for $170 million, she said. She made another $180 million when she sold her remaining stake four years later to Clorox, which now owns Burt’s Bees.

Quimby, 60, says a new national park would conserve land and create jobs by drawing millions of additional visitors to the region to stay and spend.

It remains to be seen whether Quimby is one day mentioned in the same breath as Percival Baxter, who donated the land that became Baxter State Park, or George Dorr, whose efforts helped create Acadia National Park.

She lives most of the year in a home built by the Baxter family in Portland, overseeing her philanthropic organizations.

“You can trust her word. She’s one of these folks that if you shake her hand on a deal, then it’s a deal,’’ said Eugene Conlogue, town manager in Millinocket.

Whales May Have Names They Call Each Other

2011-03-24T16:32:00.000-04:00

Sperm Whales May Have Names
By Brandon Keim

Subtle variations in sperm-whale calls suggest that individuals announce themselves with discrete personal identifier. To put it another way, they might have names.

The findings are preliminary, based on observations of just three whales, so talk of names is still speculation. But “it’s very suggestive,” said biologist Luke Rendell of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. “They seem to make that coda in a way that’s individually distinctive.”

Rendell and his collaborators, including biologists Hal Whitehead, Shane Gero and Tyler Schulz, have for years studied the click sequences, or codas, used by sperm whales to communicate across miles of deep ocean. In a study published last June in Marine Mammal Sciences, they described a sound-analysis technique that linked recorded codas to individual members of a whale family living in the Caribbean.

In that study, they focused on a coda made only by Caribbean sperm whales. It appears to signify group membership. In the latest study, published Feb. 10 in Animal Behavior, they analyzed a coda made by sperm whales around the world. Called 5R, it’s composed of five consecutive clicks, and superficially appears to be identical in each whale. Analyzed closely, however, variations in click timing emerge. Each of the researchers’ whales had its own personal 5R riff.

The differences were significant. The sonic variations that were used to distinguish between individuals in the earlier study depended on a listener’s physical relationship to the caller: “If you record the animal from the side, you get a different structure than dead ahead or behind,” said Rendell. But these 5R variations held true regardless of listener position.

“In terms of information transfer, the timing of the clicks is much less susceptible” to interference, said Rendell. “There is no doubt in my mind that the animals can tell the difference between the timing of individuals.” Moreover, 5R tends to be made at the beginning of each coda string as if, like old-time telegraph operators clicking out a call sign, they were identifying themselves. Said Rendell, “It may function to let the animals know which individual is vocalizing.”

Rendell stressed that much more research is needed to be sure of 5R’s function. “We could have just observed a freak occurrence,” he said. Future research will involve more recordings. “This is just the first glimpse of what might be going on.”

That individual whales would have means of identifying themselves does, however, make sense. Dolphins have already been shown to have individual, identifying whistles. Like them, sperm whales are highly social animals who maintain complex relationships over long distances, coordinating hunts and cooperating to raise one another’s calves.

Sperm-whale coda repertoires can contain dozens of different calls, which vary in use among families and regions, as do patterns of behavior. At a neurological level, their brains display many of the features associated in humans with sophisticated cognition. Many researchers think that sperm whales and other cetacean species should be considered “non-human persons,” comparable at least to chimpanzees and other great apes.

Compared to primates, however, studying the behaviors and relationships of whales is extremely difficult. They don’t take well to aquariums, and observations in the wild take place on their aquatic terms.

What’s been observed so far are just “the crude behavioral measures we get by following them in a boat,” said Rendell. “I’d argue that there is probably a vast amount of complexity out there in sperm whale society that we have yet to understand. As we get to know more about them, we’re going to continue to reveal complexities that we didn’t anticipate.”

Get Gardening

2011-03-23T13:57:00.001-04:00

You wouldn't know it round these parts, but Monday (snow all day) was the first full day of spring-- actually, you would know it, as the snow didn't stick to the open earth or to roads, only to the grass-- Our Mother is warming up. The Full Worm Moon happened this weekend, and so we are in the Worm Moon for the next 28 days-- named by the Native Americans in honor of the diminutive creatures who begin to stir near the surface of the earth now, without whom their would be no tillable earth-- the earth would be like concrete. The Native Americans knew that. Most of us, don't.

Imagine that-- that we owe our existence to the worms, and ants, and beetles, and the other creatures who keep the earth pliable and fertile. One would never get that kind of sense from watching television or participating actively-- or passively, as the case might be-- in American consumerist culture. We can order and control all things, we are told-- all it takes is more possessions, more money, more power, and more greed and selfishness. We are the crowns of creation, the supreme end of evolution!

Uhmm...well...maybe not so much. The sad truth is, the earth, and ALL her species, would be lots better off without us. In some ways, we are a form of rapid multiplying bacteria, breaking down the planet. And yet, when we watch children playing barefoot over Mother Earth, running through grass or rolling down hills, or listen to Beethoven's Ninth, or read beautiful poetry, or witness a selfless act of pure human kindness, or escape into nature and feel oneness with Spirit-- how can we can deny that we have such potential to be good, and to do good, and that we are indeed our Mother Earth's children?

So, the earth needs friends, and for her to survive, we must all of us appeal to the better angels of our natures. Let's become the earth's stewards, in humility and gratitude. One of the best ways to do that, and to help ourselves and our health at the same time, is to begin to grow our own food.

Even a small apartment balcony can grow a surprising amount of food, with wall units and containers. Growing one's own food also takes one of the most important determining factors of our long-term health out of the hands of corporate agri-business-- where profit is the only concern, and the use of poisons not only encouraged, but actually partially funded by our government-- and puts this into our own hands.

More than that, gardening is entering into relationship with the earth. It will feed your soul and spirit as much as your body. It will change you. You will slow down. You will become a lover of rain, an intimate acquaintance of sunsets, a friend of the birds. You'll watch the sky with quiet eyes. As you are healed by the earth, you may be able to return the favor. In a fascinating book, Spiritual Growth Through Domestic Gardening, the Jesuit Al Frisch posits the wonderfully quirky and nearly 'magikal' idea that, in the same way that humans are healed by touch, so can the earth. Well-- why not? When we put our hands into the earth, to plant or cultivate or weed, stop for one moment and notice-- is the ground warm or cold? Muddy, wet, dry? Become aware of the earth, and then gently massage it-- the energy of your healing touch, no matter how weak, will reverberate around the entire globe. Interesting! Anyway, Father Frisch's wonderful book is offered free and with love to the public, and is available here: Happy Spring!

http://www.earthhealing.info/garden.htm#Introduction

Miracle Dog Survives

2011-03-22T21:58:00.000-04:00

A Hyde Park woman cried tears of joy this week after finding her dog alive among the ashes of her burned-out and boarded-up house, where the dog had survived since a blaze totaled the residence on Feb. 23.

Terisa Acevedo initially thought that Lola, her year-old long-haired dachshund, escaped the blaze and was wandering through the neighborhood. In the days after the fire, the 24-year-old EMT and Northeastern University student posted fliers on telephone poles and walked the neighborhood hoping to find her dog. But as the days turned into weeks, Acevedo began to think that Lola perished in the fire.

But on Monday Acevedo returned to the house to shut off the alarm on a truck she was keeping parked there, and she heard a scratching noise at the boarded-up front door. She immediately knew it was Lola.

Acevedo yelled out her pet's name and with the help of friends, tore the plywood off the entrance. Lola, apparently out of fear, retreated into the blackened interior of the house. But when Acevedo called out her name again, Lola ran into her arms.

"It was a miracle," Acevedo said yesterday, hugging her dog at the Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in Jamaica Plain, where Lola is being nursed back to health.

'Baffling' Dog-Napping in Sterling

2011-03-17T21:07:00.002-04:00

A real-life Cruella de Vil nabbed nine puppies from Sterling Animal Shelter Wednesday night, and police are searching for clues in the puzzling crime. Two of the stolen puppies are shown at left.

Leigh Grady, the shelter's executive director, said that when she arrived at work this morning the side door was kicked in and nine puppies were missing, ranging in age from 10 to 14 weeks.

“This morning when I came into the kennel, it was pretty quiet, like they knew something was going on and they were traumatized,” she said.

Grady immediately called police, who took photographs and dusted for fingerprints.

Police Chief Gary Chamberland said police don’t have any idea of who the thief could be, and the department’s best lead was a stolen vehicle that had been abandoned in the area.

Police have reached out to nearby police departments and animal control units, asking people to keep an eye out for the dogs. But, he said, for this type of case, there's no set procedure.

“I’ve never seen this number of dogs taken from a shelter,” said Chamberland. “I would say it’s kind of unusual.”

Neither Grady nor Chamberland could think of any motive for the theft of the mixed-breed dogs.

Staff at the shelter are particularly concerned because all of the puppies were spayed and neutered Wednesday and are in need of medication. Grady is personally offering a $1,000 reward for their return – no questions asked.

“We just want to make sure they’re OK,” she said. “We’re all pretty upset and devastated.”

Anyone with information on the puppies is urged to call the Sterling Animal Shelter at 978-422-8585 or Sterling Police at 978-422-7331.

Bradley Manning Update from AlterNet

2011-03-17T17:45:00.001-04:00

As the Treatment of Bradley Manning Grows More Obscene, Reality Becomes Harder to Ignore

By Lynn Parramore, New Deal 2.0
Posted on March 11, 2011, Printed on March 17, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150223/

Imagine that you’ve arrived at the local multiplex for a weekend flick. Popcorn in hand, you settle in to watch Matt Damon star in a new thriller as a young American soldier imprisoned by the government for blowing the whistle on crimes witnessed while serving in a foreign country.

INT. MILITARY PRISON CELL - DAY

(Calendar pages flip by indicating the passage of months. July. August. September. October. Etc.)

The Damon character stands naked in front of his cell. His head is bent over, and he stares blankly at the floor.

GUARD (roughly): “Are you all right? I need a verbal response.”

DAMON CHARACTER (voice shaking): “Yes, I am all right.”

The Damon character is handed his neatly folded underwear.

GUARD: “You give it back at night. Every night. Got it?”

DAMON CHARACTER: “Yes.”

GUARD (turning the lock on the cell door). “Are you all right?”

DAMON CHARACTER (weakly): “Yes, I am all right.”

CUT TO: INT. SMALL EMPTY ROOM IN MILITARY BRIG - DAY

The Damon character shuffles slowly in a figure eight pattern. He stops to scratch his foot. The guard interrupts.

GUARD: “Exercise is over! You know the rules. No stopping. Are you all right?”

DAMON CHARACTER (robotically): “Yes, I am all right.”

As our movie unfolds, we see the Damon character growing more detached from reality. Every five minutes, he is interrupted with the same question, “Are you all right?” Day in, day out. Each night, he must surrender his clothing, left naked in his cell without a pillow or blanket. Should he roll to a side of the bed where the guards can’t see him, he is immediately awakened. He is kept alone in his cell for 23 hours a day, and his only exercise is an hour of walking in a bare room. If he pauses, he forfeits the rest of his time. The Damon character grows pale; his speech becomes broken, almost indecipherable.

Gradually he becomes catatonic, awaiting a trial that has never been set.

In this Kafkaesque film, the military personnel overseeing the treatment insist to the press that they can’t explain why they strip the soldier because to do so would violate his privacy. They claim that they are isolating him and imposing bizarre restrictions out of concern for his safety. Members of the press corps don’t believe the lies. But they nod in tacit agreement. “Traitor!” they whisper. They deadpan the story, as if it were just another routine case.

If we were watching all this transpire on the screen, we would know how to interpret the story. We would intuit that the soldier is up against some version of Big Brother, the Authoritarian State. We would squirm in our seats, waiting for justice to intervene. If this were a high-quality, complex film, we might not completely sympathize with the motives of Damon’s character or totally agree with his interpretation of the crimes he witnessed. But we would root for him anyway, because as Americans we instinctively reject authoritarian control. We know that the Constitution protects citizens from the trampling of basic rights. And we sense that the violation of one is the violation of all.

Except when it happens in reality. Then we stick our heads in the sand. We make excuses. We say, “but this case is different.”

Even when we do talk, we are careful. Cautious not to sound too soft. Many journalists have covered the detention of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the suspect accused of leaking cables to Wikileaks (Manning, as yet, has been convicted of nothing). But though he has been subjected to exactly the treatment as our fictional example, most — with some brave exceptions — have been reluctant to challenge the military or the U.S. government.

But as the treatment grows more obscene, reality becomes harder to ignore. Some have suggested that the abuse violates Manning’s 8th Amendment protection from cruel and unusual punishment. A blogger recently called it “borderline torture.” Today, we learn that a spokesman from the State Department called it “ridiculous and stupid.”

Why is it so hard time to call this treatment what it actually is? Torture.

Plain and simple.

Maybe it’s because if we did, we would have to acknowledge truths too painful to bear. We would know that what had once happened to “foreign combatants” is now happening to Americans soldiers, and maybe it will soon happen to civilians, too. So we continue the doublespeak.

“Political language,” wrote George Orwell, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” (”Politics and the English Language“, 1946.)

Orwellian language has justified things in our country’s history that many good citizens knew to be wrong. Slavery. The subjugation of women. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Each time, many people failed to call for justice because they didn’t see the victims as full citizens. Or even fully human. Some suggest that Bradley Manning gave up his protection under the U.S. Constitution when he joined the armed forces, an affront to the sacrifice of service if there ever was one. Others have declared him guilty without a trial, an attack on our precious tradition of presumed innocence. The niceties of civilization are jettisoned. The Bill of Rights becomes just a piece of paper.

We wait and we watch as the U.S. government defends itself from whistle blowers by torturing them in plain view. What stronger evidence that there is much to blow the whistle on?

Obama the Commander in Chief, the man who said that “the U.S. does not torture,” does nothing (Update: Friday afternoon, the President personally asked the Pentagon about Manning’s treatment, but says that he was assured that the treatment is “appropriate”). Eric Holder, the country’s chief law enforcement officer, fails to intervene.

How does this story end in reality? Not well, I fear.

Lynn Parramore is the editor of New Deal 2.0, a project of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

© 2011 New Deal 2.0 All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150223/

[w1]

Too Adorable Not to Post!

2011-03-17T17:21:00.003-04:00

OKAY SO THIS IS the latest Hayes, Will Edward Andrews, born last month to my nephew (and Godson) Teddy and his lovely wife Mary. I met him Sunday for the first time and he's a little angel. Mary sent this out today and how cute is this?????

And...speaking of Saint Patrick's Day-- the Irish have a proud and long (and, alas, bloody) tradition of fighting injustice and oppression, based primarily on their own experience under 800 years of British imperialistic misrule. The best way we Irish can honor our 'rebel' sires and dames is to continue to fight oppression today-- especially when it comes from our own imperialistic country. We still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq-- the latter was a mistake from the beginning, based on lies, greed, and the hubris of a ne'er-do-well son. The former is the very definition of a quagmire, and the perfect example of throwing good money after bad. These two wars have cost us 3 TRILLION since they began, and one can only imagine what we could have done with this money instead-- the infrastructure, universal health care, education, etc etc etc etc etc -- insanity. And Guantanamo is STILL up and running and STILL keeping people indefinitely without a trial...and Bradley Manning is STILL being held in solitary confinement...and the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest among us have become permanent....I saw graffiti the other day under a bridge in Cambridge, and it very simply said O B A M A = B U S H. There is simply no point in trying to 'reach across the aisle' and compromise with Republicans/Tea Baggers. Obama should have done what every Republican President has done lately, i.e., rammed his agenda through while demonizing the opposition. Oi. Anyway-- Happy St. Patrick's Day from Boston....

Tragic, But No Surprise....

2011-03-15T09:43:00.000-04:00

Soldier, loyal dog make final journey

Associated Press / March 11, 2011

LONDON — Liam and Theo were a team, fast friends doing a dangerous job — searching out roadside bombs laid by insurgents in Afghanistan.

The British soldier and his irrepressible dog worked and played together for months, and died on the same day. Yesterday, they came home, flown back to Britain in a somber ceremony for the soldier remembered for his empathy with animals and the companion he loved.

Lance Corporal Liam Tasker, a dog handler with the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, was killed in a firefight with insurgents in Helmand Province on March 1 as he searched for explosives with Theo, a bomb-sniffing springer spaniel mix. The dog suffered a fatal seizure hours later at a British army base, probably brought about by stress.

Military officials will not go so far as to say Theo died of a broken heart — but that may not be far from the truth. “I think we often underestimate the grieving process in dogs,’’ said Elaine Pendlebury, a senior veterinarian with animal charity PDSA. “Some dogs react very severely to their partner’s loss.’’

Words Difficult to Translate

2011-03-09T09:55:00.000-05:00

What are the hardest words to translate into English? “Hyggelig” is just one on our list

March 8, 2011

2 Comments

There’s a running debate among translators about what word is hardest to translate. Obviously, the challenges vary from language to language, with languages that have less in common creating more elusive word to word translations. Let’s acknowledge that determining the hardest word to translate is more of a game than any sort of realistic exercise. That said, here are a few contenders that make the hypothetical list.

Jayus is an Indonesian word that conveys the awkward humor behind a joke delivered so badly that you can’t help but laugh. In English, we sarcastically say, “That’s so funny I forgot to laugh.”

Tartle is a Scottish word for the hesitation one feels when introducing people but having forgotten someone’s name.

Prozvonit is a Czech word for “dropped call” but it refers to a mobile phone user who calls, lets the phone ring once then hangs up. The person who was called then dials the caller, saving the caller the cost of the call.

Saudade is a Portuguese word for longing for someone or something that someone has loved and lost. It is stronger than the sense of the English nostalgia.

(A Spanish word, duende, is considered difficult for similar reasons. Learn the exact story, here.)

Cafune is a Brazilian Portuguese verb for running your fingers through someone’s hair tenderly.

The Danish word Hyggelig literally translates as “cozy,” but the modern connotation has more to do with how Danes see themselves.

One of the hardest English words to translate into other tongues is gobbledygook, meaning “jargon-filled language that is difficult to read, maybe intentionally confusing.” It’s based on the onomatopoeic sound of a turkey’s gobble. Given the confusion that language learning students face when deciphering new words that would be a handy word to have available to describe what a poor translation looks like.

Can you think of any other words that would be difficult to translate into English? Let us know.

* Special thanks to Maria and Manny at Alta Language Services http://www.altalang.com

Eastern Cougar Declared Extinct, Even as They Return to East

2011-03-03T14:30:00.000-05:00

Federal researchers declare eastern cougar extinct

By MICHAEL RUBINKAM, Associated Press Michael Rubinkam, Associated Press Wed Mar 2, 4:04 pm ET

ALLENTOWN, Pa. – The "ghost cat" is just that.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday declared the eastern cougar to be extinct, confirming a widely held belief among wildlife biologists that native populations of the big cat were wiped out by man a century ago.

After a lengthy review, federal officials concluded there are no breeding populations of cougars — also known as pumas, panthers, mountain lions and catamounts — in the eastern United States. Researchers believe the eastern cougar subspecies has probably been extinct since the 1930s.

Wednesday's declaration paves the way for the eastern cougar to be removed from the endangered species list, where it was placed in 1973. The agency's decision to declare the eastern cougar extinct does not affect the status of the Florida panther, another endangered wildcat.

Some hunters and outdoors enthusiasts have long insisted there's a small breeding population of eastern cougars, saying the secretive cats have simply eluded detection — hence the "ghost cat" moniker. The wildlife service said Wednesday it confirmed 108 sightings between 1900 and 2010, but that these animals either escaped or were released from captivity, or migrated from western states to the Midwest.

"The Fish and Wildlife Service fully believes that some people have seen cougars, and that was an important part of the review that we did," said Mark McCollough, an endangered species biologist who led the agency's eastern cougar study. "We went on to evaluate where these animals would be coming from."

A breeding population of eastern cougars would almost certainly have left evidence of its existence, he said. Cats would have been hit by cars or caught in traps, left tracks in the snow or turned up on any of the hundreds of thousands of trail cameras that dot Eastern forests.

But researchers have come up empty.

The private Eastern Cougar Foundation, for example, spent a decade looking for evidence. Finding none, it changed its name to the Cougar Rewilding Foundation last year and shifted its focus from confirming sightings to advocating for the restoration of the big cat to its pre-colonial habitat.

"We would have loved nothing more than for there to be a remnant wild population of cougars on the East Coast," said Christopher Spatz, the foundation's president. "We're not seeing (evidence) because they're not here."

Others maintain that wild cougars still prowl east of the Mississippi.

Ray Sedorchuk, 45, an avid hunter and outdoorsman, said he got an excellent look at a cougar last June in rural Bradford County, in northern Pennsylvania. He was in his truck when a reddish-brown animal with a long tail crossed the road. He said he jammed on the brakes, and the cougar stopped in its tracks.

"I could see the body, the tail and the head, the entire animal, perfectly. It's not a bobcat, it's not a housecat, it's a cougar," he said. "It's a sleek animal. It ran low to the ground and stealth-like. It moved with elegance."

Sedorchuk, a freelance writer who spends copious amounts of time in the woods, said he'd always been skeptical of the eastern cougar's existence, even as two of his friends insisted to him that they had seen them in the wild.

And now?

"I believe that they're here, without even thinking twice about it," he said. "I believe there aren't that many, but there are enough where they can get together and breed."

Once widely dispersed throughout the eastern United States, the mountain lion was all but wiped out by the turn of the last century. Cougars were killed in vast numbers, and states even held bounties. A nearly catastrophic decline in white-tailed deer — the main prey of mountain lions — also contributed to the species' extirpation.

McCollough said the last wild cougar was believed to have been killed in Maine in 1938.

The wildlife service treated the eastern cougar as a distinct subspecies, even though some biologists now believe it is genetically the same as its western brethren, which is increasing in number and extending its range. Some experts believe that mountain lions will eventually make their way back East.

The loss of a top-level predator like the cougar has had ecological consequences, including an explosion in the deer population and a corresponding decline in the health of Eastern forests.

"Our ecosystems are collapsing up and down the East Coast, and they're collapsing because we have too many white-tailed deer," said Spatz. "Our forests are not being permitted to regenerate."

Cougars and wolves, he said, would thin the deer herd through direct predation while also acting as "natural shepherds," forcing deer to become more vigilant and "stop browsing like cattle."

Spatz's group would like the federal government to reintroduce cougars and wolves to the eastern United States, though he acknowledged any such plan would come up against fierce resistance.

The wildlife service said Wednesday it has no authority under the Endangered Species Act to reintroduce the mountain lion to the East.

___

Online:

http://www.fws.gov/northeast/ecougar/

Spring

2011-02-28T21:39:00.002-05:00

Hello People,

In less than three hours' time, it will be March. Don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not sure I've ever looked forward more eagerly to a month than this one-- it was a long, challenging winter, and my usual panacea of walking five miles a day with the dog was severely impacted by-- not so much the weather, as blocked sidewalks, towering piles of snow at street corners, and other hazardous impediments. It seems many people, and municipalities, gave up on keeping sidewalks and other pedestrian ways open about midway through this very long winter.

And then I got sick, and a bad chest cold turned into pneumonia. Just starting to feel better now, but it's been a long haul.

But away with all that! March is upon us, and that means spring, not just on the 20th or 21st, but in our hearts and minds at various unpredictable moments. Like love, we all know when it happens to us. For some, it's when they spot/hear their first Red-Winged Blackbird; for others it's Big Night, when the salamanders move. Still others declare it isn't spring until they hear their first peepers, or wood frogs.

But for me, always and forevermore, it's the first peent, that magical sound the male American woodcock makes just before taking off for his sky dance. The woodcock carries spring on his back, and I'll be waiting for him in my secret woodcock spots beginning tomorrow nigh-- not that I'm likely to hear one for at least a week or two; but my earliest sighting was March 1 and, besides, hope is the thing with feathers-- the fact that I can go out and wait is gift enough, for now. I can wait for the peent.

Happy Spring, everyone.

Joe

Duh

2011-02-28T21:34:00.001-05:00

Scientist Warns On Safety Of Monsanto's Roundup

Date: 01-Mar-11
Country: USA
Author: Carey Gillam

Questions about the safety of a popular herbicide made by Monsanto Co have resurfaced in a warning from a U.S. scientist that claims top-selling Roundup may contribute to plant disease and health problems for farm animals.

Plant pathologist and retired Purdue University professor Don Huber has written a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack warning that a newly discovered and widespread "electron microscopic pathogen appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals, and probably human beings." He said the pathogen appears to be connected to use of glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup.

Huber coordinates a committee of the American Phytopathological Society as part of the USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System. He is a long-standing critic of biotech crops, such as Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" soybean and corn, which have been genetically altered to withstand treatments of Roundup herbicide.

In his letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Huber said the organism has been found in high concentrations of Roundup Ready soybean meal and corn, which are used in livestock feed. He said laboratory tests have confirmed the presence of the organism in pigs, cattle and other livestock that have experienced spontaneous abortions and infertility.

The organism is also prolific in corn and soybean crops stricken by disease, according to Huber.

"I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen is unique and of a high risk status," Huber wrote. "In layman's terms, it should be treated as an emergency."

Monsanto scoffed at the allegations and said its own research as well as independent field studies and tests by multiple U.S. universities do not corroborate Huber's claims.

"Monsanto is not aware of any reliable studies that demonstrate Roundup Ready crops are more susceptible to certain diseases or that the application of glyphosate to Roundup Ready crops increases a plant's susceptibility to diseases," the company said in a statement.

EARLY STAGE FINDINGS

Huber said in his January 17 letter to the USDA that the findings were at an "early stage," but it appeared side effects of glyphosate use may have facilitated growth of the pathogen, or allowed it to cause greater harm to weakened plant and animal hosts.

He requested USDA participation in an investigation, and he urged a moratorium on approvals of Roundup Ready crops.

USDA officials declined to comment about the letter's contents.

"We're reviewing it, and will respond directly to Dr. Huber, rather than responding through the media," said USDA spokesman Andre Bell.

Roundup has long been a draw for critics, who say the herbicide promotes widespread weed resistance, or "super weeds."

"While the evidence is considered preliminary, the potential damage to humans and animals is severe," said Jeffrey Smith, executive director of the Institute for Responsible Technology.

There have been other alarms raised about Roundup, including a report last year from Argentine scientists who claimed that Roundup can contribute to birth defects in frogs and chickens.

Monsanto says the chemical binds tightly to most types of soil, is not harmful and does not harm the crops. But some scientists say there are indications of increased root fungal disease as well as nutrient deficiencies in Roundup Ready crops. They say manganese deficiency in soybeans in particular appears to be an issue in key U.S. farming areas.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said last year that it may review glyphosate for any adverse effects as part of a protocol to review products every 15 years.

But the agency had no immediate comment Thursday as to whether or not such a review would be undertaken.

New Short Fiction

2011-02-07T08:40:00.002-05:00

A few weeks ago I took this mini-course at the Cambridge Center where I occasionally teach. The course was entitled Flash Fiction, 'the hot new thing,' pieces that are 300-1200 words in length. Brevity has never been one of my strong suits so I looked upon this as a challenge. Our first assignment was to write something about someone's profession/occupation, and the result is the story below.

Due North

“George! How are you feeling? I’m not…disturbing you?”

“Come in, my friend, come in,” George says, smiling, half rising from his easy chair by the window. There are three pots of bright red geraniums on the sill. Beyond the glass, the lawns and woods are leaking their colors, as October becomes November.

“Oh don’t get up, please.”

The orange blob of the setting sun—“So soon! So early!” George protests, jerking his head at it-- smears its last light onto the blue plaid afghan spread over his knees. With a courtly unfurling of his hand, he motions me to the chair across from him. His gestures seem Mediterranean today. He’s a king, granting favors.

“Paolo has left for the day, so I can only offer you these,” he adds, motioning to a dish of dusty mints on the table between us.

“I’m fine George, thank you,” I answer, fascinated. I loosen my suit jacket and take the proffered seat. George’s palms are joined together, the long index fingers resting on his lips as we regard each other. His brown eyes shine.

“How well you look!” he enthuses, sitting back. “Certainly you appeal to me more than your predecessor. I believe marriage suits you!”

“When I see her. We’re working all the time, we’re both…we both have similar professions. What were you thinking, when I came in?”

“Ah! Down to business, eh? Well-- two things, really. Mostly I was at sea.”

“Really? At sea?”

“Remembering the days. Dipping into…how to say it…dipping into the river of time. Dipping into the river of time, and extracting a few drops to quench the thirst for days gone by. What else, at my age?” He laughs silently, shakes his head. He looks at me with something like pity. “How free we were then, my friend, how very free! I do not believe such freedom is to be had today.”

“Mmmm, you may be right. I like your beret, George. French?”

“Corsican, in fact-- the Isle of Deep Ravines. If this thing could talk! But as it can’t, perhaps I should?”

“Oh, please—I want you to.”

His magnificent head eases back. He joins his hands as he smiles at the ceiling. “Wherever to begin? How to make you see—perhaps…well, it was at this time of year one heard the old and sacred call. And didn’t we answer it, following the seasonal urgings!”

“And ahhh…what call was that?”

“Ah! Ask the birds! The south, the south! I heard it earlier, as the wind came through those pines outside. The very trees, the south! The south! Urging on whoever might be left. ” He sighed. “I pity I can answer that call no more.”

“So this wasn’t—you weren’t living round here then, these times of…uhm, freedom?”

“The merchant marine, my friend, the merchant marine. We were called merchant mavericks, for we signed on for only one hitch at a time, so we might follow the heart’s instructions.”

“And this time of year—you were saying--”

“Yes! But summers—let me begin with summers. They were sweeter then, greener--summers would find us in some place of great Northern gaiety—Copenhagen, Oslo, Reykjavik—the farther north the better.”

“Really?”

“Of course! You see, after such darkness as visits these winters every winter, the people come out to feast and dance in the never-ending light of spring and summer, until life loses its dullness entirely and one cannot distinguish today from tomorrow. All days become holy when they are freed from the burden of names and their corresponding behaviors. The bright red and yellow local costumes, a green that astonished the eye, made from the dye of a particular flax known to grow only in the northern realms of the Reindeer--the processions, the holidays, learning the dances, following your lover into the fragrant boreal forest to feast on wild berries and each other—ah!

“But--” George shrugs, opens up his palms. “All too soon the northern shadows return. The nights begin to assert themselves, the people grow thoughtful—but then, here comes the sweet voice of the south, singing her songs. One finds oneself gazing southward more often, always southward, wondering what might be over that horizon. Then down to the docks we would hurry, the only question being to which southern port would we embark? My own favorite route often found me on what we called ‘the cheese boat.’ Rotterdam and Le Havre, then Normandy, the harvest dances round the hay piles, but then of course Paris, to slake the insatiable French appetite for cheese—and we would find ourselves catching up to summer all over again. Ah, those smells and colors…and the Sunday mornings of Paris…”

He leans in closer and holds my eye.

“There are several Sunday mornings in particular I am recalling now. Mmmm, her name was Claudette—a student of art. Her father fished for eels by night farther up the Seine, beneath Burgundian stars. We would take his boat Sundays and let the waters lead us where they might. Drifting, the green poplars and copper beeches and chartreuse willows leaning in to watch us and they meeting overhead, their leaves and branches entwining, and the light coming down all spangled, all lime-colored. Then, a shower of bird-song falling down upon us, and our words and cooings of love intermingled did not seem out of place with these songs. And after love, I would play my squeezebox, while Claudette would sing—though sometimes she would lean over the gunwales and wash her hair in the river water, which she said was beneficial—the color of burnished copper, her hair.

“But then, soon enough, the leaves take on this same color, as if in sympathy. One afternoon, it pleases the Bois de Boulogne to flush up like a robin’s breast and one morning, a week later, the sun stabs you awake, you among the tangled sheets alone. In the kitchen with the view of Montmartre, there is a lingering aroma of coffee, and a note, alongside a croissant-- and she is back to University, back to her favorite odors of oils and gouache and linen canvas-- which is just as well, as one’s own southern smells are rising in the fresh yeast of memory. And these are…ripening olives. Orange blossoms, the lavender fields of Provence and, farther along, cliff-hanging, sun-bleached villages of white, beneath an Aegean sky so blue it is nearly black, beneath the wine-dark sea that Homer speaks of, and the wine that our ships would carry across it, calling, always calling…can’t you hear it? And the scent of your lover’s skin in those isles of love, gleaming skin and limbs bathed in rosemary and lemons, sometimes a young woman, sometimes a young man and it makes no difference, everyone is a lover in these isles-- everyone loves, nobody minds. Somewhere I have sketches, as I drew then, a habit from Claudette…some are private as you can understand, but perhaps the next time—and one evening, oh, one evening we ascended a mountain sacred to Aphrodite. How the junipers poured out their aromas, like confessions to the midnight air! As we climbed higher the stars blazed out, and they seemed to whisper encouragement, to call out their names and ask to be known, and I distinctly remember how when we reached the summit—“

We both start as my beeper goes off intrusively. I hunt for it, my notebook clattering to the floor, only to find it’s the new Blackberry, hiding in my bottomless kit bag. George looks startled, accusatory.

‘I’m Sorry, George, it’s just…one moment…just…”

“As you wish. It must…be important.”

“Not really, but…necessary,” I fumble, as I send a distinctly ungrammatical response. “Okay, I’m good. So…you were saying?”

But George’s arms are folded, his head turned to the wall. The day has leaked away from this room, as days will. The attendant has not yet put on the lights. I know from experience there will be no more today. But still—

“Please, George?” I try to hide the pleading quality, fail.

Nothing.

“Until the next time, then,” I mumble, rising.

In the adjacent nurses’ station, I fill out the necessary forms. “I’m cutting most of these scripts in half,” I mumble, as a nurse plods in. “For George. George Shattuck.” From the corner of my eye I see her halting, abrupt displeasure.

“Oh.”

“You object?”

“He’s…he’s more trouble when you do that,” she says, observing my wedding ring. “He gives us fits and keeps the other patients up half the night with his stories. Yesterday to sail a hot air balloon across the Pacific.” She pauses. “Dr. Miller never did that.”

“I’m not Dr. Miller. I…don’t suppose you know much of his personal history? George?”

“As it turns out, I do. I grew up here. He was in my mother’s high school class.”

“He was never…he wasn’t in the merchant marine?

“Oh no, Doctor-- oh God, no.” She laughs, as if this might be something we could make common cause over. “I never knew him. But I knew who he was. Used to write endless letters to the editor, and recite his poetry at Town Day. When they had Town Day. Took over his father’s hardware store and never left town. Went out of business when Wal-Mart came in. Been here ever since.”

Later, driving home-- and however to explain this lingering in a nameless parking lot? Stolen minutes, when I’m expected, and perhaps mildly wanted, elsewhere? And all to watch the November wind push an empty plastic bag across the infinity of empty space--

Here’s that odd dismay again, lying bitter upon my tongue like a strange medieval poison. I resume my cold way home, but my malaise grows keener when the car’s guidance system informs me that I am traveling due north.

Pepe Escobar on US Role in Egypt

2011-02-07T08:17:00.001-05:00

Why the US Fears Arab Democracy

By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times
Posted on February 6, 2011, Printed on February 7, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149813/

Anybody believing that Washington's "orderly transition" led by Vice President Omar Suleiman (aka Sheikh al-Torture, according to protesters and human-rights activists) could satisfy Egyptian popular will believes Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin could have gotten away with a facelift.

The young, urban masses in Egypt fighting for bread, freedom, democracy, Internet, jobs and a decent future - as well as their counterparts across the Arab world, two-thirds of the overall population - see right through it.

Real "change we can believe in" (the Egyptian version) means not only getting rid of the dictator of 30 years but of his torturer-in-chief, who happens to be so far a key interlocutor of Washington, Tel Aviv and European capitals, and a key exponent of a regime rotten to the core, dependent on pitiless exploitation of its own citizens, and receiver of US aid to pursue agendas virtually no one would vote for in the Arab world.

"Orderly transition" may also be regarded as a ghastly euphemism for sitting on the fence - way distinct from an explicit call for democracy. The White House has morphed into a succession of white pretzels trying to salvage the concept. But the fact is that as much as Pharaoh Mubarak is a slave to US foreign policy, US President Barack Obama is boxed in by geopolitical imperatives and enormous corporate interests he cannot even dream of upsetting.

A crash course on 'stability'

To cut to the chase; it's all about oil and Israel. That's the essence of Washington's foreign policy for the past six decades as far as the Middle East, Arabs and the Muslim world at large are concerned. This has implied coddling an array of dictators and assorted autocracies, and sprinkling their countries with military bases. A crucial example - the story on how the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) brought down democracy in Iran in 1953. Geostrategically, the code word for this state of things is "stability".

Egypt plays out a very special strategic role. This is how Obama himself spelled out the strategic value of Hosni Mubarak and his regime when he went to Cairo in June 2009 to deliver his freedom message to the Arab world; "He has been a stalwart ally in many respects to the United States. He has sustained peace with Israel which is a very difficult thing to do in that region."

So as one of the pillars of the "cold peace" with Israel, Egypt is a paradigm. It's a bipartisan phenomenon, in US terms; Republicans and Democrats see it the same way. There's the Suez Canal, through which flows 1.8 million barrels of crude a day. But "partner with Israel" in the 1979 Camp David accords is what explains all the billions of dollars showered on the Egyptian military and the three decades of unconditional support to the corrupt Mubarak military dictatorship (and make no mistake, the US implication in that vast shop of horrors is all documented in the vaults of the regime). On a parallel track, "stability" also translates as a lousy quality of life for virtually the totality of Egyptians; democratic rights of local populations are always secondary to geostrategic considerations.

The dominant geostrategic status quo in the Middle East, that is the Washington/Tel Aviv axis, has hypnotized Western public opinion to accept the myth that Arab democracy = Islamic fundamentalism, disregarding how all attempts of popular rebellion in the Arab world over the past decades have been squashed. The Israeli government goes beyond this equation; for Tel Aviv it's Islamic fundamentalism = terrorism, ergo, Arab democracy = terrorism. Under this framework, Mubarakism is an essential ally more than ever.

It's me or chaos

Yet the fact that former president Anwar Sadat made a deal with Israel in 1979 in exchange of precious gifts from the US - a system perpetuated under Mubarak - does not mean that Egypt and Israel engage in French-kissing.

Take for example Egyptian state TV insistently spreading the blatant lie of Israeli spies in the streets of Cairo disguised as Western journalists; that led to concerted, terrifying attacks not only on foreign journalists but on Egyptians working with them. And, believe it or not, Mubarakism had the gall to include the Israeli Mossad, along with the US, plus Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas as co-participants in a huge conspiracy to overthrow it.

This happens while in fact it was the Jihad Amn-Ad-Dawlah ("The Security of the State Apparatus") - the most sinister of the state security agencies, a counter-terrorism unit with extremely close ties with the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Mossad - that unleashed its goon squads over the protesters and foreign media alike, funded by the billionaire cronies of Mubarak's son Gamal (who has not fled to London after all).

To add to the perversity, Mubarak then says he's "fed up" and wants to quit but can't because otherwise there will be chaos - the chaos the regime's own goons provoked; meanwhile his number two, Suleiman, blames the Muslim Brotherhood for the "riots".

As much as the revolution threatens the political survival of an entire ruling class in Egypt - including the current military junta of Suleiman, Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, Defense Minister Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi and Lieutenant General Sami Annan, chief of staff of the army - the new young actors, because they are an expression of local communities, are not manipulated by foreign powers. These are new, more autonomous, more unpredictable, more self-respecting actors. Another factor to scare the US "stability" myth.

What's most extraordinary is that as these new actors emerging in the Maghreb, Mashrek and Middle East directly collide with the Israeli obsession in keeping the extremely unbalanced status quo (which includes the genocide in slow motion of Palestine), they provoke a major strategic clash between US interests and Israel.

The Obama administration had understood that the absolutely crucial issue to be solved was the Palestinian tragedy. Now the administration is absolutely helpless to deal with an Israel under the acute paranoia of being encircled by "hostile" forces; Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, an ever more assertive mildly Islamist Turkey, a "nuclear" Iran, an Egypt dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood ...

Truth will set you free - maybe

"But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed, confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice, government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people, the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas. They are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere."

This was Obama in Cairo in 2009. Is America really supporting these rights now that Egyptians are willing to die for them?

As much as Obama went to Cairo to "sell" the case for democracy (and one may say he's succeeded), one may bet that the Washington establishment will do all it can to try to "damage control" really democratic elections in Egypt. The financial markets and Machiavellian politicians (and we're not even considering rabid rightwingers) are almost praying for the Brotherhood to become an alternative reality so they can finally legitimate the concept of an Egyptian military dictatorship forever.

It escapes them that the real actors in Egypt, the urban, middle class masses - the people peacefully protesting in Tahrir square - know very well that fundamentalist Islam is not the solution.

The two top mass organizations in Egypt are the Brotherhood and the Christian Coptic church - both persecuted by the Mubarak regime. But it's new movements that will be crucial in the future, such as the young labor activists of April 6, associations of white and blue collar workers, as well as the New Wafd Party, a revival of the party that dominated Egypt from the 1920s to the 1950s, when the country had real parliamentary elections and real prime ministers.

The Brotherhood hardly would get more than 30% of the votes in a free and fair election (and they are firm believers in parliamentary democracy). They are not hegemonic, and definitely not the face of the new Egypt. In fact there's a strong possibility they would evolve to become similar to the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in Turkey. Moreover, according to a recent Pew poll, 59% of Egyptians want parliamentary democracy, and 60% are against religious extremism.

Egypt essentially makes money out of tourism, tolls in the Suez Canal, manufacture and agricultural exports, and aid (mostly military) such as the annual $1.5 billion from the US. It badly needs to import grain (the reason behind increasing food prices, one of the key reasons for the protests). All of this spells out a dependency on the outside world. The Egyptian souq (the bazaar), with a large Coptic Christian community, totally depends on foreign tourists.

It's fair to imagine a really representative, democratic government in Egypt would inevitably open the Gaza border and de facto liberate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And that those Palestinians, fully supported by their neighbors in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria in the fight for their legitimate rights, would turn the "stability" of the region upside down.

So it boils down to the same old song. For bipartisan Washington, there are "good" democracies (those that keep serving US strategic interests) and "bad" democracies which vote "wrong" (such as in Gaza, or in a future Egypt, against US interests).

This is the dirty secret of the "orderly transition" in Egypt - which implies Washington only meekly condemning the bloody Mubarakism wave of repression of protesters and international media. That's considered OK - as long as the military dictatorship remains in place and the glacial status quo is maintained. Moreover, sacrosanct Israel came out swinging praising Mubarak; this also means Tel Aviv will do everything to "veto" Mohamed ElBaradei as an opposition leader.

You're talking to me?

Washington after all bought Egypt and its army. Suleiman works for Washington, not Cairo. That's another meaning of "stability".

Washington never really cared about Egypt's martial law, the crushing of labor demands, the human rights abuses, not to mention the high unemployment among the young, and college graduates barely surviving under a mega-corrupted system. Over the years, "stability" literally killed a Nile of labor activists, young idealists, human rights workers and progressive democrats.

In a sane world - and if Obama had the will - the White House would back people power unconditionally. One can imagine, in terms of improving the US's image, what a roaring success that would be.

For starters, it would instantly erase the perception in the Arab street that Mubarak's Frankenstein response - totally ignoring Obama - shows how the dictator believes he can get away with it. One more instance of US irrelevance in the Middle East - the tail wagging the dog.

Shameless self-aggrandizing Mubarak must have thought; if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can publicly humiliate Obama, why not me?

The Arab street is very much aware how the Mubarak system was bribed to send natural gas to Israel at ridiculous prices; how it enforces the blockade against civilians in Gaza; and how, bribed by the US, it acts as Israel's bouncer. Netanyahu stealing Palestinian land or starving Gaza to death, and Mubarak using billions in US military aid to crush people power - this is all seen by the Arab street as supported by Washington. And then clueless US rightwingers carp on "why do they hate us".

Obama saying to Mubarak "now" means "now" - and meaning not only himself but the whole gang in uniform - would alienate the hyper-powerful Zio-con lobby. Not such a bad deal, considering that after all the oil is in Arab lands, which double as the crux of Middle East politics. But that won't happen. "Orderly transition"? Beware of what you wish for.

Pepe Escobar is a journalist based in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

© 2011 Asia Times All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149813/

[w2]

Down the Tubes!

2010-12-01T09:18:00.001-05:00

Why Europeans Think We're Insane

By Democrats Ramshield, Daily Kos
Posted on December 1, 2010, Printed on December 1, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/149010/

(Written by an American expat living in the European Union).

It wasn't until I left America that I started to realize how badly the American plutocrat owned media lies to the American people through its disinformation campaign.

Well today for a span of at least this one Daily Kos diary, you will get to see what the American plutocrat owned media never wants you to see, and that is how Europe in particular and the world in general has come to see America as a country in decline, whose people are so badly misinformed by the media, they actually don't realize that America is the only major industrialized nation in the world that by right of law does not offer universal medical access, paid sick leave, paid maternity leave and paid annual leave. It just seems almost impossible to get that word out to the American people. Even diaries on that subject at the Kos top out at just over 2,000 views. Let's please remember the purpose of the plutocrat owned commercial media isn't so much to inform us but rather to sell commercial advertising space.

Therefore this diary today will try to do something different. It will show you what the European media is saying about the American dream and you will be shocked!

Here the British Guardian newspaper says that the so-called American middle class lifestyle for most people was fake and that was financed by three decades of a debt bubble which has now gone bust. The credit ride of working class folks living a middle class lifestyle is dead and gone. Is this article stating bluntly that it's over? The only remaining question is, will it ever come back? I mean, how long can people ride a wave of endless debt before the ride is over, all while pretending to be middle class? Is that what this British Guardian newspaper article is saying? Well, to that end I offer the quote below and a link to the full article. Please read it and decide for yourself what it says.

(Guardian.co.uk) America's new poor: the end of the middle-class dream
America's middle class is disappearing. A lifestyle sustained for 30 years by rising debt is dissolving as the credit dries up. And the question beyond the crisis is: can it ever come back?
---------------------------------------------------------
In the midterm elections politicians have promised to "do something" for the middle class. The kindest thing they could do is tell the truth: Americans have been living a middle-class lifestyle on working-class wages – and bridging the gap with credit.
And it's over.

In a free-market society the real middle class is always a minority: if your street has a gate and a security camera at the end of it then you are middle class. A real middle-class kid can afford a college education, not a web-based degree. The real middle-class family does not skip meals or find its automobiles trapped in the repair shop because of unpaid bills.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...

This article below declares the American dream is withering away and talks about the use of food stamps in America which is growing. To which we should note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps to humiliate its poor in the grocery checkout line.

(International Business Times) - 'American Dream' withers as tent cities mushroom in promised land
By Jijo Jacob | November 21, 2010
The nation that once gloated over its ability to feed the entire world is seeing an explosion of poverty: The number of people surviving on food stamps is rising as biting unemployment refuses to abate, personal incomes have been falling while the debt bubble is inflating with each passing day and, in a more startling representation of the grim reality, tent cities are mushrooming as more and more people are pushed out of their ‘underwater’ homes.
http://uk.ibtimes.com/...

Did you know that while 50 million Americans go hungry, the corporatist fatcats are paying themselves ever larger salaries? Shocked Europeans looking over seeing 50 million hungry Americans, the Europeans can't understand how America could let this happen to its own people.

(Daily Mail.co.uk) - America starves as executive pay rockets:
50MILLION people go hungry while Wall Street fatcats take home millions
By Daniel Bates
16th November 2010

A record one in six American families went hungry last year because they did not have enough food, a shock survey has revealed.

Some 17.4million U.S. households - 50 million people - were classified as ‘food insecure’ which meant they regularly skipped meals even if they wanted to eat. Others went for entire days without eating and handed round smaller portion sizes to make their meagre offerings suffice.

The news comes as it is revealed that top U.S. executives saw their pay and bonuses shoot up last year in the face of the worst recession for 80 years.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...

The article below is from the British Guardian newspaper which asks, why do working class Americans keep electing millionaires to represent them in the Congress, and then proposes radically 'why not elect some poor working stiffs to Congress instead? At least maybe those people could identify with their lives, needs and working class values instead of electing millionaires to Congress, who cannot identify with their working class constituent's needs, because they live in the millionaire's bubble.

(Guardian.co.uk) - US Congress aka the millionaires' club

No wonder the DC political class has a bad name – it's filthy rich. Here's a revolutionary idea: why not elect some poor people? It is one of the great moans of vast numbers of American voters: Washington politicians are just not like them. They are different. They are a breed apart, unable to understand what real life is like for tens of millions of ordinary folks.
--------------------------------------------------------
No wonder America's body politic can seem to be a little slow when it comes to reflecting the day-to-day concerns of many Americans. No wonder it is currently obsessed with working out a way to keep President George W Bush's tax cuts for the rich in place. No wonder it is seemingly willing to let slide vital unemployment benefits for millions of Americans who are now entering the ranks of the long-term jobless. No wonder it is keen to bail out the financial industry and keep bankers cashing their bonus cheques, even as it shrugs its shoulders at creating jobs for those outside the vaulted halls of the finance industry.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/...

Did you know that the British Telegraph newspaper says America has the least generous unemployment system? Let's consider that in Britain, their unemployment benefits never run out. Another example is in Germany, when your unemployment benefits ran out, you get unemployment assistance called HartzIV and it also never runs out. Under HartzIV, while unemployment, their people still get medical coverage. Why do the unemployed all over the European Union get medical coverage and the unemployed in America don't? Why is that? More over, why isn't the mainstream American media telling you this? Because most people in America don't know this. I mean, why are you having to read about this on a Daily Kos blog? Is journalism in America dead?

(Telegraph.co.uk) America: the least generous unemployment system in the world
How is it that the American economy manages year-in-year-out to outperform its European neighbours in economic terms? There is no simple answer, of course, but this chart might hold some of the clues. It shows the comparative generosity of long-term unemployment benefits around the world – and guess who is right at the very bottom?

This is the carrot-and-stick method of galvanising your population: work hard and you can make millions; don’t work and you’re in real trouble. If you were after some evidence of how the US has managed to enshrine hard-working values in its citizens, this chart is probably a good place to start. And these figures matter.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/...

In my experience as an American expat living in the European Union, the uniform response of Europeans seems to be shock at the fact that Americans while unemployed have no medical insurance. This fact almost never appears in the American plutocrat owned media, except in very forgettable sound bites.

The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy
Author: T.R. REID

Chapter 6 The European Social Model (p. 148 - 149)
The helping hand of the social model is particularly evident when a worker becomes unemployed. Americans on the unemployment rolls tend to get a monthly government check, together with help in buying food and paying heat and light bills. At some level, when his savings fall low enough, an American worker may also apply for free government-supplied health care through Medicaid. In Europe, by contrast, a worker is "made redundant"- that's the brutal British term for being laid off - will get a housing benefit, a heat and light benefit, a food benefit, a child care benefit, a monthly unemployment payment that is almost always higher than the American standard.

The European, of course, will have the same access as everybody else to the public health care system. The American system, in which you lose your health insurance when you lose your job, strikes Europeans as exactly backward. "I don't understand your approach to health," a junior minister in Sweden's health department told me once. "It seems to me that your country takes away the insurance when people most need it."

The chart below which the Telegraph is referring to shows America ranking last in terms of unemployment benefits.

"In the United States, the figure varies from state to state, but overall a couple with two children and an income a little below average will have about 50 percent of earnings replaced by public assistance in case of unemployment. In France, the replacement ratio for the same family is 86 percent; in Britain 83 percent; in Germany 74 percent; in Sweden and the Netherlands 90 percent."

(The United States of Europe by TR Reid, 2004; page 149)

Here the German magazine Der Spiegel says America is in decline.

(Spiegel) - A Superpower in Decline - Is the American Dream Over?
The unemployment rate in the United States is at about 10 percent. But when the people who have stopped looking for work and are not registered anywhere are included, the real number is likely to be closer to 20 percent. For the first time since the Great Depression, Americans have a problem with long-term unemployment.
http://www.spiegel.de/...

Did you know that 132 million Americans have no dental insurance, whereas everyone in the European Union has access by law to some kind of dental plan.

The statistic that is being widely reported in the European press is that we have 59 million medically uninsured in America. From a country that boasts 403 billionaires, this is a scandal! While we can all be proud Americans, we don't have to be proud of the inaccessibility of the US health care system. We can do better than this.

Number of Americans without Health Insurance on the Rise
Of the 59 million who don’t happen to be covered with a health insurance, a majority of the people happen to be suffering from a lot of chronic health conditions.
http://topnews.co.uk/...

Source: http://www.cepr.net/...

After reading this quote below, ask yourself: Can America do better than this when we have 60 million people without paid sick leave?

Roughly 60 million American workers have no paid sick leave, and only a minority can draw pay if they stay home with sick children. The lack of paid leave is especially acute in this country among low-wage workers, food-service workers and part-timers, among others. Many other countries do better. According to Dr. Jody Heymann, director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University, more than 160 countries ensure that all their citizens receive paid sick leave and more than 110 of them guarantee paid leave from the first day of illness.

Why don't we do what they do in Britain? Bail out the unemployed by making their unemployment benefits permanent. Instead in the British UK Progressive we see a quote from Robert Reich telling us that the new Congress is unlikely to even extend unemployment benefits. It seems that in America, the Congress only bails out Wall Street and not the working class.

Why the Lame Duck Congress Must Extend Jobless Benefits For Hard-hit Families But Not Tax Cuts For the Rich
by Robert Reich
America’s long-term unemployed — an estimated 4 million or more — constitute the single newest and biggest social problem facing America.
Now their unemployment benefits are about to run out, and the lame-duck Congress may not have the votes to extend them. (You can forget about the next Congress.) The long-term unemployed can’t get work...
http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/...

We all know that America presently has 59 million medically uninsured Americans. Here is a British newspaper called the Daily Mail that printed an alarming headline.

(Daily Mail) One in FIVE Americans is mentally ill as rising unemployment takes its toll
The 2009 mental health survey hints at the impact of record unemployment rates, which last year hit a 25-year high as struggling employers slashed jobs to cope with a weak economy. For many, lost employment meant loss of health insurance, leaving many of the nation's mentally ill unable to get treatment.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...

Michael Moore interviews Tony Benn about America's indebtedness.

(Full Video Transcript)

"I think democracy is the most revolutionary thing in the world. Far more revolutionary than socialist ideas or anybody else's idea because if you have power you use it to meet the needs of you and your community. And this idea of choice which capital talks about all the time you've got to have a choice, choice depends on the freedom to choose and if you're shackled with debt you don't have the freedom to choose. People in debt become hopeless and hopeless people don't vote. They always say that that everyone should vote but I think that if the poor in Britain or the United States turned out and voted for people who represented their interests it would be a real democratic revolution; and so they don't want it to happen so keeping people hopeless and pessimistic.

See I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralize them. An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern, and I think there's an element in the thinking of some people; we don't want people to be educated, healthy and confident because they would get out of control. The top 1% of the world's population owns 80% of the worlds wealth its incredible that people put up with it. But their poor, their demoralized, their frightened and therefore they think perhaps the safest thing to do is to take orders and hope for the best."
- Tony Benn, former British politician

Conclusion: This is the reason why we have to support President Obama and the Democrats because the Republicans will never support universal medical access to all Americans and will never support a European style social safety net for working class America. The simple fact is, while we can all be proud Americans, we don't have to be proud of the broken American medical insurance system or the weak American social safety net.

I'm an expat American living in the European Union. As I come from a business and economics background, my primary interest is in supporting health care reform issues.

© 2010 Daily Kos All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149010/

Fionnbhar the Dog Recovering

2010-11-30T21:01:00.002-05:00

Fionn (FIN) the Dog has had a rough couple of months, which means of course that I have as well. It all began at the beginning of August, on a lovely day, when I was working up in Sandown, NH, building stone walls, a pleasant enough though arduous task, especially when one is in the Granite State and there is plenty of stone at hand, and when one is working cheek-to-jowl with a beautiful conservation land of woods and wetlands, as we were. From time to time we would set Fionn free in the fenced-in backyard, and let him chase thrown balls. On this particular beautiful day, he chased the ball readily enough, but once at the ball he wouldn't pick it up. Instead he turned and looked at me.

The next day my dear friend Dermot and I went to Castle Island in S-B for lunch. It was a scorcher of a day. En route, Fionn was sitting in Dermot's lap. Dermot shifted, and Fionn began yelping in pain as I had never heard him yelp before. Once we got out of the car I went over his body inch by inch, but could nothing that made him wince, nothing swollen or bruised or battered. Over the next few days he would do this intermittently-- again i could find nothing wrong with him. Then it became apparent that he could not, or would not, open his mouth. He stopped barking. He stopped yawning. He grew listless. I had to hand-feed him soft liquidy stuff. A trip to the vet (the first of many) resulted. They thought he had suffered a head trauma of some kind, and that, while the wound was healing, an infection had started and gone into the hinge area of his jaw. They put him on a strong antibiotic, and said if that didn't work, they'd have to go in there for tests and possible surgery-- it would be delicate, as the area was so close to his brain. The meds seemed to do some good, as slowly he got better, and began yawning again (though only halfway) and barking again. When the meds were up, he had recovered perhaps 75%, and I was loathe to have him be subject to invasive testing, as it seemed nature was taking her course and healing him.

Such was not the case. We woke up one morning and his face was swollen to twice its size. One eye was closed with the swelling. I thought it was some kind of allergy, as he kept rubbing at it, to the point where he rubbed away the fur and skin. It was a Sunday and I couldn't bring him back to my vet until the next day, where I was told that he had a very serious abscess-- the worst my vet had seen in 40 years of practice-- and that he needed to go immediately to the emergency hospital. We hastened to the New England Veterinary Referral Hospital in Woburn, a state-of-the-art emergency care hospital that is more like a modern day hospital for humans. They performed surgery on him the next day, and kept him there for most of that week. When he came home, whimpering still and all stitched up, and half his head shaved, we had a few sleepless nights while we fought over getting his meds into him, and to keep his bonnet on. That was four weeks ago today, and I'm happy to say that it appears he's made a total recovery.

We had a lot of time at home, and during that time I have (more or less) finished Happy Land, the novel I've been working on for about four years. I may self-publish an e-version of the book this winter, once I have a new website up where one can get e-book versions of my first three books, which started going out of print when my first publisher was sold several years ago-- so stay tuned for updates on that. And to all who sent prayers, notes, flowers, and other forms of encouragement during Fionn's time of travail, a huge thank you-- your support means more to me than I can say.

Post Election Thoughts

2010-11-05T20:22:00.000-04:00

Sent from a friend:
Parental advisory: WHERE'S THE FUCKING OUTRAGE!!! Help me out, I'm getting sick of trying to explain to Australians (even the conservative ones) just how the world's biggest so-called Democracy can be so full of stupid, delusional, racist, self-destructive, dumbass fuckwits who vote for the very same thugs who have been robbing them blind for nearly 30 fuckin years!!!! Sorry to rant, but I am so pissed off, frustrated and disgusted (yet again) that MY country is once again is being taken over by these fuckin dinosaurs!!! I'm talking about these lying, arrogant, greedy politicians, vicious pundits on FuxNews and plundering corporations who are sucking the life out of everything good, decent and right (including the planet). I am hoping to move back there someday, but I have a 5 year old who I think deserves a far better future than what we will get with the Tea Party hypocrites and their masters who are against everything and everyone except their own narrow-minded dumbass selfish interests.

But then what should we expect when nearly US $4 billion was spent on this midterm election, mostly by large corporations who can spend unlimited and undisclosed amounts of cash to essentially buy our congress. In an assault to Democracy a recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has shredded what little integrity the US electoral system previously had. This is actually far more damaging than the supreme courts decision to hand Bush the election in 2000.

Millions of frustrated poor and middle class white voters who have been victims of Bush era policies are represented by the Tea Party which has become a pawn masterfully exploited by the Republican party, the very same folks who drove the US economy off the cliff in the first place (let's not forget they were enabled by spineless democrats). The Republican party is (and has been since Reagan) a shell for the most powerful corporations and richest elite and will never allow a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Obama tried to compromise with these extremists and look what he got. Republicans and their corporate masters who run the US cannot be reasoned with, they are ruthless and will not stop until they own, exploit and control everything for their. FOX news controls the agenda and all reason, dialogue, and decency goes out the window.

That said, the Democrats are mostly spineless bureaucrats who have lost their soul. The corporate hacks that derailed the economy are largely still in charge of fixing it thanks to Democrats who should have fired all these fuckers. These same corporations WE bailed out have funded the election of many of the rightwing politicians who want to deregulate already pathetically weak banking rules. SOCIALISM FOR THE RICH IS ALIVE AND WELL IN AMERIKA!

If reasonable people don't start to raise hell then you can kiss any reasonable semblance of Democracy goodbye.

Below is a letter from CREDO a nonpartisan organization that works on restoring our Democracy followed by some actions (at the end) that we can take to counter the destruction of Democracy.

* * * * * * *

Dear Jeff,

What a truly brutal election. One rare exception was the crushing of Texas Oil's Proposition 23 in California (see CREDO's campaign at stoptexasoil.org), which proves that even unlimited corporate cash can be beaten back — if it is disclosed and fought by grassroots mobilization.

At CREDO, we fight hard on the issues, but we don't take sides in partisan elections. As someone who cares about progressive issues, there is no doubt that Tuesday's results will make for even harder times for our country. It is crazy making to realize just how extreme and misinformed much of the new Congress will be.

There is little reason to expect any useful legislation from the Tea Party-dominated House or the dysfunctional Senate. Swing votes in the Senate have really troublesome names: Lieberman, Nelson, Manchin, and Pryor. In fact, this Congress will do damage to anything even remotely progressive.

So let's take a look at what happened and what we can do now. Bear with us as this is a bit longer than our usual missives. The media, unfortunately but not surprisingly, will be of no use in making sense of Tuesday's results, and even less so in helping chart a course for the future.

There is a lot of evidence that the state of the economy, and employment in particular, drive the results of elections — and this one was no exception. As the saying goes, "If you think the economy is working, ask someone who isn't." We have an economy stuck in a deep ditch, with corporate profits and bank bonuses soaring while long-term unemployment is at near Depression levels.

The Republicans shrunk the first "stimulus" package and filled it with tax breaks, even as corporate Democrats helped them along, blocking any effort to restructure mortgages in bankruptcies, freeze foreclosures or force banks to lend money. The election outcome was partially baked in early 2009, when the White House preemptively conceded on the scale and provisions of the stimulus package and chose to coddle the banks. To watch this unfold was simply maddening.

Making matters worse were other factors. Among the most damaging were the actions of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which seemed energized by the new President, and took the radical step of rehearing a campaign finance case — now known forever as Citizens United. In ruling 5-4 that corporations have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money for and against candidates, the Court transformed the electoral landscape in a way potentially more profound than its 5-4 ruling that seated George W. Bush as president. As many predicted, the Citizens United ruling unleashed the greatest wave of corporate spending in history, though it's a safe bet to say that their spending in 2012 will make this year's outlay look modest.

In an astonishing turn of events, the right wing was able to kill — essentially murder in public view — the organization that registered millions of poor and working class African-American and Hispanic voters in the last six years. I am speaking of ACORN, of course. By editing video completely out of context, and using the right-wing media machine to perfection, Andrew Breitbart was able to convince the mainstream media and eventually Congress, that ACORN was an election-stealing organization that had no qualms giving advice to pimps on how to increase revenues. Fulfilling Karl Rove's wildest dreams, Congress, including most Democrats, voted to block public funding for any of ACORN's laudable and effective housing or tax assistance programs, and ACORN died a quiet death. There would be no millions of new registrants.

Traditions are important in the Senate, but almost always to the detriment of progressive change. The health care reform effort was a victim of Senate conventions. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, who chairs the critical Senate Finance Committee solely due to his long tenure, stalled development of a health reform package for many months in order to "negotiate" with Republicans on his committee. They weren't interested in the least, and walked away from the discussions muttering bizarre comments about reforms "killing grandma" and setting up "death panels," because Sarah Palin says so. The behavior of Baucus would be laughable if it were not so utterly destructive.

No matter what one thought of FOX News in the 2008 election, Murdoch's monster went on a rampage over the past two years. Serving as both an instigator and an amplifier for the craziest and most offensive pundits, FOX News misled and misinformed the American people on every issue, and effectively became the public face of the Republican Party. Glenn Beck's show became so toxic and spewed so much venom that one of his devoted fans took it upon himself to plot the execution of key leaders of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, who had figured prominently in Beck's rants. Fortunately, the madman (the fan, not Beck) was stopped before he accomplished his mission.

We could go on, of course, on all the missed opportunities, the cave-ins, the sell outs, and the unpopular and misguided war in Afghanistan.

But the results are in. The House of Representatives is in the hands of the most corrupt Speaker-in-waiting ever, the Tea Party is ascendant, and the U.S. Senate, however dysfunctional it has been, is poised to be much worse.

For those of us who had hopes that the Obama Administration could seize the moment and enact popular progressive changes, this is a bitter pill. And like many, we grieve at the lost opportunities.

* But now we need to brush off the dust, suck it up, and plunge back into substantive fights. Politics is not fair — indeed, U.S. elections are rigged in profound ways! But walking away is not an option at CREDO Action, and we hope you will join us in some of the actions below we think are strategic in the new political landscape:

1. Commit to Taking Down FOX News. So long as FOX News has any credibility within the Beltway, it will be a pipeline for malicious material that will poison our political culture. Join our friends at Color of Change: turnofffox.org/landing?credo.

2. Tell the Senate to pass the DISCLOSE Act during the lame duck session. We were able to defeat the Texas Oil Initiative, Prop 23 in California, in part because we knew who the enemy was — having disclosure of corporate contributions brings the enemy out in the open for us to take on and fight. The DISCLOSE Act passed the House and came within a single vote of passing the Senate. One vote. You can join this fight by taking action with Public Citizen at citizen.org/disclose-act-action.

3. Keep fighting to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. This issue will get resolved during the lame duck session. Take action at act.credoaction.com/campaign/bushtaxcuts.

4. Sign up for the fight for a constitutional amendment to reverse the Citizens United decision by declaring that corporations do not have the legal rights of humans. This may take years, if not decades, but we should start now. Please join Free Speech for People: freespeechforpeople.org/.

5. Tell the FCC to use its existing authority to establish and defend net neutrality. Our friends at Free Press are leading this charge: act2.freepress.net/sign/put_up/.

6. Demand that the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service investigate the political organizations set up by Karl Rove to launder millions of dollars in secret cash to change the outcome of elections. Act now at act.credoaction.com/campaign/investigate_crossroads.

7. Defend the EPA from castration by pro-coal interests in Congress. The EPA accomplished almost nothing during the Clinton years because the Gingrich-led Congress used the budget process to prohibit the agency from doing its work. This battle has already started. The Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign is a great way to join this fight: sierraclub.org/coal.

8. Convince the Obama administration to stop appealing progressive court rulings on matters like the Defense of Marriage Act, Don't Ask Don't Tell, and the state secrets defense against torture and wiretapping. Urge the Department of Justice to change its approach at act.credoaction.com/campaign/stop_appealing.

9. Urge Democratic senators to do away with lifetime tenure for committee chairs and open up all chair positions to majority vote elections. This will go a long way towards more progressive legislation. Take action with us at act.credoaction.com/campaign/end_seniority_system.

10. Demand that the Department of Justice enforce the provisions of the national voter registration law that require state governments to offer to register all voters at departments of public welfare and motor vehicles. Many state governments simply ignore these requirements and this is a cheaper and more inclusive way of registering voters than the campaigns of the now dead ACORN. Urge Attorney General Eric Holder to expand voter registration: credoaction.com/campaign/enforce_motor_voter.

I suspect you are angry and exhausted at this point. I know I am. But let us not forget that the values and ideals we fight for are greater than any one election. They still endure, and so must our fight. We have a lot of work to do.

Michael Kieschnick, CEO

CREDO Action from Working Assets

Bread and Circus

2010-10-13T09:33:00.000-04:00

Our Country Is Lost Believing in What It Sees on Screens, and We Are Going to Pay a Nasty Price for It

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on October 8, 2010, Printed on October 13, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148449/

This article first appeared on TruthDig.

Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. She exacted divine punishment on arrogant mortals who believed they could defy the gods, turn themselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around them. The price of such hubris was almost always death.

Nemesis, related to the Greek word némein, means “to give what is due.” Our nemesis fast approaches. We will get what we are due. The staggering myopia of our corrupt political and economic elite, which plunder the nation’s wealth for financial speculation and endless war, the mass retreat of citizens into virtual hallucinations, the collapsing edifices around us, which include the ecosystem that sustains life, are ignored for a giddy self-worship. We stare into electronic screens just as Narcissus, besotted with his own reflection, stared into a pool of water until he wasted away and died.

We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We believe that money, rather than manufactured products and goods, is real. We believe in the myth of inevitable human moral and material progress. We believe that no matter how much damage we do to the Earth or our society, science and technology will save us. And as temperatures on the planet steadily rise, as droughts devastate cropland, as the bleaching of coral reefs threatens to wipe out 25 percent of all marine species, as countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh succumb to severe flooding, as we poison our food, air and water, as we refuse to confront our addiction to fossil fuels and coal, as we dismantle our manufacturing base and plunge tens of millions of Americans into a permanent and desperate underclass, we flick on a screen and are entranced.

We confuse the electronic image, a reflection back to us of ourselves, with the divine. We gawk at “reality” television, which of course is contrived reality, reveling in being the viewer and the viewed. True reality is obliterated from our consciousness. It is the electronic image that informs and defines us. It is the image that gives us our identity. It is the image that tells us what is attainable in the vast cult of the self, what we should desire, what we should seek to become and who we are. It is the image that tricks us into thinking we have become powerful—as the popularity of video games built around the themes of violence and war illustrates—while we have become enslaved and impoverished by the corporate state. The electronic image leads us back to the worship of ourselves. It is idolatry. Reality is replaced with electronic mechanisms for preening self-presentation—the core of social networking sites such as Facebook—and the illusion of self-fulfillment and self-empowerment. And in a world unmoored from the real, from human limitations and human potential, we inevitably embrace superstition and magic. This is what the worship of images is about. We retreat into a dark and irrational fear born out of a cavernous ignorance of the real. We enter an age of technological barbarism.

To those entranced by images, the world is a vast stage on which they are called to enact their dreams. It is a world of constant action, stimulation and personal advancement. It is a world of thrills and momentary ecstasy. It is a world of ceaseless movement. It makes a fetish of competition. It is a world where commercial products and electronic images serve as a pseudo-therapy that caters to feelings of alienation, inadequacy and powerlessness. We may be locked in dead-end jobs, have no meaningful relationships and be confused about our identities, but we can blast our way to power holding a little control panel while looking for hours at a screen. We can ridicule the poor, the ignorant and the weak all day long on trash-talk shows and reality television shows. We are skillfully made to feel that we have a personal relationship, a false communion, with the famous—look at the outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson. We have never met those we adore. We know only their manufactured image. They appear to us on screens. They are not, at least to us, real people. And yet we worship and seek to emulate them.

In this state of cultural illusion any description of actual reality, because it does not consist of the happy talk that pollutes the airwaves from National Public Radio to Oprah, is dismissed as “negative” or “pessimistic.” The beleaguered Jeremiahs who momentarily stumble into our consciousness and in a desperate frenzy seek to warn us of our impending self-destruction are derided because they do not lay out easy formulas that permit us to drift back into fantasy. We tell ourselves they are overreacting. If reality is a bummer, and if there are no easy solutions, we don’t want to hear about it. The facts of economic and environmental collapse, now incontrovertible, cannot be discussed unless they are turned into joking banter or come accompanied with a neat, pleasing solution, the kind we are fed at the conclusion of the movies, electronic games, talk shows and sitcoms, the kind that dulls our minds into passive and empty receptacles. We have been conditioned by electronic hallucinations to expect happy talk. We demand it.

We confuse this happy talk with hope. But hope is not about a belief in progress. Hope is about protecting simple human decency and demanding justice. Hope is the belief, not necessarily grounded in the tangible, that those whose greed, stupidity and complacency have allowed us to be driven over a cliff shall one day be brought down. Hope is about existing in a perpetual state of rebellion, a constant antagonism to all centers of power. The great moral voices, George Orwell and Albert Camus being perhaps two of the finest examples, describe in moving detail the human suffering we ignore or excuse. They understand that the greatest instrument for moral good is the imagination. The ability to perceive the pain and suffering of another, to feel, as King Lear says, what wretches feel, is a more powerful social corrective than the shelves of turgid religious and philosophical treatises on human will. Those who change the world for the better, who offer us hope, have the capacity to make us step outside of ourselves and feel empathy.

A print-based culture, as writer Neil Postman pointed out, demands rationality. The sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” But our brave new world of images dispenses with these attributes because the images do not require them to be understood. Communication in the image-based culture is not about knowledge. It is about the corporate manipulation of emotions, something logic, order, nuance and context protect us against. Thinking, in short, is forbidden. Entertainment and spectacle have become the aim of all human endeavors, including politics, which is how Stephen Colbert, playing his television character, can be permitted to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Campaigns are built around the manufactured personal narratives of candidates, who function as political celebrities, rather than policies or ideas. News reports have become soap operas and mini-dramas revolving around the latest celebrity scandal.
Colleges and universities, which view students as customers and suck obscene tuition payments and loans out of them with the tantalizing promise of high-paying corporate jobs, have transformed themselves into resorts and theme parks. In this new system of education almost no one fails. Students become “brothers” or “sisters” in the atavistic, tribal embrace of eating clubs, fraternities or sororities. School spirit and school branding is paramount. Campus security keeps these isolated enclaves of privilege secure. And 90,000-seat football stadiums, along with their millionaire coaches, dominate the campus. It is moral leprosy.

The role of knowledge and art, as the ancient Greeks understood, is to create ekstasis, which means standing outside one’s self to give our individual life and struggle meaning and perspective. The role of art and scholarship is to transform us as individuals, not entertain us as a group. It is to nurture this capacity for understanding and empathy. Art and scholarship allow us to see the underlying structures and assumptions used to manipulate and control us. And this is why art, like intellectual endeavor, is feared by the corporate elite as subversive. This is why corporations have used their money to deform universities into vocational schools that spit out blinkered and illiterate systems managers. This is why the humanities are withering away.

The vast stage of entertainment that envelops our culture is intended to impart the opposite of ekstasis. Mass entertainment plays to the basest and crudest instincts of the crowd. It conditions us to have the same aspirations and desires. It forces us to speak in the same dead clichés and slogans. It homogenizes human experience. It wallows in a cloying nostalgia and sentimentalism that foster historical amnesia. It turns the Other into a cartoon or a stereotype. It prohibits empathy because it prohibits understanding. It denies human singularity and uniqueness. It assures us that we all have within us the ability, talent or luck to become famous and rich. It forms us into a lowing and compliant herd. We have been conditioned to believe—defying all the great moral and philosophical writers from Socrates to Orwell—that the aim of life is not to understand but to be entertained. If we do not shake ourselves awake from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet we will experience the awful and deadly retribution of the gods.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

An Essay from Chris Hedges

2010-10-13T07:53:00.001-04:00

Our Country Is Lost Believing in What It Sees on Screens, and We Are Going to Pay a Nasty Price for It

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on October 8, 2010, Printed on October 13, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148449/

This article first appeared on TruthDig.

Rutgers Holds Vigil for Victim of Secret Taping

2010-10-03T22:43:00.000-04:00

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Rutgers University held a silent vigil Sunday night to remember a student who committed suicide after his sexual encounter with a man in his dormitory room was secretly streamed online.

The tribute to 18-year-old freshman Tyler Clementi drew a few hundred people, many holding candles, to the school's campus in New Brunswick.

While some area religious officials briefly addressed the crowd during the hour-long vigil, few words were spoken by the participants. Most in attendance took the time to reflect on what had happened to Clementi, sharing hugs and holding hands with others in a show if unity.

Among those attending was Rutgers student Julie Burg, who said she wanted to spread the message that help is available for students in crisis.

"There are many groups anywhere you go to that could help support you," Burg told WCBS-TV in New York.

Burg was joined at the vigil by her mother, Annmarie Burg, who was saddened by the events leading to Clementi's death.

"It had to take such an unfortunate incident like this to create, probably, an even larger awareness," the mother said.

Prosecutors say Clementi's roommate and another student used a webcam to broadcast on the Internet live images of Clementi having the intimate encounter.

Clementi, a promising violinist, jumped off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River three days later. His body was identified Thursday.

Rutgers President Richard McCormick said the vigil was an opportunity for students and staff to come together and "reaffirm our commitment to the values of civility, dignity, compassion and respect."

The vigil was the latest in a series of remembrances for Clementi at the university that included the establishment of a Facebook group, In Honor of Tyler Clementi.

On Friday, students wore black and were encouraged to leave flowers or mementoes at a makeshift memorial for Clementi. The Rutgers Glee Club marched to the memorial and performed a rendition of "Rutgers Prayer," which is traditionally sung when an important member of the Rutgers community dies or a tragedy happens at the university.

On Saturday, the school had a moment of silence for Clementi before the start of its homecoming football game against Tulane.

Clementi's death was one of a string of suicides last month involving teens believed to have been victims of anti-gay bullying. On Friday, more than 500 people attended a memorial service for Seth Walsh, a 13-year-old central California boy who hanged himself after enduring taunts from classmates about being gay.

A Gaggle of Geese, a Husk of Hares

2010-09-29T09:37:00.002-04:00

FIONN THE DOG and I have been at the vet's several times of late (he suffered a head trauma which turned into an infection at the hinge of his jaw, which has made me crazy lately) and while waiting in one of the surgical offices, I came across this wonderful poster, which lists the proper, albeit increasingly archaic, names for groups of specific animals. Just had to share! As someone very near and dear to me noted recently, 'the world has lost much of its elegance.' So has our language. Perhaps we can resurrect some of these words by using them more frequently. For example, when at work, at an office meeting, one could say to one's superiors, especially if one were sick of working at that particular establishment, "Good morning, sirs and madames. May I say that walking into the room just now, you reminded me of nothing more than a Pace of Asses."

Speaking of a Pace of Asses, I am reminded of the time I visited Ireland about thirty years ago and was hanging out with some of my younger cousins at my family's farm in Castlemartyr, County Cork. Brian, who was 15 at the time, and I, went into the village to get some grain, and we took one of the asses with us to carry the grain back home. The ass had to go onto the walk-on scale outside the feed store to see how much grain we had purchased-- all well and good. But after the ass had been weighed, he refused to move. Not an inch!!! Brian tried coaxing, cajoling, shoving-- even, God help us, lighting matches near his hindquarters. Still the ass refused to move. Brian finally approached me, red-faced and sweating. "Oh no!" I thought, "He's going to ask a city-slicker like me to solve this problem." But no...."Uncle Joe," he said. "Can you ever tell me, in the name of all that's good, how in the world did our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and his family ever escape into Egypt on an ass?" So here we go:

A Litter of Pups. (yes-- especially if you've ever had to clean up after a bunch of puppies...)

A Flock of Sheep.

A String of Ponies.

A Covey of Patridges.

A Pride of Lions.

A Herd of Elephants.

A Plague of Locusts.

A Colony of Ants.

A Leap of Leopards.

A Pod of Seals.

A Sloth of Bears. (Anyone who has ever been chased by a bear would, I think, protest this one)

A Rafter of Turkeys.

A Pace of Asses.

A Walk of Snipe.

A Gam of Whales.

A Nest of Rabbitts.

A Gang of Elk.

A Fall of Woodcocks. My favorite bird. And during the male's mating ritual, they do seem to fall to the ground)

A Dule of Doves.

A Skulk of Foxes.

A Dissimulation of Birds.

A Spring of Teal.

A Peep of Chickens.

A Bevy of Roebucks.

A Business of Ferrets. (love this one)

A Bale of Turtles.

A Pitying of Turtledoves. (how poetic)

A Drift of Hogs. (wonderfully oxymoronic-- I can assure you that hogs don't 'drift' into one's home

A Paddling of Ducks.

A Siege of Herons. (maybe the way they fish?)

A Trip of Goats.

A Charm of Finches.

A Cete of Badgers.

A Deceit of Lapwings.

A Shoal of Bass.

An Exhaltation of Larks. (Lovely!)

A Drove of Cattle.

A Singular of Boars.

A Tidings of Magpies. (Lovely too!)

A Gaggle of Geese.

A Congregation of Plovers.

A Husk of Hares.

An Unkindness of Ravens.

A Labor of Moles.

A Richness of Martens.

A Cast of Hawks.

A Knot of Toads.

A Descent of Woodpeckers.

A Sounder of Swine.

A Mustering of Storks.

A Clutch of Eggs.

A Bouquet of Pheasants. (Lovely)

An Army of Caterpillars.

A Hover of Trout.

A Flight of Swallows.

A Troop of Kangaroos.

A Clowder of Cats.

A Watch of Nightingales.

A Barren of Mules.

A Shrewdness of Apes. (Rank speciesism!)

A Rag of Colts.

A Murmuration of Starlings. (Very apt, though I would suggest 'a shrillness.')

A Building of Rooks.

A Parliament of Owls. (For WHOM did you vote?)

A Murder of Crows. (Shakesperean!)

There were others, but at this point the vet came back into the room and my scribbling came to a premature end.

Full Moon Beer

2010-09-26T22:57:00.002-04:00

(If I wasn't a sober guy I would like to give this a try!)

Full moons are often associated with tides, insanity and creatures like werewolves, but it turns out they're also good for brewing beer.

In Peruwelz, a small, sleepy town in southern Belgium, a family-owned brewery has produced its first batch of specialist beer brewed by the light of a full autumnal moon.

It isn't so much a nod to mythology as a recognition of nature's impact on the science of brewing.

"We made several tests and noticed that the fermentation was more vigorous, more active," explained Roger Caulier, the owner of Brewery Caulier, which began in the 1930s when his grandfather started selling homemade beer from a handcart.

"The end product was completely different, stronger, with a taste lasting longer in the mouth," he said.

The full moon speeds up the fermentation process, shortening it to five days from seven, which adds extra punch to the beer without making it harsh, according to connoisseurs.

The finely balanced, gold-colored beer is 10 percent alcohol by volume, extremely strong by most European or U.S. standards but not uncommon in Belgium, where traditional monk-brewed beers frequently hit 10 or 12 percent.

"It goes down very well, no problem at all," said Joseph Francois, a journalist and beer expert who has tasted the brew.

Brewery Caulier, which uses methods dating from the 1840s and is well-known for its artisanal beers, plans to produce about 12,000 bottles of its full moon beer, called Paix-Dieu (Peace-God), which go on sale on October 31.

The idea came to Caulier after he visited a friend in Alsace, a winemaking region of eastern France, who told him about how he planned his entire production schedule according to the lunar calendar.

Caulier began experimenting and eventually came up with a nine-step process that includes using two types of hops and involves a two-week secondary fermentation process inside the bottle, not unlike the technique used to produce Champagne.

"It gives the product greater fame, a bit like for great vintage wines," he said.

"It could lead to collectors checking the differences between one vintage and another because there could very well be differences between every batch."

Being from a three-generation brewing family, Caulier is fascinated by the science behind the process. But he doesn't discount the mythical aspects of full moon beer either.

"Many farmers are convinced that the moon influences the quality of some of their products," he said."

You can feel agitated on full moons, you have births, you get many myths around the full moon and I think there is some truth behind them."

Either way, he's hoping that Paix-Dieu proves a hit and is even in talks to distribute it in the U.S. and Japan.

2010-08-12T08:09:00.004-04:00

Okay so I finally scored this four volume set of books I've been lusting over for years. I would spend my last dollar on books, and candles, or something utterly, wonderfully foolish like aromatherapy bath salts for years-- A Treasury of Irish Myth, Legend, and Folklore, in four volumes, reissued in leather and 22 kt gold by the Easton Press (Norwalk, CT) and now out of print. It's wonderful when a book has beauty in it; the experience can only be heightened when the physical book itself is a testament to the love and craft of the (almost) lost art of book making. Crisp, sturdy pages, beveled edges, a sewed-in satin ribbon marker, silk moire endpapers, leather covers, raised hubs on the spine...the works. And the smell! And, is there anything more beautiful than candlelight on the printed page?

Anyway, this four volume set (lavishly illustrated-- see the picture of Cuchulain above) was written by seminal poet W.B. Yeats and his sometime collaborator, Lady Augusta Gregory (both of whom were among the founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, 'where modern drama began,' as one critic puts it) and it's just wonderful-- wry, thought-provoking, fascinating, and highly entertaining. There is some juicy stuff in here, including the realization that seeing/hearing fairies (that word has a different connotation in Ireland than in the US-- in the former they can range from the bagpipe playing 'Gentry' to the monstrous stuff of nightmares) and being endowed with 'second sight,' were not matters of art or arrangement, but occurrences of everyday life. Indeed, one of the authors cited in the foreword, speaking about these matters, and specifically the amused disdain that city people have often felt for the 'country folk,' avers that we are congenitally endowed to engage-- and be engaged by-- the great invisible world, but that these senses have been washed away by our urban lives and strident upbringings, where belief in the invisible is usually punctured by adolescence: "It is a commonplace to call primitive people 'children of nature,' and to apply the same term to youngsters unspoilt by city living. Surely this is the key to everything. Are we not all born clear-sighted, and is it not our artificial surroundings and upbringing which destroys this ability?" Yeats himself, we are told, appears to have been a believer, "with a mind too subtle to be a skeptic." And as Yeats went about the crofters and farmers and fisherman of the rural regions, collecting these tales ("which are full of the vast and vague magnificence of the Celtic heart," he said) he found belief in such things as ordinary and commonplace as our own modern acceptance of city traffic on our morning commutes.

In one instance Yeats enters a farmhouse and asks of the old man of the home if he believes in Fairies. "Amn't I annoyed at them now?" the old man answers matter-of-factly. In another episode the same question is answered by a different man with, "There is fairies in in surely. And didn't my own father see the furth (firth) beyond full of them, and he passing on a moonlit night, and a little piper among them, and he playing music that mortal man never heard the like?" And, again, he was told by another that he himself "would not speak agin the fairies," for it's often he heard their music playing from the old bush behind the house.

On one occasion Yeats took part in a seance, wherein a young woman known in her village as a medium summons the Queen of the Fairies for him; he asks, of course, quite analytical questions. Finally he is told: "Be careful. Do not seek to know too much about us." There is also much talk of Jung, Swedenborg, NeoPlatoists, and the like. And then, of course, the stories themselves...

The Perseid Meteor Showers peak this evening, though some could be seen last night and again Friday night. It's always a toss-up as to how brilliant, or busted, the show will be from year to year. We'll have a bit of cloud cover here tonight in New England, so they say, but I'll be out looking away in case we should experience a chance clearing. I've always felt that, beginning with the Perseids in mid-August, we enter a special time of the year-- there's a pregnant hush in the air, as if summer heard the approaching footsteps of fall-- nights are blessed with cricket chant, and the air seems saturated with the smell of sharpened pencils. Goldenrod is spouting everywhere, and a haze-- not the lurid, glaring haze of humid July, but a benign softness-- lingers in the mornings. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Someone at Haworth, my old publisher, once did, and we decided August 15 to October 1 should be called Cricket Chant Goldenrod Harvest Moon time-- or something-- to denote its unique qualities.

Last Saturday, we celebrated the Eastern Massachusetts Rhythm Festival, and about 150 drummers gathered at River Bend State Park in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, for the affair. The day was sublime-- dry, sunny, and punctuated with castle-clouds. A very talented artist friend, Andrea Sweeney, painted one of my drums (with two of my favorite things-- a great blue heron, and Heavenly Blue Morning Glories) and then decided my face should be painted in the same manner. It's amazing what a little face paint will do to one's mood, and one's self-perception. Isn't there a need for costume, from time to time? I think so....I kept my 'face' on into the evening, and was met with astonishment, alarm, hostility, and questions as I encountered toll booth collectors, store clerks, and waitresses, each of whom was given a spontaneous, fictionalized reason for a grown man having Heavenly Blue Morning Glories twining around on his face. In some parts of the country, I'm sure Homeland Security, that wretchedly-named Orwellian vestige from the Bush National Nightmare, would have been summoned. In a world full of moths, it takes balls to be a butterfly!

The Dog Days

2010-07-13T14:52:00.002-04:00

Fionn the Dog's tongue, a foot long, resembles something hideous and unnatural from a demonic movie. The kale in my garden wilts every forenoon, and remains in this limp condition, until the evening, no matter how much I water. The asphalt sidewalks and driveways of Stoneham, many of them shade-free (beside of the locals' seemingly-congenital aversion to trees-- are they afraid the birds will poop on their shiny SUVs, broiling in the sun?) do not exactly inspire St. Francis-like thoughts as we shuffle along on our daily walk-- or, rather, daily pull, as Fionn is most reluctant to walk abroad in this weather. According to the Ayuvedic system of health (fascinating stuff- as young Danny, who works for me, to explain) I'm a Pita-- and Pitas loathe the heat. Accustomed to a five mile day perambulation, I get nasty and antsy and irregular and somewhat sleepless and appetite-less when I am robbed of this panacea. And yet at the same time, it's so tiresome to swell the route of Whiners, isn't it? When we are given the gift of a new day? So what's a guy to do to maintain his happiness, in this kind of weather? Because happiness, as often as not, is a choice I think.

Does anyone remember Fred Ward, the almost-alarmingly friendly weatherman that used to be on Channel 7, before they went all hussy-and-gigolo on us? Bald, dubious teeth, of a certain age, he was sacked (and a lawsuit followed) for not being pretty enough and young enough-- and yet he possessed a doctorate in meteorology and, like many people in the Boston area, we adored him and, as we were all mildly educated and somewhat enlightened, we didn't care a horse's ass what he looked like. At any rate he would always smilingly trumpet, just as a nasty, rotten, putrid, girdle-sticky heat wave was about to break, "HERE COME OUR COOL CANADIAN FRIENDS!" and there would be weather maps with all these wonderful streaming arrows bearing down on New England from the Great Northwest, promising cool starry nights, dry, clear days, and general well being. I miss that. So if the mountain will not come to Mohamed, then etc etc, and we decamped this morning to the Minuteman Bike Trail in Arlington, in search of its shady lanes, its car-free, smog-free, diesel-free, noise-free ambiance. Did you know that the average medium size tree emits 40,000 BTUs of air conditioning per hour? It's true. So of course the bike trail is somewhat cooler, too; additionally, if one walks far enough (we did) one comes to the Great Meadows of Arlington, in Lexington-- which is not to be confused with the Great meadows National Wildlife Sanctuary, in Concord and Sudbury. The former is, according to the Friends of Arlington's Great Meadows Website:

Arlington's Great Meadows is a 183-acre parcel of land located in east Lexington. It is the largest piece of undeveloped land in the Arlington/Lexington area. It is part of the Mystic River watershed. Once a glacial lake, it is now a wet meadow surrounded by uplands created by glacial outwash. Great Meadows was purchased by Arlington in 1871 to serve as a supplementary water storage area, but was only briefly used for that purpose. However, it remains a valuable buffer against flooding in the area.

Arlington's Great Meadows has long served as public open space and is a popular recreational spot, particularly since the opening of the Minuteman Bikeway on its southern border. It also provides a home for local wildlife. To date, 56 species of birds have been found nesting in Great Meadows, 12 species of amphibians and reptiles live there, and 251 species of plants grow in the wet meadow and uplands. Last summer's Biodiversity Days survey of the area recorded nearly 400 species of plants and animals in the Great Meadows area.

Because it is situated between two schools, the Waldorf School of Lexington and Lexington Christian Academy, Arlington's Great Meadows is a valuable resource for teaching children about nature and the environment. The Citizens for Lexington Conservation organizes annual bird watching and geology walks in the Meadows.

There's a bluff in the Meadows off the Minuteman Trail that is one of the more delightful places I know for a picnic, to be followed by some leisurely afternoon summer reading. I seem to be stuck in either bold or italic as I write this, so please bear with me. This bluff always reminds me of Karen Blixen/Isaac Dinsen's bluff in Out of Africa, where she and Denis Fitch Hutton would sit and watch over the African plain. While I haven't seen lions yet from this sylvan perch, I have seen a variety of birds and mammals, and the meadows spread out before me on a summer's day, such as today, seems like nothing less than a benign gesture. Fionn loves walking on the bike trail-- it's more comfortable, and the different smells, no doubt, make the bushes and trees of Arlington and Lexington as exotic as Paris or Hong Kong. We rested on the bluff for a bit, after having walked briskly two miles or so I suppose to get there, and read a bit from our book du jour, Thoreau's Week on the Concord and Merrimack. I really defy anyone with even a soupcon of appreciation for nature to read this book and not want to go rushing off to do likewise, despite the fact that one would be confronted, I suspect, by the ass ends of BJs and Home Depots, upside down shopping carts and Clorox bottles, as opposed to the bittern nests, muskrat lodges, and wooded banks that graced the margins of said rivers in Thoreau's day. Not that Concord, of course, has BJs and Home Depots-- only the CFOs of same, I suppose, in their 6000 sq ft homes that dot today's Concord River. Marvelous to say, Thoreau's trip was NOT preceded by a trip to LL Bean or EMI, for the (nowadays) de rigeur 'gear.' Nowadays, indeed, I believe that Thoreau's work would go unpublished; or, if not, people and their inquiring minds would long to know-- is he hairy-chested? Gay or straight or something in between? Cut, uncut? At any rate, this book is best when Thoreau is dealing with the business at hand. Ever other page has allusions, and lines, from classical poetry which, except for the Homeric quotes, gets old very quickly. I guess it was the thing to do then, transcendental name-dropping as it were. Okay I have to go tot he local Farmer's Market now, which has just opened this year down the street at the mostly-unused Stoneham Common. While Stoneham get funky and artsy, the way Arlington has? Or will it continue as a town of quite limited sympathies and people voting down library and school budgets, while the young people smoke cigarettes and work at the Mobil 'On the Run!' gas station down the street? Stay tuned....God knows I am doing all I can to make it a weird little place full of wonderfully eccentric people...

Funny Pictures

2010-05-20T07:52:00.009-04:00

My friend Roger sent these to me a while back. They are pix of one of the first gay pride parades in the US, in NYC back in 1970 or something. At the same time the parade was going by, this convention of 'average Americans' (God help us!) from some state without a coastline was emptying out of the hotel across the street. Roger decided to take pics of their faces, rather than the parade, as they watched the marchers move past them. I'm sure it's pretty obvious who is who...priceless! Regarding the close-up...Granny, or Tranny? You make the call!

What a Wonderful World

2010-05-16T08:44:00.002-04:00

When before the beauty of a sunset or a mountain, you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,'
you are participating in divinity." -Joseph Campbell

When I came in last night I deposited that part of me that is backside upon the top step of the back stairs. My hope was that I would see some bats, the Cirque de Soleil (as it were) of the Night Sky. I saw them two weeks ago, wheeling and darting across that part of the night hanging directly over my mulberry tree and the barn out back.

There were no bats last night, or perhaps I had missed them, but I did notice that Pansy (yes, I name my plants!) was a little dry. Pansy has an interesting story. I was walking Fionn one night about a month ago, and as we reached the front of the Stoneham Public Library (closed more often than not these days-- can someone tell me why we have the money to wage war, but not to keep our libraries open?) Fionn lunged at something on the sidewalk. I pulled him back, then stooped to retrieve whatever it was. It was a pansy plant, without a pot, shriveled and mostly dead on the sidewalk. How in the world it got there, who can say? Someone must have tossed it out of somewhere. At any rate I picked it up, put it in my pocket, and brought it home. Once there I soaked it in water, chanted to it (thanks for the tip, Dan Shea!) then planted it in a fresh new pot. The next morning it had revived completely, and now it is beside itself with bloom. Everytime I water it, or hold it up in its pot to admire it, I can feel this little rush of love and gratitude coming at me-- no kidding. Its flowers are white, with a bright yellow eye. Happy little thing. Anyway, last night, like many other living things on a Saturday night on Planet Earth, Pansy was dry, so I went in to get the watering can. I figured most of my other plants were a bit dry as well, so I watered everything. I suppose I have thirty of forty potted plants scattered here and there, either on the front steps, the back steps, or the front porch, with more being added every day. I suppose I'm like one of those eccentric old folks, with 40 cats in the house, when it comes to plants. Then I figured, well, as long as I'm gardening now, I'll plant a few petunias and lantana that I've been meaning to plant. This is like at 10:30 on a Saturday night, and me in bliss.

At one point when I was walking out front, I happened to look up at the clearing sky and WHOOSH! there was a beautiful shooting star, streaking its magnificence across the zenith. Make a wish? You betcha, as that wolf-killing creature from Alaska is wont to say. Can't tell, you know-- it won't come true if you do. On my return trip back toward the house, something else caught my eye, in the woods behind the house. One here, then another-- could it be? yes! Fireflies! A little early, but cead mile failte (KAYD MIL-uh FAW-cha, a hundred thousand welcomes, as we say in the Mother tongue). And then you stand there, one hand on a beauty-addled head, and you wonder: What have I done to deserve such munifence? Such beauty? I hopped into the bed of my pick-up, stretched out, and watched the firefly dance around me and above me. Fifty feet away, Main Street roared away on its Saturday night river of racket-- motorcycles, the bass-thud of gangsta rap in the young'uns cars-- and here I lay, at the edge of the woods, staring up at fireflies. Fifty feet away. The dichotomy of that always amazes me.

The only possible response to this is a giddy joy, a deep gratitude, a senseless admiration-- sober nearly eight years now, I nevertheless found myself once again drunk on a Saturday night, but this time on firefly dance, and the stars answering back, in twirling sympathy.

A Must-See Documentary: The Cove

2010-03-06T08:36:00.003-05:00

I had a rare and wonderful quiet night at home with a friend last night, and though I seldom watch television, we tuned in to Jeopardy while we ate. A little bit of channel-surfing during the mostly unbearable commercials (it's amazing how inanely annoying they are if you've been away from them for a while) told us, in breathy pants, that Oscar Season was nearly upon us. Lost in the gush about Avatar, and-who-will-wear-which-designer, is the fact that two Oscar-nominated documentaries are really must-sees-- if you can find them. One is the truth-telling Food, Inc., a mystery of sorts as Michael Pollan and others try to solve the mystery of what's on our dinner plate and how it got there. As it turns out, in most cases, what's on our plate is a health-, human-rights-, and environmental-nightmare. The second documentary is The Cove, a heart-wrenching, enraging documentary on Japan's dirty little secret involving the slaughter of 25,000 dolphins a year.

The article below originally appeared last August in AlterNet, but bears re-reading as Oscar season appears. See both movies in you can-- and go see Fresh while you're at it--and at the end of the article below, there's a list of things people can do if they are moved to action.

Ric O'Barry almost looks crazy. He is driving a car, with a mask over his mouth, crouching low in his seat, hoping not to be recognized.

If the authorities catch him, there's no telling what will happen to him. He's cruising through the misty streets of Taiji, Japan, a small town with a really big secret, he says. And it's a secret that the town's fishermen want to hide from the rest of the world at all costs.

This is how the documentary, The Cove, opens. And it turns out O'Barry is not crazy, he's on a mission -- probably one of the most important in the history of conservation. And it's personal.

He used to be a world-famous dolphin trainer. He captured and trained the five dolphins who played Flipper in the hit TV show of the same name. The show's popularity sparked a dolphin craze that has continued since the 1960s and has grown into $2 billion industry in the U.S. alone.

But while places like Sea World might be raking in the cash, O'Barry has spend the last 35 years trying to end dolphin captivity -- having had a change of heart after the tragic suicide of one of the main dolphins in Flipper. (If you want to know how a dolphin can commit suicide, you'll have to see The Cove.)

It turns out these intelligent and charismatic creatures don't do well in captivity -- half of all captive dolphins die within two years. They're used to swimming 40 miles a day, diving hundreds of feet deep and hanging out with their close-knit pod. Apparently jumping through hoops and swimming with tourists in a pool just isn't an adequate substitute.

But that hasn't stopped the plethora of marine theme parks and the horrific industry that has grown to support it. It has, however, inspired O'Barry to expose some of the worst of it, which is why he's hiding out in Taiji.

In this quaint fishing village, each fall, tens of thousands of migrating dolphins are captured, some of which are sold into captivity (for up to $150,000 a piece), and the rest are taken to a secret cove and slaughtered (to be sold for their meat -- sometimes falsely described as whale meat).

O'Barry wants the world to see what's happening in Taiji, and that means staying out of reach of the authorities and the local fishermen, who would very much like him arrested, deported, or worse. It also means trying to get into the secret cove with a camera.

The film kicks off with O'Barry joining forces with filmmaker Louis Psihoyos and the Ocean Preservation Society to put together a dream team of sorts that will get them into the cove and capture the horror on film.

It's reminiscent of Oceans 11 to be sure -- there are underwater sound and camera experts, special-effects artists to hide microphones in fake rocks, marine explorers and world-reknown free divers who help get the gear into place, and unmanned drones.

There are secret night-time missions, viewed on film with military-grade thermal cameras, where the crew is constantly dodging either the police, the Japanese mafia or irate fishermen.

It's a thriller. You're perched on the edge of your seat wondering if they'll get the footage they need or if they'll get nabbed. Sometimes it's so engaging, you forget to wonder if you actually want to see what they're trying to tape. And that's the film's greatest accomplishment.

Mixed in to the night-vision goggles and camouflage narrative are the images and interviews that make you realize why these people are risking their lives to make a movie: to save some dolphins.

These creatures are incredible. And the filmmaking is incredibly beautiful -- like Winged Migration with cetaceans. If they get the footage, you're going to want to see it, you're going to have to, because of the injustice of it.

There's also another layer of complexity to the film. There's the political stuff. Commercial whaling was outlawed in 1986, but dolphins -- members of the same family -- aren't protected.

The International Whaling Commission deems them "small cetaceans" and, apparently, therefore worthy of slaughter. Japan, which has tripled its dolphin killing since the ban, kills 23,000 dolphins each year, and thousands more are sold into captivity.

The country is also trying to overturn the whaling ban, and as the film shows, it is offering financial support to small, bankrupt nations to get folks on their side.

And there's also some serious health issues. Dolphins, sadly, are toxic-waste dumps these days. Their meat has been shown to have up to 1,000 times the allowable level of mercury. Eating their meat could be hazardous to a person's health, but often consumers may not know they're eating it.

The Cove shows that dolphin meat is sometimes passed off as whale meat -- and was even being served in school lunches in Taiji.

All this might seem a little depressing. And in some ways, it is. But you won't notice until after the film, because you'll be so blown away by what's on screen. It will captivate you, it will break your heart, and hopefully, it will make you jump out of your seat and help.

And if so, here's what you can do:

Learn more about dolphins in captivity.
Choose the safest fish to eat.
Help those on the front line by visiting Save Japan's Dolphins.
Support the Ocean Preservation Society with your donation.

Happy Spring!

2010-02-01T11:33:00.003-05:00

WELL, IN IRELAND IT IS, ANYWAY, at least the traditional first day of Spring, and any day now the first Irish daffodils will start showing up in area markets. In Ireland this is the first day of Imbolc (IM-mulk), or spring, which runs from February 1 to sunset on April 30-- which brings in May Day and the first day of Bealtaine (BELL-uh-TAHN-yuh): like many other ancient cultures, the new Celtic day begins at sunset. Today also begins the 'Light of the Year,' that half of the year that runs from February 1 to July 31; with the beginning of Samhain (SOW-wun) on August 1, the Dark of the Year commences. Ireland's spring comes earlier than ours does, due to the fact that the Gulf Stream brushes the southern coast of Ireland, keeping the weather relatively moderate year round, despite the fact that it's as far north as Labrador.

I celebrate Imbolc by starting some of my seeds for this year's garden-- indoors, of course! the first plants I start each year are both Milkweed varieties, Common Milkweed (Asclepias vulgaris) and Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa) both beautiful native flowers that are hardly weeds at all. As Thoreau noted, a weed is simply a plant whose virtue man has yet to discover. Well, if man has been slow to discover the virtues of the milkweeds, the Monarch Butterfly certainly has not. In fact, the female Monarch lays her eggs on a milkweed plant and on a milkweed plant only. Without the milkweeds, there would be no Monarchs-- which is one of the reasons why I grow them. As habitat decreases and the Monarch faces other environmental challenges (herbicides, pesticides, and GMO food-- don't get me started on that) there are fewer milkweeds than there used to be. I raise about one hundred seedlings every year, and give most of them away so people can raise their own milkweed-- and attract Monarchs-- in their own gardens and fields. So let me know if anyone is interested, and I'd be happy to give you a few plants. They're pretty easy to grow, and, though they take a year or two to flower, their fragrance is heavenly, and you'll be making your garden more butterfly-friendly.

The Monarchs truly are one of nature's marvels. Each year, North American Monarchs migrate (the only butterfly species to do so) by the millions, as far as 4000 miles away, to a very specific microclimate in the mountains of central Mexico (which are also under siege due to illegal logging and lack of enforcement of the law). Beginning in the spring, they begin to migrate north again, breeding and laying eggs as they do. That first generation dies, then the next generation emerges from their cocoons and begins the process again. As spring moves northward-- about one hundred miles a week-- so do the Monarchs. The fourth generation reaches northern New England and Canada by summer's end, and these are the ones who will migrate back down to Mexico-- an amazing process science is still trying to figure out. In fact, try to catch this week's Nova on PBS, which features 'The Amazing Migration of the Monarch Butterfly,' an episode I've been waiting all winter to catch.

Another interesting feature about the Monarchs is the fact that the milkweeds-- again, the only plant the female Monarch lays her eggs on, and the only plant the young caterpillars eat-- is toxic to all other living things (although humans can harvest young shoots when they first come up in the spring-- but try to refrain: the Monarchs need them more than we do). The Monarchs have built up a tolerance to milkweed over the eons. So if a bird or other predator ever takes a bite out of a Monarch-- argghh!-- it spits it right out again and won't try a second time. Other butterflies (the painted lady, for example) have mimicked the Monarch's markings to also protect themselves from predators, though they, in fact, aren't toxic at all. Another thing people can do to help the Monarchs is let a part (or all) of your lawn go to meadow (in other words, don't cut it) and grow native flowers, the nectar of which the Monarchs will feed on as they migrate south. In fact one of the other hats I wear is that of proprietor of Vision landscape, a design/build landscaping business that creates water gardens, meditative and contemplative gardens, wild gardens, new installations, perennial gardens, etc for people. One of our newer endeavors is to help people turn their lawns into vegetable gardens.

Guests Blogger: Community Gardening in SanFran

2010-01-23T09:22:00.002-05:00

THIS WAS SENT TO ME FROM MY DEAR FRIEND Allen out at Butterworth Farm in Royalston, a place I am very fond of peopled with people I am very fond of. It has to do with community gardens and it's a great story. Speaking of which, one of the features that Vision Landscape (my little landscaping business) will offer this spring and summer, besides the usual contemplative and water gardens, is the chance to help people turn their lawn into a vegetable garden. A lawn, the de rigeur trapping de luxe of Suburbia, is, according to some, the only truly American contribution to Landscape Design. Some municipalities, and many 'community associations,' have quite strident and stingent regulations stating that one must have a lawn, and that this lawn must be maintained. But several individuals have challenged these regulations in court-- and have always won. Though who knows, after the Supreme Court's ruling this past week on political contributions by corporations...at any rate, we'll help people turn their lawn-- empty, unproductive places-- Dead Zones, really-- that dump poison onto and into the environment, into organic vegetable gardens. And if one doesn't wish to raise one's own food (although why that might be the case remains a mystery) one of the best things one can do for the environment is to simply let one's lawns grow out-- like a 60's hairdo, one might say. If you do, the fireflies will come back. As will certain species of birds. Try it. Be prepared to be labeled a weirdo. Welcome to the club!

Here's the link to Allen's friend's blog: http://hedonia.seantimberlake.com/hedonia/2010/01/tending-our-gardens.html

Local Wildlife

2009-12-08T22:28:00.004-05:00

SOMEONE in one of my bird groups posted these photos today, of an Eastern Screech Owl, and an Eastern Coyote; both of them were taken at Oak Grove Cemetery in Medford, a little over a mile from here as the crow flies. The cemetery workers told the photographer there is a family of six coyotes living on the cemetery grounds; the screech owl has been heard, but not seen by anyone in the birding group, for a couple of years now. (Craig Gibson photos) It's amazing how perfectly the owl blends in with the tree! and look at the coyote's beautiful, intelligent face!

The Great Wall of Israel

2009-12-08T17:29:00.001-05:00

By Ellen Cantarow
Posted on December 8, 2009, Printed on December 8, 2009
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175175/

Try to imagine this: An American president visits Israel and in a speech given close to the vast “separation wall” Israel continues to build in part through Palestinian territory, says: “Mr. Netanyahu, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for Israel and the region, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Netanyahu, open this gate! Mr. Netanyahu, tear down this wall!”

I’m sure you recognize that set of famous lines. With the name “Gorbachev” in place of “Netanyahu,” President Ronald Reagan intoned them on June 12, 1987, in front of the Berlin Wall. Less than two-and-a-half years later, of course, that stain on Europe, that prison wall of Soviet power which, in all the years of the Cold War, was seldom long out of the U.S. news, was gone -- and 20 years later we’re still celebrating. The Israeli wall, endlessly under construction, is far longer, approximately twice as high, no less militarized, and no less a dystopian wonder of prison architecture. It is also a thief. As it meanders, it steals land. It is, as the Berlin Wall once was, a stain on the human landscape. But no American president, including Barack Obama, is likely to make a Reaganesque journey to the Middle East, denounce the wall, and call for its dismantlement. It plays little part in the news in this country when the Israeli-Palestinian situation is raised. It’s hard to imagine us celebrating its fall.

In the meantime, while that grotesque wall grows, while the talk is of shuttling diplomats and diplomatic cul-de-sacs, of paths to nowhere and missing Plan B’s for the Obama administration, as well as potential Israeli strikes against Iran, those in the shadow of the wall suffer. Ellen Cantarow, who covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the Village Voice back in the 1980s, recently spent time on Palestinian farmland in the shadow of the Great Wall of Israel and offers a portrait, from under the olive branches, not from the heights of diplomatic exchanges, of what it’s like, and what it takes, to live near today’s version of a mega-Berlin Wall. Tom

Living by the Gate From Hell
A Portrait of Nonviolent Resistance in One Palestinian Village
By Ellen Cantarow

Much is heard of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the story of the determined, long-term nonviolent resistance of many Palestinian villagers to the loss of their lands, striking as it may be, is seldom told. Here’s my report from just one village on the West Bank.

At no time since its 1967 West Bank occupation have Israel’s seizures of Palestinian land and water resources seemed as shocking as the ones attending its construction of “the wall,” begun in 2002. Vast, complex, and shifting in form, the wall appears most dramatically as 25-foot-high concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared the wall illegal, but Israel ignored the ruling. Now, it undulates through the West Bank for over 280 kilometers, clasping Israel’s major colonies and some minor ones in its embrace. The completed wall will incorporate more than 85% of the West Bank’s settler population, a de facto annexation by Israel of significant chunks of the territory it first occupied in 1967. This is the dream of Greater Israel rapidly turned into architecture. For the Palestinians, however, the wall means theft, separating many Palestinian cities and villages from their land and water.

Jayyous, with a population of 3,500, is one of those villages. It lies nestled in a mountainous northern West Bank landscape with the Palestinian city of Qalqilya just to its west. The scenery here remains one of the Mediterranean’s loveliest, a cross, let’s say, between Tuscany and parts of Yugoslavia. Greek and Roman ruins mark the village’s great age. This was one of the West Bank’s most fertile areas. Farming involving a lively variety of nut, citrus, and olive trees, as well as vegetables, flourished around Jayyous, drawing life from abundant underground wells. The aquifers beneath Jayyous and Qalqilya, in fact, constitute a West Bank treasure. Lands belonging to both the city and the village abut Israel’s pre-1967 border -- the “Green Line.”

Before the wall’s advent, Qalqilya’s merchants and Israelis did regular business on either side of the border, while Jayyous’s farmers worked their land all the way up to the Green Line. Now, the monstrous, concrete version of the wall surrounds Qalqilya entirely, bringing to mind high-security prisons or ghettoes from other eras. Jayyous is segregated from most of its former land by the wall in what one could call its “barrier” form -- a system of steel fences, razor wire, and patrol roads manned by Israeli soldiers.

Four thousand of the village’s olive and citrus trees were uprooted to make way for the wall. All the village’s wells and over 75% percent of the land are now sequestered behind the wall, isolated on its west -- that is, “Israeli” -- side. A small Israeli settler colony called Zufim sits amid Jayyous’s former wealth. Israeli plans are on the books to build up to 1,500 new housing units on the bounty confiscated from the village. The new units will destroy the only road over which Jayyous’s farmers can now travel to and from their land: there used to be six of these roads. Israel has already blocked five of them.

Sixty-five year-old Sharif Omar Khalid, known more familiarly as Abu Azzam, has spent half his life struggling to preserve Jayyous’s land. In 1980, with other farmers representing villages throughout the West Bank, he founded the Land Defense Committee, one of 18 organizations that now make up the Stop the Wall campaign. Gifted with stubborn optimism, he counts as victory an Israeli Supreme Court decision in April 2006, which pushed the path of the wall back from the south side of the village. The decision returned 11% of Jayyous’s former land -- 750 dunams of the 8,600 blocked by the barrier. (A dunam is a little over a quarter of an acre.)

The wall remains, as does one of its most essential parts: the “agricultural gate.” There are two of these on Jayyous’s land -- one to the north; another to the south. Almost all of the village’s farmers are forced to use the north gate. Opened by Israeli soldiers for two 45-minute intervals at dawn and dusk, the gate blocks a patrol road manned by the Israelis.

But to get beyond the gate, across the patrol road, and from there to their farmland, Jayyous’s farmers need “visitors’ permits.” Since 2003, Israel has decreed that the villagers are only “visitors” on land they have worked for generations. Obtaining the permits is an excruciating obstacle course that only begins with proof of land ownership. Abu Azzam is one of the village’s major landowners; his title goes back several generations to the time when Jordan occupied the West Bank. Being a known activist, he was periodically denied his permit until the Israeli Supreme Court finally granted him a permanent permit noting that its bearer is a “security problem.” This produces extra problems for him in his daily odyssey to his fields and back.

The Gate from Hell

The first time I saw an “agricultural gate” was in 2004 outside the northern Palestinian village of Mas’ha. It was terrible to behold. Immense steel jaws painted a bright ochre-yellow creaked open, thanks to the Israeli Occupation Forces’ finest, for about 30 minutes at dawn and again at dusk. Between those two moments, it remained locked, leaving the local farmers with no possibility of returning home for lunch or emergencies, nor even for crop-irrigation at the appropriate time (after sundown).

Each opening of the Mas’ha gate permitted a lone farmer, Hani Amer -- his home locked in on three sides by the wall and on the fourth by an Israeli settlement -- to make sporadic trips to his fields. At both sides of the gate lay coils of razor wire snarled in front of a barrier ditch which stretched into the distance as far as we could see. Beyond this ditch, more razor wire. Then a “military road” meant for Israeli soldiers patrolling the boundaries of an Arab world considered burdensome to the Greater Israel.

Across the military road lay yet more razor wire and another ditch before Hani Amer could finally reach his fields.

To grasp what the gate really means, though, you’d have to stay, as I did, at least a night with a farmer in Jayyous at harvest time. You’d awaken with his wife and him at 5:30 A.M., drink a cup of strong Arabic coffee, eat bread spread with jam made from fruit he grows on the land remaining to him, and then go jolting down the white, rutted, stony road on his tractor. Finally, of course, you would wait with him in a gathering line of farmers at the gate.

Now watch, in the dawn of another day in the forty-second year of occupation, in front of this steel raptor out of some mad film-maker’s imagination, as they all arrive: one on his tractor, another on a donkey laden with sacks and harvest tools, until finally a long line stands waiting. Note those ubiquitous coils of razor wire, and the ditches, and that military road, just one form of the endless wall that imprisons Palestine’s people. Watch as the soldiers turn languidly and unlock the gate, swinging its jaws wide to transform it, and the military road it bars, into a checkpoint for the brief morning opening.

As I waited and watched from Abu Azzam’s tractor this past October, I imagined the hillside on the other side of the road as it must have been decades ago, when I still reported regularly from the West Bank. The region’s steep hills were then punctuated by lines of dry-wall terracing that enclosed olive trees whose leaves billowed silver in the wind, and the darker greens of fruit trees and grapevines. The Greater Israel’s new, California-style urban sprawl, its cities that now ooze through the West Bank, were still part of an expansionist dream, not a burgeoning reality, and of course there was no wall, nor a “military road,” nor, of course, an agricultural gate.

Watch now, as each farmer with his donkey, his tractor, his work-tools, approaches the passage between the gaping steel jaws. Watch each as he moves into the military road, brings his donkey to a halt, dismounts, and offers his ID card to a stout, impassive Israeli soldier. Flanked by two other soldiers, he, in turn, calls a control tower rising in the distance and in Hebrew recites each bearer’s name and ID numbers. Take in the stoicism, the resignation, the endurance of these farmers as they accept the indignity of all this because there is no other choice. Think that they are trying to do one simple thing: harvest their olives.

But first each must move into the road, stand with head bowed or eyes averted as his fate is determined for this day, and then, if he’s approved, move forward. Beyond lie more ditches at the other side of the road, more razor wire and -- at last -- something that masquerades as freedom but isn’t. The farmer is now permitted to climb the hill in his vehicle. Beyond its crest he may reach his fields, for whose sake he has endured this daily torment.

And now, consider the Israeli settlers and soldiers, whose absolute rule, running the gamut from control over this gate through vigilantism against villagers like those in Jayyous, make a nightmare of this simple thing, the olive harvest. Settlers from Zufim actually uprooted olive trees in Jayyous in 2004. (Some were carted away for sale in Israel); sewage from the colony has destroyed others.

A week after my stay, according to the Israeli paper Haaretz, Jewish settlers elsewhere in the northern West Bank “clashed with Palestinians picking olives.” The settlers called the farmers trying to bring in their crops a “security” threat because they “could gather intelligence and launch attacks from the olive groves.”

Elsewhere in the area that same week, Israeli security forces stood by as settlers entered a Palestinian village “to hold a brief rally” against the harvest. (Israel’s army is now dominated from top to bottom by ultra-religious-expansionist settlers, which makes a mockery of the “settler-soldier” distinction.) Meanwhile, near an Israeli “outpost” settlement called Adi Ad, settlers “uprooted dozens of olive trees.” As I write, similar alarums reach me by e-mail daily.

Several times since October the Israeli Army has imposed curfews on Jayyous -- collective punishment for the weekly anti-wall demonstrations staged by village youth here. Most of the time the curfews have been levied after the farmers were already in their fields and haven’t interrupted the harvest. But they have punished the rest of Jayyous. Collective punishment -- reprisals against all for the actions of a few -- is illegal under the 1949 Fourth Geneva convention.

Keeping Going

“A state gone mad,” observed Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh when, a day after visiting Jayyous, I described the scene at the gate. This particular barrier of steel, these particular patient farmers, those particular soldiers enforcing Israel’s banality of evil -- they offer but a taste of the insane ingenuity that is the still-developing Greater Israel. A Dutch filmmaker who had interviewed some West Bank Jewish settlers, related this little exchange to Shehadeh: “What is your dream?” she asked one of the settlers. “My dream,” he replied, “is that my grandchildren will say someday, ‘Here, they say that once upon a time there were Arabs.’”

The evening before we all arose to go to the gate, Abu Azzam took a German visitor and me to see the local olive press where he and other farmers unload each day’s harvest. The sight of Jayyous’s olives moving up a conveyor belt and into the press, finally to emerge as a stream of oil bottled in large plastic containers, was joyous. Children ran and slid about on the slick floor, laughing; their parents dipped bread for them in the delicious, freshly-pressed oil. What human madness would inflict constant torment on such peaceful labor?

Later, Abu Azzam told me stories about his life as an activist, his marriage, and his children. Jailed by Jordan for belonging to the Communist Party and later by Israel for his attempts to preserve the village land, he says he can’t imagine anything but keeping going. “I have no other choice” is the way he puts it, with a shrug and a smile.

He recalled the moment back in October 2003 as the wall was being built, when an Israeli official tried to buy off the Jayyous activists by offering them 650 permits which would have allowed that many farmers to access their land. But the Land Defense Committee made “a team decision” not to use them. Accepting the permits would have meant recognizing the validity of the wall and the whole system of dispossession that went with it. Israeli soldiers closed the gate; it was the height of the olive, guava, and clementine harvests. Abu Azzam and other farmers cut gaps in the barrier and crept through to work their fields “without a tractor, without horses, without carriages, without anything. Only our bodies.”

More arrests followed. The farmers made a decision to stay on their land and not return to the village. “My wife was very angry,” Abu Azzam recalls. “She called me on October 21 asking me, ‘Are we divorced? Are we separated?’ I said ‘I’m resisting.’ ‘Resisting? Can you see one box of guavas, cucumbers, or tomatoes? ‘Enough, to be on the land is resistance.’ I said.”

Since 2003 Abu Azzam and other Jayyous farmers have continued their obdurate odyssey to their lands. This determination to keep farming on the 3,250 dunams -- of an original 8,050 -- that the villagers still have, rather than live elsewhere in the West Bank or abroad is itself resistance. In Palestine, this “just staying” is called samid. It means “the steadfast,” “the persevering,” and eloquently expresses the oldest form of Palestinian nonviolent resistance.

“You have so many problems,” I said to Abu Azzam. “Would you ever leave?” He smiled at me indulgently. “All our life is a problem. I don’t want to be a new refugee. I am against the emigration that took place through the Israelis.”

Since 2008, Jayyous’s young people have staged weekly demonstrations against the wall. One of their leaders -- Mohammed Othman -- was arrested by Israeli authorities this past fall when he returned from a speaking tour in Norway. He is still in jail under indefinite administrative detention.

Jayyousi leaders have also written to high officials in Norway and Dubai imploring them to divest from companies owned by the Uzbekistan-born Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev. In doing so, Jayyous joins growing international revulsion at, and refusal to deal with, Leviev’s companies. Their reach is vast and diverse, extending to Angola’s diamond mines, New York real estate, and Israeli settlements in whose planning and building (including Zufim) they are heavily involved. Last March, Haaretz’s Barak Ravid reported that the British Embassy in Tel Aviv “stopped negotiations to lease a floor in Africa-Israel’s Kirya Tower because of the [Leviev-owned] company’s involvement in settlement construction.” Oxfam has severed ties with him for the same reason.

On September 9, 2009, a month before my arrival, the Israeli Supreme Court handed down a new ruling moving the route of the wall again and returning an additional 2,448 dunams to Jayyous. “Because of your efforts?” I asked Azzam.

“It is because of Jayyous,” he replied. “It is a group struggle.”

Ellen Cantarow, a Boston-based journalist, first wrote from Israel and the West Bank in 1979. Her work has been published in the Village Voice, Grand Street, and Mother Jones, among other publications, and was anthologized by the South End Press. More recently, her writing has appeared at Counterpunch, ZNet, and Alternet. This essay is part of a series on Palestinian non-violent resistance, "Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape."

[Note: Another of Cantarow’s Palestinian portraits can be read by clicking here. A comprehensive U.N. account of Israel’s wall can be found by clicking here (PDF file).]

Copyright 2009 Ellen Cantarow

Wolf-Killer Targeted at Mall: Give That Man the Congressional Medal of Honor

2009-12-08T09:39:00.000-05:00

Man Throws Tomatoes at Palin at MOA

Jeremy Olson

Hundreds Gather at MOA for Palin

Bloomington police arrested a man for throwing two tomatoes at Sarah Palin at Mall of America Monday afternoon.

Jeremy Paul Olson, 33, was arrested for fourth degree assault and disorderly conduct.

Palin was never aware of the incident.

The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee was at the mall to sign copies of her book 'Going Rogue.' Hundreds showed for a chance to get an autograph.

Bloomington police said Olson tossed the tomatoes from the second level of the rotunda.

The tomatoes missed Palin by about ten feet. They bounced off the stage and hit two Bloomington police officers who were providing security.

Bystanders pointed out the suspect to police.

Feinstein-Resnick Have Fish Rescue Plan in Their Sites

2009-12-08T08:03:00.000-05:00

Meet Stewart Resnick, Corporate Farming Billionaire and One-Man Environmental Wrecking Crew

By Lance Williams, Center for Investigative Reporting
Posted on December 8, 2009, Printed on December 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144427/

Wealthy corporate farmer Stewart Resnick has written check after check to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s political campaigns. He’s hosted a party in her honor at his Beverly Hills mansion, and he’s entertained her at his second home in Aspen.

And in September, when Resnick asked Feinstein to weigh in on the side of agribusiness in a drought-fueled environmental dispute over the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, this wealthy grower and political donor got quick results, documents show.

On Sept. 4, Resnick wrote to Feinstein, complaining that the latest federal plan to rescue the Delta’s endangered salmon and shad fisheries was "exacerbating the state’s severe drought" because it cut back on water available to irrigate crops. "Sloppy science" by federal wildlife agencies had led to "regulatory-induced water shortages," he claimed.

"I really appreciate your involvement in this issue," he wrote to Feinstein.

One week later, Feinstein forwarded Resnick’s letter to two U.S. Cabinet secretaries. In her own letter, she urged the administration to spend $750,000 for a sweeping re-examination of the science behind the entire Delta environmental protection plan.

The Obama administration quickly agreed, authorizing another review of whether restrictions on pumping irrigation water were necessary to save the Delta’s fish. The results could delay or change the course of the protection effort.

To environmentalists concerned with protecting the Delta, it was a dispiriting display of the political clout wielded by Resnick, who is among California’s biggest growers and among its biggest political donors.

Resnick’s Paramount Farms owns 118,000 acres of heavily irrigated California orchards. And since he began buying farmland 25 years ago, Resnick, his wife, and executives of his companies have donated $3.97 million to candidates and political committees, mostly in the Golden State, a California Watch review of public records shows.

They have given $29,000 to Feinstein and $246,000 more to Democratic political committees during years when she has sought re-election.

"It is very disappointing that one person can make this kind of request, and all of a sudden he has a senator on the phone, calling up (U.S. Interior Secretary Ken) Salazar," says Jim Metropulos, senior advocate for the Sierra Club.

Feinstein’s letter was "based on what she believes to be the best policy for California and the nation," spokesman Gil Duran said in a statement. "No other factors play a role in her decisions."

With the Valley’s economy battered by recession and drought, Feinstein believed it was important to reconsider the restrictions on pumping Delta water for irrigation, he said. Many farmers have urged such a review, he added.

In an interview, Resnick said he didn’t leverage his relationship with Feinstein to persuade her to intervene.

"Honestly, I’m not saying we could not have done that, but I don’t think that’s the way it happened," he said. Feinstein long has had an interest in water issues, and "she just wanted to get to the bottom of this," Resnick said.

A Troubled Estuary
The Delta provides drinking water for 20 million people and irrigation for the state’s vast agriculture industry. But after decades of water diversions, Delta fish populations are in catastrophic decline, scientists say.

Prodded by lawsuits from environmentalists, federal wildlife agencies commissioned scientific studies of the Delta’s ecological crisis. Based on the studies, the agencies launched a restoration program that curtailed pumping for irrigation and increased water flows for migrating fish.

Meanwhile three years of drought have forced big cuts in water allotments for farmers, and swaths of valley farmland lie fallow. The recession pushed the unemployment rate in some valley towns to 40 percent.

As a result, the restrictions on pumping Delta water became the target of a series of noisy protests that played out over the summer. Farmers and politicians blamed "radical environmentalists" -- and the Obama administration -- for ignoring the drought’s impact on the valley’s economy. "The government decided that the farmers come second and the delta smelt come first," as Sean Hannity of Fox News put it on a visit to Fresno.

Farm groups filed 13 different lawsuits to overturn the restoration plans, arguing that climate change, urbanization, and discharges from sewers and factories are causing the Delta’s problems. One suit was filed in August by the Coalition for a Sustainable Delta, a non-profit founded by three executives of Resnick’s Paramount Farms. Resnick said he is "on the periphery" of the non-profit.

People familiar with Resnick’s political operation say Feinstein’s letter is a reminder of the power he can wield on water issues.

"Paramount Farms is a huge player," says Gerald Meral, former director of the Planning and Conservation League environmental lobby.

"They are just way different from the average farmer -- far more strategic" in their thinking, Meral says.

Wealth and Philanthropy
In Los Angeles, Resnick, 72, is known as one of the city’s wealthiest men and among its most generous philanthropists. He’s given $55 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, millions more for a psychiatric hospital at UCLA and an energy institute at Cal Tech.

His wife and business partner, Lynda Resnick, is an entrepreneur, socialite and writer. Her 2008 marketing book, "Rubies in the Orchard," had blurbs from Martha Stewart and Rupert Murdoch, and her "Ruby Tuesday" blog is sometimes featured on huffingtonpost.com. The couple live in a Beverly Hills mansion that writer Amy Wilentz called "Little Versailles." It’s the scene of parties for celebrities, charities and politicians -- governors, senators and presidential candidates.

Resnick said he worked his way through UCLA "washing windows," and made his first million running a burglar alarm service. Since then, the couple’s Roll International holding company has profitably operated a long list of businesses: Teleflora florist wire service; POM Wonderful pomegranate juice; Franklin Mint, a mail-order collectibles firm; and FIJI bottled water, imported from the South Seas.

Underpinning their fortune is agribusiness -- 70,000 acres of pistachios and almonds, 48,000 acres of citrus and pomegranates -- most of it in Kern County at the south end of the San Joaquin Valley, and all requiring irrigation to survive.

Resnick said he makes political donations "without much real strategy," other than to give to centrists from both parties. Water issues aren’t a major factor, he said.

Records show Resnick often contributes to politicians with power over the bureaucracies that make decisions affecting farming’s financial bottom line.
Since 1993, the Resnicks have given $1.6 million to California governors, key players in determining state water policy. Their donation pattern seems non-partisan, with the money following who’s in power.

In the 1990s, they gave $238,000 to Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, records show, although Resnick says he doesn’t recall giving to Wilson and doesn’t think he ever met him.

The Resnicks also backed the Democrat who replaced Wilson, Gray Davis. They gave Davis $643,000 and $91,500 more to oppose Davis’ recall in 2003.

With Davis gone, Resnick began donating to Arnold Schwarzenegger -- $221,000, records show -- plus $50,000 to a foundation that pays for the governor’s foreign travel.

Other big donations include $776,000 to Democratic political committees; $134,000 to agribusiness political committees and initiatives; and $59,000 to Republican committees.

Hedging Bets
The Resnicks have developed easy access to some of the politicians to whom they donate.

Schwarzenegger has called them "some of my dearest, dearest friends," and like Feinstein, he has urged a review of the science behind the Delta restoration plan. Davis appointed Resnick co-chair to a special state committee on water and agriculture.

A more enduring benefit came during Wilson’s administration, when Paramount Farms gained part ownership of what was to have been a state-owned storage bank for surplus water.

As recounted in a report by the advocacy group Public Citizen, in the 1980s state water officials devised a plan to ease the impact of future droughts by collecting excess water during rainy years and storing it underground.

The water was to be pumped south via the California Aqueduct, then put into a vast aquifer in Kern County that could hold a year’s water supply for one million homes.

The state spent about $75 million to buy a 20,000-acre site and to design the water bank. But in 1994, state water officials transferred the water bank site to the local Kern County Water Agency in exchange for significant water rights, Resnick said. The water agency developed the water bank in partnership with four other public agencies and one private business -- a subsidiary of Paramount Farms. Paramount wound up controlling a 48 percent share of the bank.

Resnick said the state had been unable to develop the water bank and gave up on the project. The local agencies and his company spent about $50 million to engineer the project and make the bank a success, he said.

Paramount’s control of the bank continues to infuriate some environmentalists. In recent dry years, the bank sold some of its stored water back to the state at a premium, Public Citizen reported.

"Resnick likes to call himself a farmer, but he is in the business of selling public water, with none of the profits returned to the taxpayers," says Walter Shubin, a director of the Revive the San Joaquin environmental group in Fresno.

A supportive community
When she first emerged as a statewide candidate in the 1990 governor’s race, Feinstein made little headway in the Central Valley, and she was defeated by Wilson. After she was elected to the Senate two years later, Feinstein set out to befriend farmers.

Her attention to agriculture and water issues has paid off, says Dan Schnur, director of the Unruh Institute of Politics at USC and a former Wilson aide

"That community has been very supportive of her, much more for her than for most statewide Democrats," Schnur says.

The Resnicks contributed $4,000 to Feinstein’s 1994 re-election campaign. When she ran again in 2000, they gave her $7,000. Resnick also donated $225,000 to Democratic political committees that were active in key Democratic races.

Resnick said he first got to know Feinstein personally 10 or 12 years ago because the senator also has a second home in Aspen.

In August 2000, when the Democratic National convention was in Los Angeles, the Resnicks hosted a cocktail party for Feinstein in their home. Among the guests were the singer Nancy Sinatra, then-Gov. Davis and former President Jimmy Carter, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In 2007, they gave $10,000 to the Fund for the Majority, Feinstein’s political action committee. In June, another committee to which Resnick has contributed, the California Citrus Mutual PAC, spent $2,500 to host a fundraiser for Feinstein, records show.

Feinstein also socializes with the Resnicks. Arianna Huffington, the blog editor and former candidate for governor, told the New York Observer in 2006 that she had
spent New Year’s with Feinstein at the Resnicks’ home in Aspen. "We wore silly hats and had lots of streamers and everything," she said of the party.

On Aug. 26, Feinstein met with growers and water agency officials in Coalinga, Fresno County. While there, she told the Fresno Bee that she wanted the U.S. Interior Department to reconsider the biological opinions underlying the Delta protection plan.

The following week, she received the letter from Resnick, which was first reported by the Contra Costa Times. She then sent her own letters to Interior Secretary Salazar and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. Days later, the administration agreed to pay $750,000 to have the National Academy of Sciences re-study the scientific issues underlying the Delta protection plan.

Last month, state lawmakers enacted a package of measures aimed at reforming the state’s outmoded water allocation system. The centerpiece – an $11 billion bond to build new dams and canals – must be approved by voters.

Climate Change Threatens Life in Small Alaskan Town

2009-12-03T07:59:00.000-05:00

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By John D. Sutter, CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

World leaders meet next week in Copenhagen to try to pass a treaty on climate change
Meanwhile, warming is threatening places like Shishmaref, Alaska
One couple in arctic village live at edge of coast that's melting
Their safety, survival of Shishmaref's Inupiat Eskimo culture are in jeopardy

Shishmaref, Alaska (CNN) -- When the arctic winds howl and angry waves pummel the shore of this Inupiat Eskimo village, Shelton and Clara Kokeok fear that their house, already at the edge of the Earth, finally may plunge into the gray sea below.

"The land is going away," said Shelton Kokeok, 65, whose home is on the tip of a bluff that's been melting in part because of climate change. "I think it's going to vanish one of these days."

Coastal erosion has been an issue for decades here, but rising global temperatures have started to thaw the permafrost that once helped anchor this village in place. Sea ice that protects Shishmaref's coast from erosion melts earlier in the spring and forms later in the fall. As a result, the increasingly mushy and exposed soil along Shishmaref's shore is falling into the water in snowmobile-sized chunks.

The crumbling land already toppled one house into the sea. Thirteen other homes -- nearly all of the Kokeoks' neighbors -- had to be moved inland. The land they stood on washed away.

Now the Kokeoks' wooden residence, which Shelton built by hand 20 years ago, stands alone -- only feet from the edge of this barrier island.

But safety is only one of Shishmaref's many concerns.

The warming climate and erosion threaten to steal the Kokeoks' centuries-old culture, their unique language and the viability of their entire village.

They're not alone. A dozen Alaskan villages, including Shishmaref, are at some stage of moving because of climate-change-related impacts like coastal erosion and flooding.

Around the world, as many as 150 million people may become "climate refugees" because of global warming, according to an Environmental Justice Foundation report, which attributes some of the moves to rising sea levels.

People in Shishmaref are aware that world leaders will meet next week in Copenhagen, Denmark, to try to hammer out an international treaty on climate change. Most of the talk at the United Nations Climate Change Conference will focus on cutting the industrial world's emissions of heat-trapping gases, or trying to prevent climate disasters like those already seen here and in other coastal communities. Three students from Shishmaref will travel to Copenhagen as witnesses to the impact of climate change.

That doesn't give Shelton and Clara much comfort. Many of their neighbors have resigned themselves to having to leave Shishmaref because of the changes.

Not Shelton.

"This is my hometown," he said. "I don't want to go anywhere."

Shelton is afraid to budge from his perilous location on the front lines of the climate catastrophe. To move would be to give in, to lose everything.

Already, he's lost more than he can bear.

Harsh environment

As far as outsiders are concerned, Shishmaref might as well be at the edge of the Earth.

Only 20 miles south of the Arctic Circle and less than 150 miles from Russian Siberia, the village's geography alone makes it seem uninhabitable.

Its 600 residents endure temperatures that drop to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. Polar bear sightings are common. Water is scarce. There's no plumbing in most homes; ice is harvested from lakes in microwave-size blocks and melted in buckets. No roads connect Shishmaref to the outside world.

It's a harsh, isolated and dangerous place but one Shelton has learned to love. Shishmaref's tundra environment provides everything he needs.

The village island, about a quarter-mile wide in the center, sits between the Chukchi Sea and the wide estuary of the Serpentine River. That's prime real estate for hunting and fishing, the main forms of survival and employment in the village.

In the winter, Shishmaref residents hack tiny cylinders of ice out of the estuary to fish for tomcod and smelt. In the summer, when the sun hangs in the sky almost 24 hours a day, locals harvest cloudberries, which are orange, and blueberries; caribou and reindeer herds gallop across the vast expanse of inland tundra.

When Shelton was growing up, he looked forward to the springtime hunt for bearded seals, spotted seals and walrus, which took place out on the still-frozen sea. Dried meats and oils cured from those marine mammals sustained the community year-round, even when other hunts or fishing seasons went poorly.

Shelton's father taught him to hunt seals. They rode a dogsled toward an eerily flat horizon, where the thick slate of white sea-ice met an eternal blue sky. At the edge of the ice, they hunted sea mammals out of the frigid water below.

Shelton has raised his four children in Shishmaref's unique traditions. Clara, his wife, still sews seal slippers. They speak Inupiaq at home. Dried seal meat, black and crusty, hangs on a wooden rack beside their house. They keep seal oil in the kitchen. Their kids grew up eating both.

Norman Charlie, Shelton's youngest son, learned to chase down seals and fish as soon as he was old enough to handle the arctic elements.

The boy became a fine hunter. And that pleased Shelton.

On Norman, Shelton hung his hopes for the future.

Forced adaptation

Because of its remote location and live-off-the-land lifestyle, it could appear that Shishmaref has remained the same for centuries, as time passed it by.

That's not the case. The village itself is an adaptation to outside influence.

Shishmaref's people were nomadic, following seals and caribou, until the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs built a school on the island in the early 1900s and forced Inupiat children to attend. Some residents still resent that school; they say it punished those who spoke Inupiaq and stifled other aspects of the Native culture.

Over the decades, though, the community adjusted to its new stationary existence. And today, people are attached to this place.

Change also has come from within.

When Shelton was young, Shishmaref was nothing but an outpost of one-room sod houses with no electricity; some villagers made windows out of "Eskimo plastic," the translucent intestines of the bearded seal.

It was difficult to import materials from the outside, so people got most of what they needed from the land and the sea.

Today, two stores in Shishmaref sell Cheez-Its, Coke, Tang, ramen noodles and Ruffles, all brought in by plane. In front of the local school complex, which has new computers and wi-fi Internet, snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles drop kids off in the morning. In the past, dogsleds were the main mode of transit.

A sign in a high school class where students learn to make carvings from walrus tusks reminds them to put their iPods away.

The modernization of Shishmaref angers some people, including Shelton. He worries that Shishmaref's youth don't speak Inupiaq as well as they should, and he says people in town are getting fat and lazy in part because soda is available.

He had to wrestle with the fact that younger generations are carrying on village traditions in new ways when Norman decided to move away from the village, to Fairbanks, Alaska, for work.

His son returned to Shishmaref to visit. He still worked on speaking the local language and tried to carry on his village's musical traditions by participating in a traditional dancing and drumming group. And, always, when he was home, he hunted.

But things were changing.

Shishmaref exists in a delicate balance with nature and with its own identity.

And, one morning in June 2007, that balance tipped for Clara and Shelton.

The storm

Morris Kiyutelluk, a short man in an orange ski jacket, walked to the edge of the sea on a recent day, pointed to the slushy water behind Shelton's and Clara's home and said, "That's where I grew up."

The land where his house stood has vanished into the ocean.

It was the middle of a stormy night during the winter of 2002 when Shelton and Clara heard the waves slapping the side of their house with a force that vibrated the floors and shook the walls.

Next door, behind their house and even closer to the roiling sea, Morris was rushing to evacuate his family.

By the time his wife and children were out, waves were clawing at the ground underneath his house, to the point that it hung off the edge of the island by four feet, he said. Neighbors wrapped a rope around the body of the red wooden home and pulled in unison. They were able to scoot it back just enough to keep it from tipping.

After that storm and a series of others, Morris' home was among those moved to the other side of the island. At first he and his wife, Mildred, had a hard time adjusting to their new life on the sheltered side of the island. They joke that they're "eastsiders" now, not "west side people," like they used to be.

Mildred had trouble sleeping in the new location because the soothing sounds of the sea were gone.

But, over time, she's learned to sleep through the silence.

"Apparently, I got used to it," she said.

In part because they've had to relocate once, Morris and Mildred are among many locals pushing for Shishmaref to move off of this tenuous island and onto an uninhabited location away from the sea.

Morris says the changes in Shishmaref -- the melting sea ice, the disappearing seals and polar bears, the crumbling coastline -- are beyond the village's control.

"We've got to move. There's no question about it," he said. "That seawall will stop erosion on this end, but the water will go around it. My ancestors said it will happen. It will happen."

But planning the move has been anything but easy.

The village voted in 2002 to relocate from the island. Seven years later, it has had little luck finding a suitable location or funding.

A place called Tin Creek, several miles inland, is the most talked-about relocation spot at the moment. But many of the same problems that plague Shishmaref could be issues there, too.

Tin Creek sits on permafrost, and permafrost melt across Alaska has been accelerating. The site is further from the sea mammals locals depend on. And, to make matters worse, Tin Creek may also be situated atop "ice lenses," thin sheets of underground frozen water that could melt and cause the ground to crater.

Earlier this decade, the people of Shishmaref applied for grants and started a Web site where the public could donate money for the village's relocation.

Those efforts haven't gotten the village far. That's partly because there's no federal or state government agency ready to pay for the coming wave of "climate refugees," like those in Shishmaref.

A 2009 Government Accountability Office report found that 31 Alaskan villages face "imminent threats" because of coastal erosion, flooding and climate change. At least 12 are at some stage in the relocation process.

Moving an entire town is not cheap. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that Shishmaref's relocation, if it happens, will cost up to $200 million. Relocations of other Alaskan villages carry similar estimates.

Who's to blame is another contentious topic.

Residents of the industrialized world could be considered liable for the climate refugee problem, since they produce the bulk of the greenhouse gas emissions that alter the climate. Some say the government is responsible. Others say it's difficult to prove with absolute certainty that a problem in any single community was caused by climate change because other factors, like land use and natural erosion, could be at play.

The climate refugee problem gets all the more complicated when considered on a global scale. The Environmental Justice Foundation estimates that unchecked climate change will force 150 million people from their homes by mid-century.

In Shishmaref, when talk of relocation first surfaced, it seemed like the village would be able to adapt, to control its fate.

Lately, it appears the village's worst fear may come true.

Shelton and others are terrified that Shishmaref may have to merge with an existing town, like Nome or Kotzebue. Both are less than 100 miles away but worlds apart. Shishmaref residents say their entire way of life may disappear.

Without access to the sea, they might have to stop hunting. Their threatened dialect, spoken only in Shishmaref, could fizzle and die. The village's celebratory dances, its music, its walrus-ivory carvings and native food recipes, all of it could be flushed off the Earth and into history books.

Over the edge

It was about 5 o'clock on a spring morning two years ago when Shelton got the phone call that changed his life.

His youngest son, Norman Charlie, had gone out duck hunting with a friend. They'd traveled by snowmobile across the estuary that separates Shishmaref from the mainland.

In the past, that stretch of water would have been frozen solid on the first week in June, Shelton said. But that year was warmer than usual.

Shelton waited and waited for his son to come home. Finally, the phone call came.

The ice cracked. Norman fell in. His friend couldn't save him.

Shelton blames climate change for taking his son.

"Something went wrong with me the last couple of years, after we lost that boy," Shelton said. "I think he's taken most of my life. ... I lost my baby."

Dozens of photos of the young man, who was 24, line Shelton and Clara's living room.

His grave is on this island.

Tradition

Like the young man who clung to village traditions but whose life was taken by the melting ice, Shishmaref may become a memory.

For Shelton and Clara, solace is hard to come by these days. She had a heart attack last year. His knees are giving out. He's no longer able to hunt.

The death of their son pushed them over the edge.

Their only relief comes from a native tradition: Scattered around their village and beyond are perhaps a half-dozen children, born since their son died, who are named after Norman.

In Shishmaref, when a child is named after someone who's gone, that child takes on characteristics of his or her namesake.

Ken Stenek is Shelton's nephew and the local science teacher. He and his wife named their youngest boy after Norman.

Norman Charlie was one of Stenek's favorite students. He was a respected hunter. He was trying to learn the Inupiaq language. He was part of a native dance troupe. He was carrying Shishmaref's traditions onward.

Stenek says he's raising his son to do the same.

At supper time, he grinds up seal meat, a Shishmaref staple, and feeds it to his 7-month-old.

Baby Norman loves it.

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Iraq Sees Alarming Rise in Cancers, Deformed Babies

2009-12-02T20:08:00.001-05:00

(Something else Dubya probably didn't consider when he launched his illegal, immoral invasion)

BAGHDAD - The guns are gradually falling silent in Iraq as a fragile stability takes hold, turning the spotlight on a stealthier killer likely to stalk Iraqis for years to come.

Incidences of cancer, deformed babies and other health problems have risen sharply, Iraqi officials say, and many suspect contamination from weapons used in years of war and accompanying unchecked pollution as a cause.

"We have seen new kinds of cancer that were not recorded in Iraq before war in 2003, types of fibrous (soft tissue) cancer and bone cancer. These refer clearly to radiation as a cause," said Jawad al-Ali, an oncologist in Iraq's second city of Basra.

In the city of Falluja in western Iraq, scene of two of the fiercest battles between U.S. troops and insurgents after the 2003 U.S. invasion, a spike in the number of births of stillborn, deformed and paralysed babies has alarmed doctors.

The use of depleted uranium in U.S. and coalition weaponry in the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait and the 2003 Iraq invasion is well documented, but establishing a link between the radioactive metal and health problems among Iraqis is hard, officials say.

Iraqi medical facilities are limited, and keeping accurate health statistics during years of sectarian slaughter unleashed by the invasion was impossible.

In Basra in particular, pummelled by years of war and swamped with industrial and agricultural pollution, it is difficult for doctors to isolate specific causes for cancer.

Its people have for years lived among mounds of scrap metal that include war debris, the brown rust flaking off into the wind and carried into peoples homes, food, and lungs.

"Our information indicates there are more than 200 square kilometres of land south of Basra containing war debris, some of which is contaminated with depleted uranium," said Bushra Ali, of the Environment Ministry's radiation prevention department.

A 2007 Basra University medical journal report found "no major rise" in cancer death rates, but that the proportion of children dying of cancer in Basra had jumped 65 percent in 1997 and 60 percent in 2005, compared to 1989.

CHILDREN SUFFERING MOST?

Depleted uranium, a dense metal, is used in weaponry to pierce heavy armour such as on tanks. Linking it to ill health is controversial -- the British Ministry of Defence says there is "no reliable scientific or medical" evidence.

Large quantities of depleted uranium were used in the first Gulf War, some of it near Basra.

It is not clear how much, if any, was used in Falluja by U.S. troops fighting mostly house-to-house battles in two assaults on the city in 2004.

The U.S. military did, however, use white phosphorous, which can cause serious burns if it comes in contact with skin, to mark targets or to flush enemy gunmen out of their hideouts.

Five years later, doctors in Falluja are recording an unusual number of babies with congenital heart disease and neural tube defects, the latter involving abnormal spinal cord or brain development, which can cause paralysis and death.

"The marked increase of congenital malformations of newborns in this hospital pushed the hospital's board of directors to form a special committee to investigate and record these cases," said Abdulsatar Kadim, manager of Falluja's main hospital.

Doctors say they have not been able to isolate a specific cause. Several factors can trigger the condition, including a lack of folic acid during pregnancy.

A neural paediatric specialist, who declined to be named, said he was seeing on average three or four newborns with neural tube defects a week in Falluja and its surrounding areas, a region with a population of about 675,000 people.

In Britain, the incidence of the condition is less than 1 birth in every 1,000. Most births in and around Falluja are at its main hospital, where up to 30 are recorded daily, roughly equating to a neural tube defect rate of 14 in every 1,000.

"Some families decide to end the matter from the beginning. They choose to end the life of child, by refusing surgery for them -- 90 percent of the children whom we don't treat die in the first year," said a Falluja doctor who declined to be named.

(Editing by Michael Christie and Samia Nakhoul)

Buy Nothing Day This Friday

2009-11-23T22:33:00.002-05:00

(There are many ways to celebrate the day after Thanksgiving, other than flocking to the malls. I'll be taking part in the Buy Nothing Day Coat Exchange and Drumming Event in Providence, RI, and the following note comes from my friend Phil, who is one of the organizers of the event. Happy Thanksgiving to all.)

Here in Providence on Friday November 27th we observe Buy Nothing Day for the thirteenth year in a row by holding a life-affirming winter coat exchange on the State House lawn, directly across from Providence Place Mall from 10AM-2PM. In case of inclement weather, the exchange will take place at St. John's Cathedral opposite the park on N. Main St Those who have winter coats to give can just drop them off; those needing a winter coat can pick one up. Coat exchanges also take place in Pawtucket, Newport, Wakefield, and Woonsocket. Volunteers are needed at all the sites.

Drummers will be joining us = feel free to bring percussion or other instruments...

Providence: Greg Gerritt: 331-0529; gerritt@mindspring.com; Phil Edmonds 461-3683; philwhistle@juno.com

Other Buy Nothing Day Coat Exchange sites:

Pawtucket - Arthur Pitt 724-8915; kingarthur02940@yahoo.com

Other venues: Newport – St Paul's Church 12 West Marlborough St. Maggie Bulmer 849-3537.

Woonsocket St Ann’s Arts and Cultural Center 84 Cumberland Street. Roger Bonin 728-8328

Wakefield --St. Francis Church, 114 High Street. 10AM to noon Tom Abbott 364-0778

Buy Nothing Day Coat Exchange November 27^th

If you need a winter coat, come pick one up.

If you have a coat to donate, please drop off.

On November 27th – the busiest day in the American retail calendar and the unofficial start of the international Christmas-shopping season – thousands of activists and concerned citizens in 65 countries will take a 24-hour consumer detox as part of the annual Buy Nothing Day, a global phenomenon that originated in Vancouver, Canada.

Kalle Lasn, co-founder of the Adbusters Media Foundation, which was responsible for turning Buy Nothing Day into an international annual event, said, “Our headlong plunge into ecological collapse requires a profound shift in the way we see things. Driving hybrid cars and limiting industrial emissions is great, but they are band-aid solutions if we don’t address the core problem: we have to consume less. This is the message of Buy Nothing Day.”

One may ask: “instead of buying nothing on November 27^th, shouldn’t we be spending more so as to save our economy?” Attempts to shore up our present economy are futile. Our globalized consumer-orientated economic system is crumbling and the signs for global catastrophes are already here, as our planet’s natural resources are plundered, Can we face it? Can we really face the reality that this is so?

So what can we do? It will take vision and experimentation to develop new economies based on localization, where much of what we buy is produced locally, and of course, we have to consume much less. On November 27^th, join people from sixty five countries by buying nothing and sending a clear message that over-consumption is one of the main causes for our planetary crisis.

Buy Nothing Day isn’t just about changing our habits for one day, but about starting a lasting lifelong commitment to consuming less and producing less waste.

Miracle Coyote

2009-11-22T09:02:00.006-05:00

Meet the wiliest of all coyotes: Hit by a car at 75mph, embedded in the fender, driven for 600 miles - and SURVIVED!
When a brother and sister struck a coyote at 75mph they assumed they had killed the animal and drove on.
They didn't realize this was the toughest creature ever to survive a hit-and-run..
Eight hours, two fuel stops, and 600 miles later they found the wild animal embedded in their front fender - and very much alive.
Daniel and Tevyn East were driving at night along Interstate 80 near the Nevada-Utah border when they noticed a pack of coyotes near the roadside on October 12.
When one of the animals ran in front of the car, the impact sounded fatal so the siblings thought there no point in stopping.
'Right off the bat, we knew it was bad,' Daniel explained. 'We thought the story was over.'
After the incident around 1am, they continued their 600 mile drive to North San Juan - even stopping for fuel at least twice..
But it was only when they finally reached their destination at 9am did they take time to examine what damage they may have sustained.
At first it looked as though it was going to be quite gruesome.
'[Daniel] saw fur and the body inside the grill,' Tevyn East said. 'I was trying to keep some distance. Our assumption was it was part of the coyote - it didn't register it was the whole animal.'
Daniel East got a broom to try and pry the remains out of the bumper and got the shock of his life.
'It flinched,' Tevyn East said. 'It was a huge surprise - he got a little freaked out.' Wildlife authorities arrived and, after the front of the car was completely taken apart, rescued the animal. Miraculously, it had sustained cuts on its paw-- and nothing more. The coyote was crated and returned to the scene of the accident.

Insurance Stocks Soar after Lieberman Promises to Block Public Option

2009-10-28T12:15:00.002-04:00

(If you're from the Nutmeg State, call or write Joe and tell him you'd prefer he represent the people, rather than the insurance companies)

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that he would be including a version of the public option (with a state opt-out provision) in the Senate’s final health care bill. Although all of the details of the public plan are yet to be determined, progressives cheered the move. As Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) admitted, without all the pressure that progressives in and out of Congress put on legislators, it is unlikely there would have been a public option included in Reid’s final bill.

Yet this afternoon, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) broke with the Democratic caucus that he is a member of and vowed to join a Republican-led filibuster if the public option is not removed from the bill. In response, insurance company stocks — which plummeted Monday as Reid made his announcement — shot up after Lieberman made his announcement around 1:30 pm:

Lieberman’s opposition to the public option puts him completely out of step with Connecticut voters. As this polling from 538.com’s Nate Silver shows, voters in every single one of Connecticut’s congressional districts favor the inclusion of a public option in health care legislation by wide margins. The stated reason for Lieberman’s opposition to the public option — that it would increase the debt and create another entitlement — is misplaced. As ThinkProgress has noted before, the public option would be self-sustaining and would cut the deficit.

Insurance giant Aetna, represented by the blue line above, fared the best among all of the health insurance companies. Aetna is based in Hartford, CT. It is also the tenth largest single private contributor to Lieberman’s re-election committee.

Turn Off the Lights

2009-10-14T08:24:00.001-04:00

The Enormous Environmental Consequences of Artificially Lighting Up the Night

By Judith Stock, Miller-McCune.com
Posted on October 13, 2009, Printed on October 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143258/

Plants, animals and humans developed with an internal clock — the circadian rhythm. It's a 24-hour cycle that affects physiological, biochemical and behavioral processes in almost all organisms.

Civilization brought with it artificial light to homes in every village, town and city across the world, and as more buildings and factories came online, industrialization increased and the population continued to expand, our nighttime sky looked a lot like the day, changing our deep, dark sleep patterns and altering that 24-hour internal timekeeper.

With that, all living creatures' lives changed in ways only now becoming clear to us.

Dawns the light
To understand light pollution, it's important to know there are two different types: First, there is astronomical light pollution that obscures the view of the night sky, and the second kind is ecological light pollution, which alters natural light systems in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

"Light pollution started to be identified in the 1800s when we realized that birds flew into the sides of lighthouses and consequently died," says Travis Longcore, science director of the Urban Wildlands Group, research associate professor at the USC geography department and a lecturer at the UCLA Institute of the Environment in Los Angeles. (Beginning in the 1940s, radio and television towers become "the spiral of death for birds that regrettably hit the guy-wires," he added.)

Twenty years later, it was discovered that artificial coastal lighting in Florida was disorienting and disrupting the rhythm of sea turtles that bury their eggs in the sand. When the eggs hatch, the hatchlings must go toward the water and beachside nests for their survival, but the babies were being distracted by the light and diverted from their natural course, often ending up facing dehydration, being eaten by predators or even wandering along the highway.

As more animals encountered night lighting, it became evident that while night light might benefit people, it wasn't helping wildlife.

Light pollution has had disastrous effects on migrating birds, resulting in millions dying each year, and that figure increases with the combination of outdoor light and fog. Birds use the light at the horizon to migrate at night. When the birds see a brightly lit building, they become confused and fly around and around — in essence becoming trapped in the light — eventually dropping dead from exhaustion.

The term photopollution — artificial light that has adverse effects on wildlife — was coined in a watershed paper by Dutch ecologist F.J. Verheijen in 1985. In the paper, Verheijen says that many nocturnally active animals need a natural light field between sunset and sunrise as a requirement for survival.

"When we think about the night and the extent of light pollution in the last 20 years, it's growing far faster than the human population and has changed the environment significantly," explained Longcore.

But light pollution's harmful effects aren't restricted to animals.

"Women who work at night, change shifts often or don't get proper sleep at night suppress their melatonin production and have higher rates of breast cancer," explained Dr. Mario Motta, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society and associate at the North Shore Cardiovascular Associates. "It's a fact. The exact cause is speculative, but we think it's because of the changes in the melatonin production due to disruption of their circadian rhythm."

Disrupting the circadian rhythm can cause insomnia, depression and increase the risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Fallout from the disruption of your circadian rhythm can be harsh medicine to swallow, but so can simply living in the glare of the night's lights. Straining to see at night in the face of glare from oncoming traffic or streetlights that shine over the landscape can be irritating and uncomfortable, but it also can be dangerous.

"If I shined a light on your eyes in a dark room you wouldn't be able to see the rest of the room," Motta observed. "Every time you pass a bright light on the highway or the street your pupils constrict," causing decreased nighttime visibility.

Adults between the ages of 40 to 50 start to notice glare more, when the lens of the human eye begins to harden and calcify. Cataracts may develop, which can exacerbate the glare, and require surgery to remove.

Citing energy efficiency and glare reduction, the American Medical Association in June officially approved a resolution advocating light pollution control. Dr. Motto introduced the resolution saying, "This is just what the doctor ordered."

Transforming the Night
"The one thing most responsible for our nighttime sky looking like the middle of the day is there's an unwarranted volume of streetlights that aren't necessary for our safety," said Leo Smith, the northeast regional director of the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit focused on preserving the night sky through smarter outdoor lighting. "In many cases, we don't need streetlights, but streetlight manufacturers are pushing their products."

"In Connecticut," said Smith, a member of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America and a roadway lighting committee member in Suffield, "we have sections where the road is 30 miles long and is continually illuminated. There's a tremendous amount of energy loss from unneeded streetlights and ones that don't need to be on when there's no traffic."

In comparison, Interstate 20 in Atlanta has no overhead roadway lights outside the beltway, with five lanes of traffic in each direction, but it does have is a 4-foot median barrier that blocks the glare from oncoming headlights.

When it comes to dusk-to-dawn outdoor lighting, one solution that's been offered is to light streets only until 10 p.m. After that time, programmable photocell lights would turn off. Also, it is suggested that private residences use only fully shielded lighting fixtures for porches or driveways.

Smith also pointed to a solution that helps those migrating birds: "Eventually, we will have motion-sensor controls, so when you're in the building and using it, lights will be on and when the building isn't in use, the lights will be off."

He estimates that more than 100 cities in the United States have ordinances on the books regarding outdoor lighting. One such a town is Stowe, Vt.

The Stowe City Council passed standards for outdoor lighting in 1998. The regulations require outdoor lighting be cutoff fixtures, as they direct light downward where it is needed, not sideways or upward. "We do have height restrictions of 16 feet for parking lot lighting," said Stowe Zoning Director Rich Baker, "and we don't allow sodium vapor lights or internally illuminated signage.

"This is a tourist area. People come here for outdoor recreation and for the aesthetics. We needed to cut down bright outside lighting."

New on the energy horizon and ready to take the bite out of squandered light is the federal government's new planned matrix for Energy Star qualification or fitted target efficiency. The old Energy Star qualification system factored how much energy would you get out of a light bulb. Soon, it will factor how much energy is going to the target, reducing squandered light energy.

The Dark-Sky Association estimates that wasted light squanders the equivalent of 32 million barrels of oil or 9 million tons of coal each year in the United States alone. Some other industrialized nations might point the way toward improvement: Longcore said much of Europe is ahead of the U.S. on confronting this issue, particularly the Czech Republic, which has a nationwide light pollution law on the books.

"Lighting the night is a purely manmade condition," Motta says. "We can't do anything about the sun, but we can do something about the nighttime lighting situation."

Of all the complex environmental problems that so desperately need our attention and a solution, light pollution is the most easily remedied.

Judith Stock is a Los Angeles-based environmental journalist. Her articles have appeared in USA Weekend, National Wildlife, Cooking Light, HGTV and Preservation Online.

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Support Humane and Environmental Groups? The Government Thinks Your a Terrorist Groups

How I Almost Got Put on the Domestic Terrorist List for Handing Out Leaflets

By Will Potter, Conari Press Posted on March 28, 2011, Printed on April 5, 2011 http://www.alternet.org/story/150412/how_i_almost_got_put_on_the_domestic_terrorist_list_for_handing_out_leaflets

© 2011 Conari Press All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150412/

Finding Indian Rock

Flinging Manure

Garden As If Your Life Depends Upon It, Because It Does

(from this morning's AlterNet)

By Ellen LaConte, AlterNetPosted on March 29, 2011, Printed on March 30, 2011http://www.alternet.org/story/150428/

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150428/

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Bradley Manning Update from AlterNet

As the Treatment of Bradley Manning Grows More Obscene, Reality Becomes Harder to Ignore

By Lynn Parramore, New Deal 2.0Posted on March 11, 2011, Printed on March 17, 2011http://www.alternet.org/story/150223/

© 2011 New Deal 2.0 All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150223/

Too Adorable Not to Post!

Tragic, But No Surprise....

Soldier, loyal dog make final journey

Words Difficult to Translate

Eastern Cougar Declared Extinct, Even as They Return to East

Federal researchers declare eastern cougar extinct

Spring

Duh

Scientist Warns On Safety Of Monsanto's Roundup

New Short Fiction

Pepe Escobar on US Role in Egypt

Why the US Fears Arab Democracy

By Pepe Escobar, Asia TimesPosted on February 6, 2011, Printed on February 7, 2011http://www.alternet.org/story/149813/

© 2011 Asia Times All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149813/

Down the Tubes!

Why Europeans Think We're Insane

By Democrats Ramshield, Daily KosPosted on December 1, 2010, Printed on December 1, 2010http://www.alternet.org/story/149010/

© 2010 Daily Kos All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149010/

Fionnbhar the Dog Recovering

Post Election Thoughts

Bread and Circus

Our Country Is Lost Believing in What It Sees on Screens, and We Are Going to Pay a Nasty Price for It

By Chris Hedges, TruthdigPosted on October 8, 2010, Printed on October 13, 2010http://www.alternet.org/story/148449/

An Essay from Chris Hedges

Our Country Is Lost Believing in What It Sees on Screens, and We Are Going to Pay a Nasty Price for It

By Chris Hedges, TruthdigPosted on October 8, 2010, Printed on October 13, 2010http://www.alternet.org/story/148449/

Rutgers Holds Vigil for Victim of Secret Taping

A Gaggle of Geese, a Husk of Hares

Full Moon Beer

The Dog Days

Funny Pictures

What a Wonderful World

A Must-See Documentary: The Cove

Happy Spring!

Guests Blogger: Community Gardening in SanFran

Local Wildlife

The Great Wall of Israel

By Ellen CantarowPosted on December 8, 2009, Printed on December 8, 2009http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175175/

© 2009 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175175/

Wolf-Killer Targeted at Mall: Give That Man the Congressional Medal of Honor

Man Throws Tomatoes at Palin at MOA

Feinstein-Resnick Have Fish Rescue Plan in Their Sites

Meet Stewart Resnick, Corporate Farming Billionaire and One-Man Environmental Wrecking Crew

By Lance Williams, Center for Investigative ReportingPosted on December 8, 2009, Printed on December 8, 2009http://www.alternet.org/story/144427/

© 2009 Center for Investigative Reporting All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144427/

Climate Change Threatens Life in Small Alaskan Town

Iraq Sees Alarming Rise in Cancers, Deformed Babies

By Will Potter, Conari Press
Posted on March 28, 2011, Printed on April 5, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150412/how_i_almost_got_put_on_the_domestic_terrorist_list_for_handing_out_leaflets

© 2011 Conari Press All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150412/

By Ellen LaConte, AlterNet
Posted on March 29, 2011, Printed on March 30, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150428/

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150428/

By Lynn Parramore, New Deal 2.0
Posted on March 11, 2011, Printed on March 17, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150223/

© 2011 New Deal 2.0 All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150223/

By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times
Posted on February 6, 2011, Printed on February 7, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149813/

© 2011 Asia Times All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149813/

By Democrats Ramshield, Daily Kos
Posted on December 1, 2010, Printed on December 1, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/149010/

© 2010 Daily Kos All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149010/

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on October 8, 2010, Printed on October 13, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148449/

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on October 8, 2010, Printed on October 13, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148449/

By Ellen Cantarow
Posted on December 8, 2009, Printed on December 8, 2009
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175175/

© 2009 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175175/

By Lance Williams, Center for Investigative Reporting
Posted on December 8, 2009, Printed on December 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144427/

© 2009 Center for Investigative Reporting All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144427/

By Judith Stock, Miller-McCune.com
Posted on October 13, 2009, Printed on October 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143258/

© 2009 Miller-McCune.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143258/