Dharmaceutical: Your daily dose of outrage

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I’ve been blah-ging a lot about health care.  I’m outraged at knowing what happens in the board rooms, in patients’ rooms, in the operating rooms and in the emergency rooms.

But I also try to help people empower themselves so that they have the tools and skills they need in order to make the best decisions about their health for themselves, their families, their communities and our country.

This evening’s offering is simply an introduction, of sorts.  Share a little about your own health questions, your questions, and your needs.  As a community, it’s important that we identify what’s needed, and then figure out how and where our own talents can support each other and move our agenda forward.

I’m a nurse by education and accident.  As a high school part-time job, I was hired off the street as a nursing aide in a private, for-profit nursing home that was filled with residents who had been forcibly de-institutionalized from state mental institutions.  I learned about tardive dyskinesias and EPS (extra pyramidal syndrome), and I also saw a family deal with Huntington’s chorea as the adult daughter was approaching the zero hour age of 35 – when symptoms either appear or they do not – either telling the tale of a horrendous decline to death or an escape from this still lethal progressive diagnosis.

In those days before AIDS and the routine use of gloves, I cleaned up incontinent patients without gloves, routinely washed out fecal filled linen and diapers with a high power spray hose, and I lifted heavy patients by myself because there were two aides for 33 patients on the night shift. I cleaned up a dead body at the age of 16.  Death and dying is not a fearful or scary event to me, but it is supremely mysterious, sacred and I do what I can to help the dying person to maintain control and to have their wishes made known and honored.  I hold the hands of the dying, and I do not look away.

During nursing school (a five year dual degree program which had been founded by a congresswoman, Frances Payne Bolton – can you say feminist progressive Republican congresswoman?!?!?!), I picked up part-time hours at one of the first progressive care retirement communities – Judson Park.  I made many friends of the retired professors and local professionals who lived there, and I also took care of a lady by the name of Mrs. Riley, whose husband was the COO of the Heinz company in Pittsburgh.  Mrs. Riley was a particular lady who was fiercely angry at losing any ability to live an entirely independent life.

However, in the course of dressing one morning, she pulled a photograph album out of her lingerie drawer, and I shyly asked if she had family photos.

Oh! Mr. Heinz had sent the Rileys on a four month long cruise around the world as his retirement present, and these were some of the photos – from Egypt, Europe and onward.  She also had early photographs from before the turn of the 20th century of her own childhood home and family. She and I became friends, even as she tolerated my assisting her when her hands or arms wouldn’t cooperate with her will.

I always enjoyed working with and providing nursing for the elderly, and that’s where I thought my career would lead.  However, I also liked all of the bells and whistles of the critical care units.  There were more nurses to team with, and there were always exciting stories to tell.  So during my last two years of school, I became a glorified nursing assistant at the affiliated academic teaching hospital where I had been taking my clinical rotations.  In those days, as senior students, we could do almost all of the functions of a registered nurse under their supervision.  I learned how to care for groups of step-down cardiac patients on my own with a nurse just a few steps away in the main medical intensive care unit.

But the lure of NYC was too great to keep me in Cleveland after graduation.  My housing (24th floor apartment overlooking Lincoln Center with a million dollar view of the city) wouldn’t be ready until August, so I went back to my parents’ home and worked as the sole RN brand spanking new graduate charge nurse in the original nursing home where I had started.  Now I had 111 patients all under my supervision – with two licensed practical nurses sharing the medication administration and wound care duties.  But since I knew most of the patients from my summers and vacations working there, it was more like just taking one more step forward.

My career careened in directions that I never planned, but my interest has always been to empower patients, to treat everyone with respect and dignity, and most of all, to steward lives from birth to the end of life.

I’m now interested in speaking up for professional nursing and for patients.  I do not have health insurance myself.  I do have untreated health problems and under-treated health problems.

I have discharged patients to the street.  I have protested to the extent that I have been able.  I have blown the whistle. 

It is not enough.

Your turn. What is your story?

on Armando and civility

The topic has been rehashed to death already, but these diaries, written over the past 2 years, are still pretty much relevant:

Armando is a kind, gentle, caring person
Ultimate meta: civility, dKos ecology and the reclist
Meta: How to discuss constructively with a smart brash kossack

Beyond the text below, I’d like to note one thing: there is nothing that will frustrate a bully more than unflailing civility in the face of continuous aggressivity. Civility actually is very satisfying in fights.

As per the last of the 3 diaries linke to above:

Armando consistently fights the hypocrisy of those that call for civility and restraint in comments but are unable to follow their own rules, something that I fully agree with. He also thinks that there is no need real for civility in discussions and that we’re all big boys (and girls) who should be able to take it and dish it without taking things too personally. His position is that sharp disagreements, immediate and abrupt note of inconsistencies, errors or stupidity help bring out the facts faster and weeds out the fluff. I disagree with him on the specific point that this need not be done politely, as I think that if you really are civil, people will listen to you more than if you are brusque or confrontational. I do agree that inconsitencies, errors or stupidity should be noted.

But what I’d like to point out, as CanYouBeAngyAndStillDream, is that a combination of the two approaches can be highly effective.

For a very long time, I was wary of discussing anything with Armando. I was already a well known kossack, and yet I dreaded entering any thread wehre he was present. Part of it was avoiding the hassle of being subjected to relentless pressure to justify whatever I’d have written, and part of it was the difficulty to conduct a dialogue when any error is noticed, used against you and to distract you.

I eventually did join discussions with him, but I did it in a way that would limit the possibility for him to not respond on what I hoped he would respond, i.e. by avoiding errors, ambiguities or loose ends. He forced me to think hard about what I wrote, so as not to give him easy openings. He forced me to be precise, either in what I stated, or in what I asked of him. He sharpened my arguments.

And he responded in kind – still probing, pushing, and pounding whenever he could, but also genuinely responding to questions and acknowledging points when they deserved it. And we got serious dialogue going. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty damn good between us, I think.

So, take it like this: Armando does not like noise, and he will scream at noise (yeah – irony alert. But this is the core point). Do not give him the opportunity to scream. Do not generate noise. Do not write fluff. Don’t be inconsistent. Don’t write in bad faith. Be sharp. And drop your pride offsite.

Because, let’s face it, what makes the quality of this site is, as I’ve droned on and on about many times already, is because the information is vetted. That does not mean that all writing on the side is good, far from it, but that the community is able to identify the good writing, flag the bad or the ugly or the false, and the good stuff is thus supposed to be more visible than the bad one. And Armando is part of that vetting process. The more people know that their bullshit will be called, whether in polite tones or in vicious retorts, the less noise we’ll have.

(As an aside, that’s why “response diaries”, which annoy many – why yet another diary on a topic that has already generated a lot of comments? – are actually useful, because they allow for the information beaten to death in earlier diaries to be summarised, re-used and brought to the community in a smarter form, thereby contributing directly to the vetting process).

Where I differ with Armando is that I think that the brash replies can create more noise, because they cause those people that are not willing to take the heat to huff and puff and feel (to some extent with justification) victimized, thereby allowing them a whiny out from the debate on substance. But their ability to create more noise (which triggers more reaction from Armando, naturally) does not mean that they were right.

So the lesson is simple: be smart, and find ways to use Armando’s sharpness to your advantage. Remember: he’s shouting at the noise, not at you. Hone your aguments, improve your writing, and learn how to keep cool! It works.

The Falling Dollar — Baby Let Me Follow You Down

Of course, by now we all know that the dollar is losing value at a swift pace. But do we know how that will affect our everyday life in the next 18 months?

More important, is there a way to protect ourselves? Hey, maybe there’s even a way to have fun with it and get rich at the same time.

Just about everything written on this topic is aimed at businesses and institutional investors. There’s never any clues for the little guys. We’re just collateral damage, after all. We share the same status as Iraqi civilians, in that regard.

x

(Bubbles) Greenspan: “Oops”

Greenspan alert on US house prices

US house prices are likely to fall significantly from their present levels, Alan Greenspan has told the Financial Times, admitting that there was a bubble in the US housing market.

Now he tells us! Now that, after encouraging the bubble, blowing it out of proportion, and claiming that it was not possible to tell if there was a bubble, said bubble is blowing in our faces as many observers have predicted for a number of years now, he claims that it was obvious all along.

What a lying piece of shit.

Exclusive to DD!

In an interview ahead of the release on Monday of his widely-anticipated memoirs, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve said the decline in house prices “is going to be larger than most people expect”.

That’s only because most people chose to believe his lies over the warnings of those that said that incredibly cheap debt and the “Greenspan put” (the idea, turned reality in 1987, 1997, 1998, 2001, that the Fed would rescue the markets by lowering interest rates should any big crisis strike) were a recipe for worsening bubbles, and of those that suggested that maybe central banks should worry about asset price inflation (like European Central Bank chairman Jean-Claude Trichet, who was widely mocked then for his quaint ideas). I’ve been writing diaries for close to 3 years on that topic, and the existence of a bubble has been blindingly obvious to me all along.

He said the price of risk had fallen to unsustainably low levels beforehand, with investors addicted to asset-backed securities that offered some additional yield over Treasury bonds as if they were “cocaine”. Mr Greenspan said this demand induced the big increase in the origination of subprime mortgages by mortgage brokers.

“Cocaine”, heh? Strong words. Yeah, people started takng too much risk because they made no money whatsoever on normal transactions precisely because the Greenspan Fed kept rates low and brought the remuneration for safe assets incredibly low. Borrowing money was cheap, but investing it required taking increasing risks; but risky investing was done precisely because the money to do so was made available cheaply all along… Thus a bubble of over-investing, increasingly focused on silly (but initially profitable) investments.

Mr Greenspan said the off-balance sheet investment vehicles that issued much of the asset-backed commercial paper represented a “savings and loans disaster waiting to happen” because of the mismatch between their assets and liabilities.

Indeed. And he did what about it? Nothing? Yep. Can he be blamed for that? Yep.

Of course, we should note carefully what he says, because it is yet another indictment of the Bush administration, but we should never forget that he was completely part of their economic strategy, and never protested against it despite his wide powers to do so. He is indicting himself today. Bush cannot be blamed for it all. He was helped, by accomplices, sycophants and by those that could not be bothered. Whether they were clueless, or cowards, or profiteers who thought they could get away with it, they are responsible.

And “Bubbles” Greenspan is more responsible than most.

The Falling Dollar — Baby, Let Me Follow You Down

Of course, by now we all know that the dollar is losing value at a swift pace. But do we know how that will affect our everyday life in the next 18 months?

More important, is there a way to protect ourselves? Hey, maybe there’s even a way to have fun with it and get rich at the same time.

Just about everything written on this topic is aimed at businesses and institutional investors. There’s never any clues for the little guys. We’re just collateral damage, after all. We share the same status as Iraqi civilians, in that regard.

Dollar’s retreat raises fear of collapse
By Carter Dougherty

Thursday, September 13, 2007
FRANKFURT: Finance ministers and central bankers have long fretted that at some point, the rest of the world would lose its willingness to finance the United States’ proclivity to consume far more than it produces – and that a potentially disastrous free-fall in the dollar’s value would result.

But for longer than most economists would have been willing to predict a decade ago, the world has been a willing partner in American excess – until a new and home-grown financial crisis this summer rattled confidence in the country, the world’s largest economy.

On Thursday, the dollar briefly fell to another low against the euro of $1.3927, as a slow decline that has been under way for months picked up steam this past week.

“This is all pointing to a greatly increased risk of a fast unwinding of the U.S. current account deficit and a serious decline of the dollar,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and an expert on exchange rates. “We could finally see the big kahuna hit.”

In addition to increased nervousness about the pace of the dollar’s decline, many currency analysts now also are willing to make an argument they would have avoided as recently as a few years ago: that the euro should bear the brunt of the dollar’s decline.

The euro, shared by 13 countries, once looked like a daring experiment. But it has gained credibility and euro-denominated financial assets are as good as their U.S. counterparts. With a slow economic overhaul under way in European capitals, and a fundamentally sound corporate structure, a weaker dollar justifiably means a stronger euro.

“The euro has earned what it has gotten,” said Stephen Jen, global head of currency research at Morgan Stanley in London. “It is not simply rallying by default.”

So long as Americans buy more than they earn from exports – and they did, creating a current account deficit of $850 billion last year – the rest of the world financed the binge by bringing dollars into the United States for investment in stocks, bonds, real estate or other assets, thereby preserving demand for the dollar.

The continued appetite for U.S. investments stemmed from a track record of strong economic growth and a financial system that has been remarkably resistant to shocks.

But the latest turmoil in mortgage markets has, in a single stroke, shaken faith in the resilience of American finance to a greater degree than even the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000 or the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, analysts said. It has also raised prospect of a recession in the wider economy.

While most economists just a few months ago would have dismissed the prospect of a dollar collapse outright, they now are debating the possibility that something on par with the dollar debacle of the 1970s might just happen again.

When a currency collapses, the central bank can push up interest rates to attract needed investment, but strangle the economy in the process. Alternatively, it can let the currency fall and watch prices of imports – and eventually competing domestic goods – rise sharply.

Double-digit inflation resulted in the 1970s and only a global recession brought it to an end.

Today, the dollar’s current weakness is being driven by uncertainty over how central banks will react to the turmoil in financial markets, unleashed by the collapse of the U.S. market for subprime mortgages given to borrowers with shaky credit histories.

The European Central Bank put off an interest rate increase it had planned for September, but is still inclined to tighten credit at least one more time by the end of this year. By contrast, the U.S. Federal Reserve has hinted at a rate cut at its meeting next Tuesday – a step that would diminish the appeal of dollar-denominated assets, almost certainly sending the dollar lower.

But across a horizon of 18 months to two years, investors are pondering how quickly the dollar will fall, a question to which there are no easy answers.

After a run of strong growth, the U.S. economy has lurched into a phase of slower expansion, and last Friday the most serious warning sign appeared – an outright deterioration in employment growth.

The data has coincided with profit warnings from major U.S. retailers like Wal-Mart Stores and Home Depot, suggesting that consumer spending, the backbone of the American economy for years, was ebbing. This step would logically follow the rapidly cooling housing market, since Americans have spent heavily with money borrowed against rising home values.

A drop in consumer spending by Americans means fewer imports. The current account deficit peaked at 6.8 percent of gross domestic product in late 2005 and is now running at about 5.5 percent, with figures for the second quarter of 2007 due out on Friday.

A lower deficit means less capital needs to flow into the United States, and is consistent with a steady decline in the dollar. Since the middle of last year, the dollar, weighted for trade flows, has fallen steadily against a broad range of currencies, according to data collected by the Fed.

All this suggests that, in spite of headline-grabbing news about the latest low, the dollar could be adjusting gradually as the U.S. economy becomes driven less by lending on the back of rising home price.

The problem, as every economist knows, is that the current account deficit – about $770 billion – is still colossal in absolute terms.

And foreigners are being asked to provide those dollars at a time when the subprime turmoil is threatening to spill over into the broader economy.

Put another way, at a time when the psychology of crisis has gripped financial markets, intangible attitudes toward the dollar have become all the more important. And with growth strong elsewhere in the world, there are appealing places to go besides the dollar.

“The problem is that the deficit is still very, very large,” Jen said. “And there are plenty of other investment opportunities outside the United States.”

Pressed to make an educated guess, most economists opt for calm, believing the dollar is unlikely to go into a tailspin even as they mark up the odds of one.

The major holders of dollars – notably the Chinese, with their $1.3 trillion in currency reserves – have little incentive to see the dollar weaken, and their support provides the dollar with a bulwark of strength. And since investors need to stay diversified, and U.S. markets are deep and liquid, abandoning the dollar wholesale is hardly a realistic option.

“Rather than a precipitous decline, we are probably be looking at a move steadily lower,” said Simon Derrick, chief currency strategist at Bank of New York in London.

Will he stay or will he go?

Just a quick one, but an important one.

First, the Guardian reported that:

President Vladimir Putin today dismissed Russia’s government ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections and appointed a little-known ally Viktor Zubkov as the country’s prime minister.

After months of speculation about a possible reshuffle, Mr Putin said he had accepted the resignation of the prime minister, Mikhail Fradkov, and his government during a meeting in the Kremlin.

The Kremlin later announced that Mr Zubkov had been nominated as the new head of Russia’s government – ahead of parliamentary elections on December 2 and a presidential poll in March 2008.

Then, the Associated Press:

The chairman of Russia’s upper house of parliament said Saturday that Vladimir Putin, barred from seeking a third consecutive term in elections next year, should run again for the presidency in 2012, Russian news agencies reported.

The comments by Sergei Mironov are likely add to furious speculation about Putin’s intentions.

Indeed.

Bush looked into his soul and saw the man he’d like to be.

Four at Four

This is an OPEN THREAD, but it also features four stories in the news at 4 o’clock.

  1. BBC News reports on the deadly plane crash in Thailand. “At least 87 people have died after a budget airliner crashed after landing in heavy rain at the Thai holiday resort of Phuket, officials say. ¶ The aircraft slipped off the runway and exploded into flames. It was carrying 123 passengers – most of them foreigners – and seven crew. About 40 people escaped the burning wreckage and were taken to hospital. ¶ Flight OG 269, operated by airline One-Two-Go, had flown to Phuket from the Thai capital, Bangkok. Officials say at least 87 people were confirmed dead after the plane skidded off the runway in strong winds and driving rain on Sunday.”.

  2. According to The Telegraph, Osama bin Laden has been sidelined as al-Qaeda threat revives. “Osama bin Laden’s deputy has seized control of al-Qaeda and rebuilt the terror network into an organisation capable of launching complex terror attacks in Britain and America. ¶ Intelligence officials [claim] that bin Laden has not chaired a meeting of al-Qaeda’s ruling shura, or council, in more than two years. ¶ Instead, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s nominal number two, is credited with rebuilding the terror network since the Afghan war in 2001. ¶ Intelligence sources in Washington have revealed that Western spy chiefs were recently forced to revise dramatically their view that al-Qaeda was so depleted that it was little more than a cheerleader for extremists. ¶ Instead, British and American intelligence agencies believe that a network of terrorist cells, funded, controlled and supported by al-Qaeda’s central command, based in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, is in place again. ¶ Al-Zawahiri’s task has been made easier because not a single prominent al-Qaeda leader has been captured since March 2006, nearly 18 months ago.” The Los Angles Times explains that al Qaeda is expanding by ‘co-opting’ new affiliate. “Secure in its haven in northwestern Pakistan, a resurgent Al Qaeda is trying to expand its network, in some cases by executing corporate-style takeovers of regional Islamic extremist groups, according to U.S. intelligence officials and counter-terrorism experts. ¶ Though not always successful, these moves indicate a shift in strategy by the terrorist network as it seeks to broaden its reach and renew its ability to strike Western targets, including the United States, officials and experts say.”I guess all those ‘important’ al-Qaeda number threes that the Bush administration trots out every few months are sort of like Star Trek’s red shirt guys.

  3. The New York Times reports that the state of New York has subpoenaed five energy companies that plan on building new coal-burning power plants. “Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has opened an investigation of five large energy companies, questioning whether their plans to build coal-fired power plants pose undisclosed financial risks that their investors should know about… ¶ In letters accompanying the subpoenas, the attorney general’s office asked whether investors received adequate information about the potential financial liabilities of carbon dioxide emissions that exacerbate climate change. ¶ ‘Any one of the several new or likely regulatory initiatives for CO2 emissions from power plants — including state carbon controls, E.P.A.’s regulations under the Clean Air Act, or the enactment of federal global warming legislation — would add a significant cost to carbon-intensive coal generation,’ the letters said. ¶ They added, ‘Selective disclosure of favorable information or omission of unfavorable information concerning climate change is misleading.‘ ¶ Mr. Cuomo’s move represents a new tactic in an expanding campaign against some of the more than 100 coal-fired power plants currently under consideration.”

  4. While not really news, I found this piece of travel writing by Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post quite evocative. So for your Sunday afternoon reading enjoyment, here is the opening excerpt from ‘Whiling Away the Night In the Salon of the Sahara‘.

    As darkness settled over Marrakech’s Djemma el-Fna Square and the crowds flowed in to pass the evening, a stylish young Moroccan couple in one corner of the plaza crouched by a necromancer, urgently whispering their troubles into his ear.

    Their counselor, a maker of magic charms, listened attentively, pen ready to jot down the right incantation on one of the scraps of paper lying at his feet on the gray stone of the plaza.

    In another corner, a Tuareg tribesman from the Sahara of southern Morocco was having a bad sales night. On a sheet before him lay withered ostrich legs, chunks of petrified wood from the rippling grasslands that once covered the Sahara, and numerous balms, potions, powders and scents. For now, no one was buying.

    From a plastic bin at the Tuareg’s feet, dried chameleons used in magic and folk medicine — their eyes bulging and their tongues extruding — glared sullenly at passersby. Under his blue turban, so did the Tuareg.

    Open fires roasting mutton for sale sent orange flames and towers of greasy smoke over Djemma el-Fna, adding to the medieval air of the ancient square, which is bounded by mosques dating to the 10th century…

So, what else is happening?

Pony Party: Sunday music retrospective

Harry Nilsson


Everybody’s Talkin’

Harry sang Fred Neil’s Everybody’s Talkin’ in the movie Midnight Cowboy.  There was a top 40 version released by Spanky and Our Gang.  Hence we have a connection to this morning’s Party…just as this evening’s Party is connected to this one.  I do like, in the end, to have a point.


Coconut


Without You


A hint about the late shift

Please do not recommend a Pony Party when you see one.  There will be another along in a few hours.

–The Man

The Real Makah

(Up again. Just because. – promoted by Turkana)

Disclaimer: My only relationship with the Makah tribe consists of having enjoyed their hospitality on numerous occasions.

(map, right, courtesy of the Makah Nation – click to enlarge)

“. . . we are not going to sanction illegal activities. We are not that kind of tribe.”

–Ed Claplanhoo, Makah tribal elder, member of the tribal whaling commission

The statement above is from a Seattle Times article which does a pretty good job of presenting several of the differing viewpoints on the incident of September 8, when five members of the Makah tribe fatally injured a California grey whale in a criminal act that has been loudly condemned by the group angered the most:

The Makah tribal council denounces the actions of those who took it upon themselves to hunt a whale without the authority from the Makah Tribal Council or the Makah Whaling Commission.
~~~~~
We are a law-abiding people and we will not tolerate lawless conduct by any of our members. We hope the public does not permit the actions of five irresponsible persons to be used to harm the image of the entire Makah tribe.

That hope is vain, as the Makah know well. Hence the immediate dispatch of a delegation to DC in an attempt to repair the damage.

Included in the first article above is the following:

The Makah need to follow the laws of the U.S., said Cacace, who lives near Tacoma. “It’s been a long time since those treaties were signed.

“If they did it the way they used to do it, with the harpoon and canoe, it’d probably be fine with me,” he said.

Such statements, remarkably ignorant and confused in more ways than one, are entirely representative of sentiments that can be heard at any coffee shop in the state as well as around the web and even in print. They are considered reasonable, and for that reason are as pernicious as the outright racism that the incident has inspired on the message boards and in the gutter press.


“The Makah need to follow the laws of the U.S.”

The first, the one not directly quoted, is a truism with which no one is arguing and certainly not the Makah tribe, which is cooperating fully with state and local officials and trying the miscreants in tribal court as well, where they face in addition to other penalties possible suspension of their tribal rights. Ironically, among the privileges that the tribe could take away – and only the tribe, because it is the tribe that grants them, not the US – is that of participating in any future whale hunt authorized by the tribe, assuming that such ever happen.


“It’s been a long time since those treaties were signed.”

The second implies that binding treaties can be disregarded if they are found inconvenient. Does that work both ways? If the Treaty of Neah Bay, which uniquely among treaties with native peoples granted the Makah whaling rights in its Article 4, is no longer a binding document, the Makah are presumably free to reassert claims to traditional land given up in that treaty. Or is it only the stronger power that can repudiate treaties? Do we want might makes right to be the only rule that matters? Here, and elsewhere?

The Constitution was signed even longer ago. Yet it is nominally still in effect.

Article 4 contains about all they got out of the deal. The promised assistance didn’t materialize, at least not in the form the Makah expected. What they had in mind was leveling the playing field with a few more modern boats so they could join in the capitalist game. And while they did quite well with sealing, which for years made them more money than whaling ever did, and then with halibut, they did it mostly on their own.

The great white dads prescribed the usual: English, Christian habits, and agrarianism, which would lessen the competition in the ocean fisheries and sealing.

Never mind that the possibilities for farming are severely limited by the region’s climate and geography,1 or that their dress, custom, and economy had served them well for several thousand years. So well that they were known by surrounding tribes as “makah,” a term that translates as “generous with food.”

We call ourselves “Kwih-dich-chuh-ahtx” or “people who live by the rocks and seagulls”.2


“If they did it the way they used to do it, with the harpoon and canoe, it’d probably be fine with me.”

Probably, but maybe not. There is a lot wrong with this. Up front, it demonstrates the common public ignorance of the fact that any tribally sanctioned hunt is done with harpoon and canoe. The 50-caliber rifle is used only after the whale is secured by harpoons, a measure meant to insure that death is as quick and painless as possible. Its use is an attempt to comply with modern practice and sentiment, not a quick and dirty shortcut. This protocol was established by the tribe’s own whaling commission in consultation with the International Whaling Commission and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

More objectionable still is the implicit assumption that it is up to the speaker to decide how the Makah conduct their affairs, that there is an outside arbiter that gets to decide what is the real Makah and what is not. We hear it all the time in the argument that the Makah shouldn’t be allowed to hunt whales because they don’t live in a traditional society any more, that they drive cars and use microwave ovens. They are just like us, the argument goes, and shouldn’t be granted any special privileges.

This is the last gasp of the assimilationist argument. Try arguing that Scotland has no identity of its own because few Scots paint their faces blue any more, or that the Japanese aren’t Japanese because they flock to McDonalds.

Leave it to Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to get it wrong as usual:

I think what the Makah are trying to do is test the resolve of the U.S. government to enforce the law.

This is every bit as bad as the first headlines, like Tribal Hunters Kill Migrating Whale. We have seen that it was not a tribal hunt. To me, this headline is troubling. Imagine a story on Michael Vick that began Negro Tortures Dog.

For Watson, there are no individuals, only the Makah as a group. By turns over the years Watson’s ideas on this have been wrongheaded, false, or irrelevant. He simply cannot understand that the right to the hunt is considered by most Makah as central to cultural identity and that asking them to give it up on someone else’s terms is tantamount to asking them to un-be Makah.

Nor can he comprehend the position of many in the tribe who oppose whaling on some of the same grounds as he, and yet insist on the right to decide for themselves. His remarks this time around only weaken his case.

Watson and the animal rights groups see a tree but not the forest. Firmly focussed on one animal’s death instead of the collapse of the global environment, they have convinced a huge section of the public that the Makah are awful people, utterly lacking in environmental awareness. So it might seem, given the selective amnesia of the outside world and its media.

We never hear much about the tribe’s vital role in helping to manage and protect the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary and its three National Wildlife Refuges (click to enlarge map, right). Or about its painstaking monitoring of fresh and ocean water quality.

Or its response to the Tenyo Maru disaster,3 both the immediate cleanup and the long term remediation effort. (What if the tribe had played some part in the oil spill? It would be held against them forever as evidence of their irresponsibility. But the Japanese fishing ship and the Chinese freighter that rammed it? Oh well, accidents happen you know.)

It is forgotten that the tribe chooses to build and maintain hiking trails across its own land so that visitors from around the world can more easily enjoy the remoter parts of the coast.

No one complains when the Makah spend tribal funds to research the decline in deer populations or on how to best manage the Roosevelt elk herds of the Olympic peninsula. Or when they pioneer in removing unnecessary dams to restore salmon runs that benefit not just themselves but also the commercial fishery at large.

Nor is there much coverage of the Makah’s forward thinking on renewable energy, as exhibited by their participation in the Makah Bay AquaBuOY Wave Energy Pilot Project.

Makah Tribal Council Chairman Ben Johnson Jr.:

The Makah Tribe has interest in using energy derived from renewable resources. The Makah Nation chose to partner in this project due to the environmental integrity and low impact of AquaEnergy’s offshore buoy technology.


This is not a group unaware of or disinterested in the larger environment. Without resorting to romantic nonsense it is fair to say they live in a state of closer integration with the world than most.

One of the Makah myths relates that Thunderbird brought Whale to the people, showing them the new resource that would feed them. The story is central enough that it serves as the tribal logo and flag. As stories go, it makes as much sense as the dust and spare ribs and apples on offer elsewhere.

Whatever we feel about whaling, we have no right to tell these people how to live, or to ask them to un-be what they know they are. It might be better to listen.


For your viewing pleasure: Aerial photos of the Washington coast


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  1. Nonetheless, and undermining the view that they were simply too lazy or stupid to farm, the Makah had the wit to adopt crops suitable for cultivation in their environment when they ran across any. A 1792 encounter with the Spanish resulted in a tradition of potato cultivation which continues to this day. The unique variety was finally recognized as the Makah Potato, sometimes called the Ozette.
  2. The story of the name, while true, itself plays into a noble savage myth that the Makah are happy to exploit for public relations purposes. Prior to European contact, they were successful players in the great coastal trading network. You can bet many of those gifts of food were what we would call product samples, loss leaders.
  3. It is estimated that this one spill 25 miles northwest of Cape Flattery wiped out more than ten percent of Washington’s marbled murrelets, sensitive because they spend their time at sea just beyond the surf. The coast of the Makah reservation was hit hardest of all.

Is a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America?

Crossposted at PPF!

There is alot of news coming out of Israel/Palestine/Syria/Egypt and maybe I will write a catch-up diary this weekend. But this very relevant article on our foreign policies caught my eye. Got the link over at Marisacat. And yes, I think they are must reading for cutting edge commentary.

Here is the article in entirety(with permission), blockquotes mine for people that do not read every word, BUT I hope you do:

  Despite Backlash, Many Jews Are Questioning Israel
  by Tony Karon and Tom Engelhardt
  TomDispatch

  I often think of the letters that come into the Tomdispatch email box as the university of my later life – messages from around the world, offering commentary, criticism, encouragement, but mainly teaching me about lives (and versions of life) I would otherwise know little or nothing about. Then again, the Internet has a way of releasing inhibitions and, from time to time, the Tomdispatch email box is also a sobering reminder of the mindless hate in our world – of every sort, but sometimes of a strikingly anti-Semitic sort, letters that are wildly angry and eager, above all, to shut down or shut up commentary or debate of any sort.

 
  It’s ironic, then, that the threat of sparking such “anti-Semitism,” as well as charges of being functionally anti-Semitic, have been used for a long time in this country as a kind of club to enforce, within the Jewish community, an exceedingly narrow range of correct opinion on Israel and its behavior in the world. In recent months, such attacks from within the Jewish establishment seem to have escalated whenever any professor or critic steps even slightly out of line, and the recent controversial book, The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt has caused a little storm of consternation. Tony Karon, who runs the always provocative Rootless Cosmopolitan website, suggests that these attacks may not be what they seem, that the need to turn back every deviation from Jewish orthodoxy may actually reflect a loosening of control within the political world of American Jews, and a new opening, a Jewish glasnost.
  Tom

And:

Is a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America?
Despite a Backlash, Many Jews Are Questioning Israel
By Tony Karon

  First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can’t help loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love it is its D.I.R.T. list – that’s “Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors” (also published as the S.H.I.T. list of “Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening” Jews). And that’s not because I get a bigger entry than – staying in the Ks – Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from Woody Allen to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents – those of us who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to that of Israel, or the idea that our people’s historic suffering somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against others – as “self-haters”is not unfamiliar to me.

  In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B’nai B’rith Jewish service organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Jewish Board of Deputies, the governing body of South Africa’s Jewish communal institutions. The topic of the meeting was “Anti-Semitism on Campus.” My father was pretty shocked and deeply embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out to be something I’d published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli raid on Lebanon.

  By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an active left-Zionist in my teenage years, I had, however, retained an interest in the Middle East – and, of course, we all knew that Israel was the South African white apartheid regime’s most important ally, arming its security forces in defiance of a UN arms embargo. Even back then, the connection between the circumstances of black people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious enough to me and to many other Jews in the South African liberation movement: Both were peoples harshly ruled over by a state that denied them the rights of citizenship.

  Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory, sing old kibbutznik anthems and curse in Yiddish. I had been called a “bloody Jew” many times, but never an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. What quickly became clear to me, though, was the purpose of that “self-hating” smear – to marginalize Jews who dissent from Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in order to warn others off expressing similar views.

  What I like about the S.H.I.T. list’s approach to the job – other than the “Dangerous Minds” theme music that plays as you read it – is the way it embraces literally thousands of names, including many of my favorite Jews. Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you’re trying to paint dissenters as demented traitors, you really have to keep the numbers down. Instead, Masada2000’s inadvertent message is: “Think critically about Israel and you’ll join Woody Allen and a cast of thousands…”

  A New Landscape of Jewish Dissent

  The Kahanists are a fringe movement, but their self-defeating list may nonetheless be a metaphor for the coming crisis in more mainstream nationalist efforts to police Jewish identity. The Zionist establishment has had remarkable success over the past half-century in convincing others that Israel and its supporters speak for, and represent, “the Jews.” The value to their cause of making Israel indistinguishable from Jews at large is that it becomes a lot easier to shield Israel from reproach. It suggests, in the most emphatic terms, that serious criticism of Israel amounts to criticism of Jews. More than a millennium of violent Christian persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, has made many in the West rightly sensitive towards any claims of anti-Semitism, a sensitivity many Zionists like to exploit to gain a carte blanche exemption from criticism for a state they claim to be the very personification of Jewishness.

  So, despite Israel’s ongoing dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, then-Harvard president Larry Summers evidently had no trouble saying, in 2002, that harsh criticisms of Israel are “anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent.”

  Robin Shepherd of the usually sensible British think-tank Chatham House has gone even further, arguing that comparing Israel with apartheid South Africa is “objective anti-Semitism.” Says Shepherd: “Of course one can criticize Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when the critics begin using constant key references to South Africa and the Nazis, using terms such as ‘bantustans.’ None of these people, of course, will admit to being racist, but this kind of anti-Semitism is a much more sophisticated form of racism, and the kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire people, since Israel is an essentially Jewish project.”

  I’d agree that the Nazi analogy is specious – not only wrong but offensive in its intent, although not “racist.” But the logic of suggesting it is “racist” to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa is simply bizarre. What if Israel objectively behaves like apartheid South Africa? What then?

  Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I’d be more inclined to pin the racist label on anyone who conflates the world’s 13 million Jews with a country in which 8.2 million of them – almost two thirds – have chosen not to live.

  Although you wouldn’t know it – not if you followed Jewish life simply through the activities of such major Jewish communal bodies as the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League – the extent to which the eight million Jews of the Diaspora identify with Israel is increasingly open to question (much to the horror of the Zionist-oriented Jewish establishment). In a recent study funded by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (an important donor to Jewish communal organizations), Professors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman revealed that their survey data had yielded some extraordinary findings: In order to measure the depth of attachment of American Jews to Israel, the researchers asked whether respondents would consider the destruction of the State of Israel a “personal tragedy.” Less than half of those aged under 35 answered “yes” and only 54% percent of those aged 35-50 agreed (compared with 78% of those over 65). The study found that only 54% of those under 35 felt comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state.

  As groups such as the Jewish Agency in Israel (which aims to promote Jewish immigration) and the American Jewish committee expressed dismay over the findings, Cohen and Kelman had more bad news: They believed they were seeing a long-term trend that was unlikely to be reversed, as each generation of American Jews becomes even more integrated into the American mainstream than its parents and grandparents had been. The study, said Cohen, reflected “very significant shifts that have been occurring in what it means to be a Jew.”

  Cohen’s and Kelman’s startling figures alone underscore the absurdity of Shepherd’s suggestion that to challenge Israel is to “defame an entire people.” They also help frame the context for what I would call an emerging Jewish glasnost in which Jewish critics of Israel are increasingly willing to make themselves known. When I arrived in the United States 13 years ago, I was often surprised to find that people with whom I seemed to share a progressive, cosmopolitan worldview would suddenly morph into raging ultranationalists when the conversation turned to Israel. Back then, it would have seemed unthinkable for historian Tony Judt to advocate a binational state for Israelis and Palestinians or for Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to write that “Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now.” Unthinkable, too, was the angry renunciation of Zionism by Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel’s Knesset.

  And, in those days, with the internet still in its infancy, the online Jewish dissident landscape that today ranges from groups in the Zionist peace camp like Tikkun, Americans for Peace Now, and the Israel Policy Forum, among others, to anti-Zionist Jews of the left such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voices for Peace, had not yet taken shape. Indeed, there was no Haaretz online English edition in which the reality of Israel was being candidly reported and debated in terms that would still be deemed heretical in much of the U.S. media.

  Thirteen years ago, there certainly was no organization around like “Birthright Unplugged,” which aims to subvert the “Taglit-Birthright Program,” funded by Zionist groups and the government of Israel, that provides free trips to Israel for young Jewish Americans in order to encourage them to identify with the State. (The “Unplugged” version encourages young Jews from the U.S. to take the Birthright tour and its free air travel, and then stay on for a two-week program of visits to the West Bank, to Israeli human rights organizations, and to peace groups. The goal is to see another side of Israel, the side experienced by its victims – and by Israelis who oppose the occupation of the West Bank.)

  Clearly, much has changed, and the ability of the Zionist establishment – the America Israel Political Action Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and others – to impose nationalist boundaries on Jewish identity is being eroded. It’s worth remembering in this context that anti-Zionism was originally a Jewish movement – the majority of European Jews before World War II rejected the Zionist movement and its calls for a mass migration from Europe to build a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. The most popular Jewish political organization in Europe had been the Yiddishe Arbeiter Bund, a Jewish socialist party that was militantly anti-Zionist. Even among the rabbis of Europe, there was considerable opposition to the idea of Jews taking control of Zion before the arrival of the Messiah (and there still is, of course, from a sizable minority of the ultra-Orthodox).

  Of course, the Holocaust changed all that. For hundreds of thousands of survivors, a safe haven in Palestine became a historic necessity.

  But the world has changed since then, and as the research cited above suggests, the trends clearly don’t favor the Zionists. I was reared on the idea that a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East was the “manifest destiny” of the Jews. I learned in the Zionist movement that Jewish life in the Diaspora was inevitably stunted and ultimately doomed. But history may have decided otherwise. The majority of us have chosen to live elsewhere, thereby voting with our feet. Indeed, according to Israeli government figures, some 750,000 Israeli Jews (15% of Israel’s Jewish population) are now living abroad, further undermining the Zionist premise that the Diaspora is an innately hostile and anti-Semitic place.

  The Ferocity of Nationalism, The Universality of Justice

  Increasingly anxious that most of us have no intention of going to Israel to boost Jewish numbers, the Israel-based Jewish Agency – apparently oblivious to irony of its own actions – has complained to Germany over official policies that make life there so attractive to Jewish immigrants from former Soviet territories, thus discouraging them from going to Israel. More immediately threatening to the Zionist establishment, however, is another reality: Many Jews are beginning to make once unthinkable criticisms of Israel’s behavior. If you want to bludgeon Jewish critics with the charge of “anti-Semitism” when they challenge Israel’s actions, then it’s hardly helpful to have other Jews standing up and expressing the same thoughts. It undermines the sense, treasured by Israel’s most fervent advocates, that they represent a cast-iron consensus among American Jews in particular.

  That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt’s controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion.

  Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, argued exactly the opposite: Walt and Mearsheimer, he claimed, were effectively promoting anti-Semitism, because the Israel lobby is nothing more (or less) than the collective will of the American Jewish community. Which, of course, it isn’t. In fact, in the American Jewish community you can increasingly hear open echoes of Mearsheimer and Walt’s skepticism over whether the lobby’s efforts are good for Israel.

  But Foxman’s case is undercut by something far broader – an emerging Jewish glasnost. Of course, like any break with a long-established nationalist consensus, the burgeoning of dissent has provoked a backlash. Norman Finkelstein – the noted Holocaust scholar and fierce critic of Zionism recently hounded out of De Paul University in a campaign of vilification based precisely on the idea that fierce criticism of Israel is the equivalent of “hate speech” – could be forgiven for being skeptical of the idea that the grip of the ultranationalists is weakening.

  So, too, could Joel Kovel. After all, he found his important book Overcoming Zionism pulled by his American publisher, the University of Michigan Press, also on the “hate speech” charge.

  Jimmy Carter – who was called a “Holocaust denier” (yes, a Holocaust denier!) for using the apartheid analogy in his book on Israel – and Mearsheimer and Walt might have reason for skepticism as well. But I’d argue that the renewed ferocity of recent attacks on those who have strayed from the nationalist straight and narrow has been a product of panic in the Jewish establishment – a panic born of the fact that its losing its grip. As in the former Soviet Union with the actual glasnost moment, this is a process, once started, that’s only likely to be accelerated by such witch-hunting.

  Last year, a very cranky academic by the name of Alvin Rosenfeld, on behalf of the oldest Jewish advocacy group in the U.S., the American Jewish Committee, got a flurry of attention by warning that liberal Jews such as playwright Tony Kushner, Tony Judt and Richard Cohen, all of whom had recently offered fundamental criticisms of Israel, were giving comfort to a “new anti-Semitism.”

  “They’re helping to make [anti-Semitic] views about the Jewish state respectable – for example, that it’s a Nazi-like state, comparable to South African apartheid; that it engages in ethnic cleansing and genocide. These charges are not true and can have the effect of delegitimizing Israel.”

  In reality, though, whether or not you agree with the views of those critics, they simply can’t legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Actually, I doubt any of those he cited have accused Israel of genocide or compared it in any way to the Nazi state. (Former Israeli Knesset Speaker Avram Burg, however, recently did write, in reference to Israeli militarism and hostility to Arabs, “It is sometimes difficult for me to distinguish between the primeval National-Socialism and some national cultural doctrines of the here-and-now.”). But the ethnic-cleansing in which the Israelis expelled 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and the apartheid character of Israel’s present occupation of the West Bank are objective realities. Rosenfeld is suggesting that, to take an honest look at either the occupation or the events of 1948, as so many Israeli writers, journalists, and politicians have done, is to “delegitimize” Israel and promote anti-Semitism.

  Just last week, Danny Rubinstein, senior correspondent covering Palestinian affairs for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was slated to speak to the British Zionist Federation – and then, at the last minute, his speech was canceled. The reason? Rubinstein had pointed out that “today Israel is an apartheid state with different status for different communities.” (While many liberal Jewish Americans can’t bring themselves to accept the apartheid comparison, that’s not true of their Israeli counterparts who actually know what’s going on in the West Bank. Former education minister Shulamit Aloni, for example, or journalist Amira Hass use the comparison. (The comparison first occurred to me on a visit to Kibbutz Yizreel in 1978, when the elders of my Zionist youth movement, Habonim, who had emigrated from South Africa to Israel, warned that the settlement policy of the then-new Likud government was designed to prevent Israel letting go of the West Bank. The population there, they told us, would never be given the right to vote in Israel, and so the result would be, as they presciently put it, “an apartheid situation.”)

  Use of the term “apartheid” in reference to the occupation does draw the attention of those who prefer to look away from the fact that Israel is routinely engaged in behavior democratic society has deemed morally odious and unacceptable when it has occurred in other contexts. It is precisely because that fact makes them uncomfortable, I suspect, that they react so emotionally to the A-word. Take black South Africans who suffered under apartheid on a visit to the West Bank – a mild-mannered moderate Nobel Peace Prize winner such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, for example – ask them about the validity of the comparison, and you know the answer you’re going to get.

  Moreover, it’s an answer with which a growing number of Jews, who place the universal, ethical and social justice traditions of their faith above those of narrow tribalism, are willing to deal.

  In an earlier commentary, perhaps presaging his break with Zionism, Burg noted in 2002:

  “Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or antimissile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents’ shock, that they do not know.”

  Although I am not religious, I share Burg’s view that universal justice is at the heart of the Jewish tradition. Growing up in apartheid South Africa was an object lesson in Jewish ethics. Yes, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the colonial white society of my childhood, but the mantle of victimhood belonged to others. And if you responded to the in-no-way-exclusively-so, but very Jewish impulse to seek justice, you found yourself working side by side not only with the remarkable number of Jews who filled leadership roles in the liberation movement, but also with Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and others.

  Judaism’s universal ethical calling can’t really be answered if we live only among ourselves – and Israel’s own experience suggests it’s essentially impossible to do so without doing injustice to others. Israel is only 59 years old, a brief moment in the sweep of Jewish history, and I’d argue that Judaism’s survival depends instead on its ability to offer a sustaining moral and ethical anchor in a world where the concepts of nation and nationality are in decline (but the ferocity of nationalism may not be). Israel’s relevance to Judaism’s survival depends first and foremost on its ability, as Burg points out, to deliver justice, not only to its citizens, but to those it has hurt.

  Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME who also maintains his own website, Rootless Cosmopolitan, where he comments on everything from geopolitical conflict to Jewish identity issues. “Rootless Cosmopolitan” was Stalin’s euphemistic pejorative for “Jew” during his anti-Semitic purges of the late 1940s, but Karon, who grew up in South Africa and whose family roots lie in Eastern Europe, and before that France, takes the term as a badge of honor. Karon was a teenage activist in the left-Zionist Habonim movement before finding his way into the big tent of the anti-apartheid liberation struggle, an experience that prompted him to re-imagine what it meant to be a Jew in the world.

  Copyright 2007 Tony Karon

For more:

Rootless Cosmopolitan
http://tonykaron.com…

Tom
http://www.tomdispat…

Anti-war
http://www.antiwar.c…

Not In Our Names
http://www.nimn.org/

The Official Moody Loner Fuck You Essay.