May 0808

While shopping the other day, I realized that I was spending more on food for two of us, then I had for three in the seventies & eighties. I pay more for everything, as do you, I suspect. What do I get in return? Less product, less respect, less safety, less assurance that my children will be able to eat or breathe. All the while we have major problems, we’re being diverted by the campaign from hell. We’re being diverted from the fact that we are junkies in a world that is quickly running out of our drug of choice…which isn’t our choice at all.

We know that our consumerism is eating our childrens futures, but we continue to buy the absolute crap that is presented to us. Is anyone stupid enough to buy cleaning products that are unsafe to touch or breath yet are safe for our ovens. Does anyone really buy those little aroma/night light/electrical air fresheners? How about those incrediably ugly dolls from China. Those things can give a kid nightmares.

Why aren’t we set up to re-use our bottles? I’d have no problem bringing my soda bottle to the market and re-filling it from a fountain/spigot set up. I don’t drink soda because of the bottles.

Why are we not planting more gardens and trees? Here in East Providence,RI,  you’d have no idea that we are broke and teetering on the edge of climate catastrophe. There are still fancy sidewalks being put in, we still burn the public building lights long after everyone has left, we have stadium lights that can be seen from across the bay. Does anyone beleive any of that is necessary?

We are we still struggling to get good public transportation? Frankly, I get the idea that the powers that be want to divide us, isolate us…much the way an abuser does.

We aren’t the People getting more angry? More involved? We don’t we look at the facts. We are allowing those that are suppossed to ‘protect’ us to sell us out….just like a junkie would sell out his mother.

We are selling out our future & the future of this planet when we buy out of season food stuffs that have been shipped thousands of miles. I don’t need a can of tasteless mushrooms from China. I don’t need melons from South America.  Is that $3.99 melon realy worth what it took to get it here?

Wake up.

Get angry.

Shop locally or on the net.

Bushco spends Trilions on Worthless Weapons

A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and soon you’re talking real money. But when it comes to reporting on what the Bush war legacy has cost American taxpayers, the media have been shockingly indifferent to the highest run-up in military spending since World War II. Even the devastating defense spending audit released Monday by the Government Accountability Office documenting the enormous waste in every single U.S. advanced weapons system failed to provoke the outrage it, and five equally scathing previous annual audits, deserved. This is not about the waste of taxpayer dollars — already pushing a trillion — in funding the Iraq war, which, while reprehensible enough, pales in comparison to the big-ticket military systems purchased in the wake of 9/11. In the horror of that moment, the floodgates were lifted and the peace dividend promised with the end of the Cold War was washed away by a doubling of spending on ultra-complex military equipment originally designed to defeat a Soviet enemy that no longer exists, equipment that has no plausible connection with fighting stateless terrorists. Example: the $81-billion submarine pushed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, presumably to fight al-Qaida’s navy. That’s the huge scandal the media and politicians from both parties have studiously avoided. But as the GAO’s authoritative audit details, the costs are astronomical. The explosion of spending on expensive weaponry after 9/11 had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks of that day. The high-tech planes and ships commissioned for trillions of dollars to defeat an enemy with no navy, air force or army, and using $3 knives as its weapons arsenal, were gifts to the military-industrial complex that will go on giving for decades to come. The Iraq war may end someday, but rest assured that major weapons systems, once commissioned, have a life-support system unmatched in any other sector of public spending. Rarely does the plug get pulled on even the most irrelevant and expensive war toy. Not while both Democratic and Republican politicians feed at the same trough, and when so much is at stake in the way of jobs and profit. Just how expensive and wasteful this is was marked in the GAO’s audit: “Since 2000, the Department of Defense (DOD) has roughly doubled its planned investment in new systems from $790 billion to $1.6 trillion in 2007, but acquisition outcomes in terms of cost and schedule have not improved.” Pentagon cost overruns, always a huge problem, have mushroomed. As the GAO reported, “Total acquisition costs for major defense programs in the fiscal year 2007 portfolio have increased 26 percent from first estimates, compared with 6 percent in 2000.” I know eyes glaze when government budgets are discussed, but keep in mind that defense spending accounts for more than half of all the federal government’s discretionary spending. In short, funding for all the other stuff we argue about — science research, education, Arabic translators, insuring uninsured children — is minor compared to the waste on these military boondoggles that go unexamined. Yet nothing else the federal government does involves such waste because we are talking about weapons systems shrouded in secrecy and protected from unwelcome scrutiny by the Teflon coating of “national defense.” Credit the GAO for providing a rare glimpse into the most egregious waste of taxpayer dollars, concluding in its exhaustive, 205-page report: “Of the 72 programs GAO assessed this year, none of them had proceeded through system development meeting the best-practice standards for mature technologies, stable design, or mature production processes by critical junctures of the program, each of which are essential for achieving planned cost, schedule, and performance outcomes.” That’s a grade of zero for every major weapons system. Let’s take just one, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a program estimated to be worth $300 billion in sales to its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, the nation’s biggest defense contractor and most generous donor to lobbyists and politicians’ campaigns. The program to build what Lockheed boasts is “the most complex fighter ever built” is also the most expensive, with estimated acquisition costs having increased a whopping $55 billion in just the last three years. Lockheed need not worry about future profits, because the procurement schedule on this troubled plane has been stretched out to the year 2034. As the GAO says, “currently unproven processes and a lack of flight testing could mean future changes to design and manufacturing processes.” Hey, no problem, Lockheed will just add that to the taxpayer tab. Maybe by 2034, the plane will be ready to go take out Osama bin Laden. Or not!

Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq. See more of Robert Scheer at TruthDig.

~~~

We are not doing enough. We must stop the killing. We must stop it all.

Note to China: Please Implode

Could the Olympics rain down shame on Chinese oppression and Tibet abuses? Let’s hope

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, March 21, 2008
Mark Morford.

I hope it all comes crashing down on their heads.

Is that wrong? Is it ill-minded and somehow unfair to wish that the Chinese government’s notorious record of human rights abuses and absolutely horrid treatment of Tibet be exposed to the world — and the Chinese people themselves — to the point where it is shamed and humiliated and perhaps even forced by unprecedented international scrutiny to upheave its oppressive ways and improve conditions and even (heaven forfend) honor religious and political freedom within its borders? No, I do not think it is.

Let me admit outright: I am no expert on Chinese-Tibetan relations. I do not know the full histories, the deeper conflicts, the enormous prejudices, the religious oppression that goes back decades and generations.

But I do know something of Tibet, of the Dalai Lama, of his unadorned messages of peace and love. And I know something of Tibetan Buddhism, of China’s abduction of the true Panchen Lama, of the brutal oppression and the massacres and the cultural genocide, the forced relocation of Han Chinese into Tibetan holy land, of the Tibetan’s peaceful rallies and chanting and nonviolence, all contrasted with images of jackbooted Chinese riot police stomping on the heads of protesters marching in the street.

And I know whom I tend to believe when I read “unconfirmed” reports of soldiers firing on Tibetan protesters, of dead bodies in the streets of Lhasa, of tanks rolling through crowds and hundreds of students arrested, Tibetan monasteries being locked down and Tibet again under martial law, all media cut off, all access denied, as sour and rather vile hardline Communist leader Zhang Qingli steps up to a microphone and calls the Dalai Lama — perhaps the gentlest, kindest human soul on the face of the planet — a “wolf in monk’s robes, a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast.” Yes, I think I know where the truth lies.

It doesn’t take much. Truly, you don’t need to see many photos of, say, a black-clad Chinese riot cop raising a huge, four-foot stick over his head with both hands and running straight at a praying, barefoot, red-robed Tibetan monk — a monk who is facing the other way and who is merely walking humbly on a protest march — ready to whale that stick down on the monk’s humble head, it does not take many photos like that to wish a deep and profound ill upon the government that promotes such aggression.

You don’t even need to be reminded of Tiananmen Square, or of all the ongoing crackdowns on students and dissidents and journalists, the torture and torment of humble Falun Gong practitioners or even the harsh control of Chinese Christians to know that the few images and stories of brutality and oppression that do trickle out are just the tip of a very ugly, bloody iceberg.

So then, this is the profound wish, the hope for this upcoming Olympic Games, held in a country run by an oppressive dictatorship, a country brutally divided between new wealth and extreme poverty, eager to be taken seriously as a new global superpower and also a country never before so open to cameras and reporters from around the globe: May your human rights atrocities be exposed. May your violence against peace-loving Tibetans be shamed. May we honor and respect China’s culture and history even as your government’s nauseating attacks on peace and intellectual freedom are revealed like the appalling cancer they so very much are.

Is that fair to hope? Sure as hell seems like it.

But here’s the catch: It ain’t gonna come from the United States. Hell, NBC’s Olympic coverage is traditionally so slick and safe and cheesy and jingoistic it borders on nauseating, not to mention how NBC is wholly owned by General Electric and all coverage will be sponsored by companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s and Johnson & Johnson, companies that largely adore China’s cheap labor and most of whom would happily turn a blind eye to a pile of dead Tibetans if it meant a foothold in the exploding Chinese economy.

Put another way: The odds of Bob Costas cutting away from hyping our cute perky Coke-drinking gymnastics team to show a shocking image of a dead monk lying in the street of Lhasa? About one in a billion.

What’s more, America’s not exactly a saint when it comes to human rights ourselves. Our own president endorses torture. We still have the death penalty. We have had atrocious foreign prisons and sinister Homeland Security and illegal wiretapping and the Patriot Act and a vice president who would gladly shoot a war protester in the face just to buy a gallon of milk.

And it’s also worth mentioning that China (along with Japan) owns a simply staggering portion of America’s reeling debt, Chinese banks having basically floated the United States over $1 trillion to keep President Bush’s nightmare economy afloat. Oh yes, Dubya will be there at the games, cheering and waving a little flag and holding hands with Premier Wen Jiabao and mispronouncing everyone’s name. Wonder twin powers, activate!

But the “good” news is, China’s leaders already seem to be getting a bit desperate, having been caught off guard by the widespread uprisings and protests happening now across the world. The premier has already accused the Dalai Lama of trying to sour the Olympics by inciting violence, which is a bit like Dick Cheney accusing a butterfly of murder.

But these comments also reveal a curious and telling thing about China’s leaders, normally so controlled, so removed from the intense gaze of international media: They don’t realize how utterly absurd and offensive they sound to the world audience. Nor do they seem to know the true power of the Internet, of the vagaries of global coverage, of what Olympic-sized media attention could reveal in the coming months. They never had to care. Until now.

Indeed, it will likely very much be up to the foreign press and foreign leaders, or perhaps even the athletes and visiting celebrities themselves, to speak out, to crack the armor further, really get the media’s attention. Already some foreign leaders are considering a “mini boycott” of the opening ceremonies, which would be a huge insult to China. It’s a start.

Could it all unravel for China’s dictatorship? Maybe. The vast majority of Olympics coverage will be hugely positive, upbeat, every outlet in a swoon for the “New China,” all glittery and whimsical and shiny and culturally rich, as this extraordinary new superpower puts on its best, most modern face for the world.

But somehow, among all the thousands of reporters and news agencies and bloggers covering the games, a handful might have the nerve to sneak outside the carefully guarded press boxes and Olympic stadiums and find a way to report on the real atrocities, the real abuses, and beam them to the astonished world like never before. Can we hope for that? Let the games begin.

Link to original:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/03/21/notes032108.DTL

Why on Earth are we allowing ‘our’ nation to empower & encourage this? When will get it together & stop these monsters? Please contact the sponsors & tell them you’ll boycott their products…and then start NOW!

Marijuana Addiction…..another government lie

Calling B.S. on the Idea of ‘Marijuana Addiction’ It’s laughable that the Feds are pushing the concept of pot addiction when science shows that withdrawal symptoms from caffeine are far worse. By Paul Armentano The U.S. government believes that America is going to pot — literally. Earlier this month, the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse announced plans to spend $4 million to establish the nation’s first-ever “Center on Cannabis Addiction,” which will be based in La Jolla, Calif. The goal of the center, according to NIDA’s press release, is to “develop novel approaches to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of marijuana addiction.” Not familiar with the notion of “marijuana addiction”? You’re not alone. In fact, aside from the handful of researchers who have discovered that there are gobs of federal grant money to be had hunting for the government’s latest pot boogeyman, there’s little consensus that such a syndrome is clinically relevant — if it even exists at all. But don’t try telling that to the mainstream press — which recently published headlines worldwide alleging, “Marijuana withdrawal rivals that of nicotine.” The alleged “study” behind the headlines involved all of 12 participants, each of whom were longtime users of pot and tobacco, and assessed the self-reported moods of folks after they were randomly chosen to abstain from both substances. Big surprise: they weren’t happy. And don’t try telling Big Pharma — which hopes to cash in on the much-hyped “pot and addiction” craze by touting psychoactive prescription drugs like Lithium to help hardcore smokers kick the marijuana habit. And certainly don’t try telling the drug “treatment” industry, whose spokespeople are quick to warn that marijuana “treatment” admissions have risen dramatically in recent years, but neglect to explain that this increase is due entirely to the advent of drug courts sentencing minor pot offenders to rehab in lieu of jail. According to state and national statistics, up to 70 percent of all individuals in drug treatment for marijuana are placed there by the criminal justice system. Of those in treatment, some 36 percent had not even used marijuana in the 30 days prior to their admission. These are the “addicts”? Indeed, the concept of pot addiction is big business — even if the evidence in support of the pseudosyndrome is flimsy at best. And what does the science say? Well, according to the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine — which published a multiyear, million-dollar federal study assessing marijuana and health in 1999 — “millions of Americans have tried marijuana, but most are not regular users [and] few marijuana users become dependent on it.” The investigator added, “[A]though [some] marijuana users develop dependence, they appear to be less likely to do so than users of other drugs (including alcohol and nicotine), and marijuana dependence appears to be less severe than dependence on other drugs.” Just how less likely? According to the Institute of Medicine’s 267-page report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of “drug dependence” (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, the IOM reported that 32 percent of tobacco users, 23 percent of heroin users, 17 percent of cocaine users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for “drug dependence.” In short, it’s the legal drugs that have Americans hooked — not pot. But what about the claims that ceasing marijuana smoking can trigger withdrawal symptoms similar to those associated with quitting tobacco? Once again, it’s a matter of degree. According to the Institute of Medicine, pot’s withdrawal symptoms, when identified, are “mild and subtle” compared with the profound physical syndromes associated with ceasing chronic alcohol use — which can be fatal — or those abstinence symptoms associated with daily tobacco use, which are typically severe enough to persuade individuals to reinitiate their drug-taking behavior. The IOM report further explained, “[U]nder normal cannabis use, the long half-life and slow elimination from the body of THC prevent[s] substantial abstinence symptoms” from occurring. As a result, cannabis’ withdrawal symptoms are typically limited to feelings of mild anxiety, irritability, agitation and insomnia. Most importantly, unlike the withdrawal symptoms associated with the cessation of most other intoxicants, pot’s mild after-effects do not appear to be either severe or long-lasting enough to perpetuate marijuana use in individuals who have decided to quit. This is why most marijuana smokers report voluntarily ceasing their cannabis use by age 30 with little physical or psychological difficulty. By comparison, many cigarette smokers who pick up the habit early in life continue to smoke for the rest of their lives, despite making numerous efforts to quit. So let’s review. Marijuana is widely accepted by the National Academy of Sciences, the Canadian Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and others to lack the severe physical and psychological dependence liability associated with most other intoxicants, including alcohol and tobacco. Further, pot lacks the profound abstinence symptoms associated with most legal intoxicants, including caffeine. That’s not to say that some marijuana smokers don’t find quitting difficult. Naturally, a handful of folks do, though this subpopulation is hardly large enough to warrant pot’s legal classification (along with heroin) as an illicit substance with a “high potential for abuse.” Nor does this fact justify the continued arrest of more than 800,000 Americans annually for pot violations any more than such concerns would warrant the criminalization of booze or nicotine. Now if I can only get NIDA to fork me over that $4 million check.

Paul Armentano is deputy director of NORML and the NORML Foundation. ——————————————————————————–

January 20. 2008

I love Sunday mornings. This time of year, I get to have quiet, slow Sundays. I get up by 7:30 AM, put a measured cup of milk on to heat, grab the Sunday ProJo (Providence Journal, for those of you not in the know), make myself some great latte and crawl back into bed. I love the Sunday paper. I know most of it is fiction, but I read it with pleasure. I start with the Business pages. Such story telling should and probably is amply rewarded. I can read of politicians in jail for accepting bribes from huge businesses. I can learn of how well we are going to be doing any second now. I wonder why the business writers never say something like; Haliburton is doing very well. The company bilked the nation (that’s us, folks) of millions more. Oh and jobs…..remember those??

I also read the commentary. Many people are upset because Hillary showed some emotion. Many people are making the primaries a contest between race or gender. Another diversion. God help us if Mitt Romney gets in. He made his millions working for a company that cut jobs, skimmed off the top…let’s face, he’s a smarmy, greedy, job cutting opportunist. Good for him. Bad for the working stiff. Bad for the economy.

I also read the comics. We save the comic pages. That becomes our gift wrapping paper.

We gave a wood burning stove away today. I figure that if I haven’t been able to talk my landlord into letting me install it in 5 years, it isn’t going to happen.

We shot a few pictures of a beautiful hand made babies star quilt. It’s a gently used one, barely used, really That will be up on the site this week.

Right now, my day is winding down. The thermostat is on 54. My room is nice and toasty. Tomorrow will be another working day.

Stop by, see how it’s going.

Vote Wisely….

From our friend, Joe.

Good information!

Whatever state you live in,  there are web sites for the purpose of explaining amendments to that states constitution. Here is the one for the state of Florida http://www.votesmartflorida.org/mx/hm.asp?id=home

. A simple search for the phrase “vote smart Florida” is what found this site. Do a search for your state and find a good non-partisan site and share it with your neighbors and friends, don’t forget the League of Women Voters in your state. Believe it or not women have been allowed to vote since August 26, 1920, the day that the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was added. If you know a woman who does not vote share this with her. Now look at the voting record of your congressmen at this site

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/
they go back as far as 1991, which should include any incumbent congressmen running for reelection. Lets not forget our House of Representatives, they have to answer (yeah right) to their constituents as much as any elected official. This site has quite a bit of information and is easy to move around in. http://clerk.house.gov/

And if thats not enough information try this site

http://www.vote-smart.org/

for more knowledge. So here is the idea. If your at all pleased with, or disappointed in you elected official at the local level up to the Office Of The President Of The United State of America, and if you want to voice your opinion, the best way is to scream at the poll by voting. Joe

“The best judge of a mans character is how he treats those that have no affect upon his life”

Friday in New England

Mick was right. “Every cop is a criminal, all the sinners, saints”

Look at what happened in Rhode Island yesterday. Rhode Island is in southestern New England. Believe  me, we’ve had snow before. At times, we’ve had lots of snow, tons of snow. Yesterday we had 10 inches of snow. TEN INCHES OF FREAKING SNOW!!!

And Rhode Island was gridlocked. There were school buses still stuck at 11 PM. The snow started at - what 1 PM. 10 inches.

The state workers did nothing. The city traffic was not moving.

10 inches.

Some of the state workers are calling it the perfect storm. Right. It was 10 inches.

This is a political problem that has answers. The answer that comes to mind is termination of the head of the Department of Transportation.

!0 inches. The entire state was at a stand still. Imagine your kid stuck in a school bus for 9 hours!

Here’s the reality.

Those in power do not care about us. Let me repeat. They do not care about us.

The state workers that sat in their trucks getting paid a minimum of $25.00 per hour do not care about us. The politicians that sit in the state house DO NOT CARE ABOUT US.

The governor who has called GW Bush “a brilliant man” DOES NOT CARE ABOUT US.

We are on our own. It’s time we realized that sad reality…..we are on our own.

Unless we want to exercise our freedoms.

Then we’re screwed.

Have you heard about those that want to enable the traffic police to run our prints whenever anyone is stopped? So if you’re speeding, your prints are checked. Why? They DO NOT CARE ABOUT US>

These leeches are not our leaders, they are our representatives. What a difference between those two words.

Frankly, I think we should fire them all.

Ten Green Toys for the Holidays- or Yes…We Must Do What We Can

It’s that time of year….when the media fills our brains with the stupid notion that the more money we spend on our kids, the more we love them. If we buy them a big screen tv, it will make up for the long hours at work. If we buy Cindy $500.00 worth of Wal-Mart trash, Cindy will be a fine upstanding latch key kid. If Tommy or Trevor gets new iPhones….they’ll do well in school.

The reality is that we are spending far to much money on trash, we are spending far to much money or worse…using credit cards in order to prove to our children that we love them

We can plow down virgin forests in order to have giant toy catalogs that excite our babies. We can use poisoned ink on those catalogs that fill our babies heads with the desire for toys made thousands of miles away, using toxic ingredients.

Really want to have a memorable Yule? Try this….Green toys- check this out.

10 Green Toys for the Holidays

Instaed of buying trash…how about toys that will last, toys that will entertain and educate. Toys that will be on your kids shelf ten years from now. Let’s face it….90% of the trash we get our kids lasts about a week.

Think about it.

Green toys or trash.

Janacoyote

Criminal Accessories Criminal Accessories The Suits and Lab Coats Behind the Front Lines by Zbignew Zingh copyleft 2007

This is a long read…but fascinating…and it explains why so many are in deep debt!
The History of Dirty Work

Pharaohs did not build the pyramids with their own hands. No generals dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Kissinger did not personally murder Salvador Allende nor did Nixon napalm kids in Vietnam.

What distinguishes these types of “great” leaders is their ability to get dirty jobs done by getting others to do the job for them. History’s dirty work has always been done by others, like the slaves who hewed stones for Egyptian mausoleums. But the overbearing will of “great” leaders and the manipulation of mass labor does not explain how monumental tasks, especially monumentally dirty tasks, get done. For pharaohs, like contemporary presidents and prime ministers, not only did not build their own edifices, they lacked the basic talents to do the work themselves. “Leaders” typically have no specific “know-how”, just wealth, the luck of birth, the confidence of con men, and the psychopathology necessary to dominate others. Pharaohs, like the leaders of today’s world, employed engineers, managers, social architects, scholars, designers and craftsmen — skilled professionals who did the technical and creative work before anything of historical proportion could be undertaken.

It is no different in our own times. Our age’s “historical monuments” are a mixed bag of good, bad and indifferent. Nevertheless, some of our more remarkable “accomplishments” — aerial bombardment, “shock and awe,” Little Boy and Fat Man, ICBM launch silos, stealth avionics, nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, Los Alamos, depleted uranium munitions, psychological torture, mass media propaganda, Enron, disaster capitalism, chemical and biological warfare agents, digital eavesdropping, computerized data mining, transgenic hybridization of species, retina scans, and satellite guided missiles — are more the brainchildren of our professional classes than of our own pharaonic leaders. Indeed, without professional accomplices, most of the more heinous acts perpetrated in the past two centuries could not have been thinkable, let alone possible.

The Crossroads of Power and the Professions

This is not an indictment of science or technology or of the professions, nor is this a Luddite’s lament. There is much that is positive in our world due to the real progress of science. We simply recognize that no oligarchy in any hierarchical society can stand except on the foundation stones laid by that society’s knowledgeable professionals. There is no such thing as “pure science,” any more than there is “art for art’s sake” or an idealized “rule of law.” All “professional” human endeavors — especially science, technology, economics, law and medicine — intersect with politics or commerce, and usually both simultaneously. Sometimes the connection is only dimly perceived; typically, today, the intersection is blatant, immediate and inseparable.

We already know about the attorneys who split hairs over the definition of torture, who plead for indefinite detention without charge or trial, who argue for retroactive immunity for those who illegally monitored our communications, or who plead “state secrets” as a bar to the redress of government crimes. These lawyers (and the judges who approve their specious arguments) might themselves be accessories to crime. It is not a defense to argue that every party is entitled to zealous representation when that misguided zeal facilitates the crime itself.

We already know about the so-called doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists who help keep kidnapped captives “alive” so that they can be tortured and interrogated again and again. These are not health care professionals but accessories to crime. They have not sworn a Hippocratic Oath, but a Hypocritical Oath, and they should be held accountable.

We already know about the economists and the money managers who boost profits by devising schemes to break unions, curtail jobs, cut wages, cut benefits and “externalize” the detritus of private enterprise. These professionals, as criminal enablers, share the responsibility for the death and pollution and despair caused by their principals.

We rarely think, however, about the other professional facilitators, the ones in white lab coats, that is, the engineers, medical researchers and scientists. They have a special responsibility for their work because what they do can affect especially large numbers of people in particularly horrific ways. Those who design nuclear, chemical or thermobaric weapons; those who weaponize diseases; those who conduct genetic engineering for profit; and those who develop machines for the remote delivery of war, are not mere employees, not just intellectual workers — they are accessories to some of humanity’s most horrific acts of criminality.

I champion the pursuit of knowledge. I applaud that which makes dreams real. But not since Einstein scribbled equations in his spare time at the Swiss patent office has there been any solitary “scientific research” conducted purely for science’s sake. Today, nearly all “science” is conducted in only three environments: the university, the corporate or the government research laboratory. In all three, with few exceptions, directly or indirectly, the funding for the research comes from or serves the interests of the military, big business or homeland security. And because he who pays the piper calls the tune, directly or indirectly, the scientific research that makes dreams real also makes nightmares real.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Should scientists and engineers be held to account for the dire results of their work? Absolutely. The research community thinks of itself as working within the insular and mythical cocoon of “pure science.”
But no scientist, no engineer, no computer programmer, no technician has the right to his or her comfortable isolation simply because he or she would rather not think about how his or her work will be used.

There is no excuse for not thinking. If you give your car keys to a drunk, you have to think about the ramifications of what you have done because you have enabled a drunk driver. When you hand a knife and a gun to a psychopathic killer, you have enabled the psychopath’s murders and share the guilt for the carnage he wreaks. When you help design a new missile or bomber technology; when you help develop new means of inflicting physical pain, fear or death; when you help program computers to violate Asimov’s First Law of Robotics (1) or to snoop on people’s phone calls or emails; when you research science for the sake of killing people; then, simply put, you have enabled criminal behavior. When you do so, you share the responsibility for the crimes that others commit with the technology that you helped to create.

Science has always dazzled the majority who regard it with simultaneous feelings of ignorance, awe and fear. Perhaps that is why we have customarily given a free pass to everyone who wears a white lab coat, regardless whether the scientist/doctor/researcher is a genius, a saint, a mediocrity, a charlatan or a maniac. We should be less automatic in our simple reverence for scientists and researchers, reserving adulation for those who genuinely benefit humankind, and healthy skepticism for all the rest.

Knowledge has always been a sweet and a poisonous fruit. Galileo advanced the science of mass and acceleration… but he was also a paid ballistics consultant for the armory at Venice. Wernher von Braun was the heart and soul of the early American space program, but he cut his aeronautics teeth at Peenemünde in Nazi Germany designing rocket bombs. Sure, he dreamed of reaching the stars, but Von Braun’s V2s? killed thousands in London long before their progeny ever launched into space. German chemist Fritz Haber invented an efficient process to create ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen, thereby permitting the production of modern fertilizers needed for industrial farming. Fritz Haber also invented and personally supervised the first use of battlefield poison gas used to asphyxiate French soldiers in 1915 at Ypres. Is Robert Oppenheimer a hero or a cur for shepherding the Manhattan Project from laboratory experiment to Hiroshima, even after it was known that Nazi Germany’s nuclear weapons program had failed and after it was known that the Japanese were prepared to surrender?

Medicine and Mendacity

Medical scientific research has its heroes, and its villains. Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, was a hero. So was Louis Pasteur, the inventor of pasteurization and the rabies vaccination. By contrast, Dr. Josef Mengele, the sadistic Nazi “researcher” of eugenics, was an example of “science” perverted. Mengele’s counterpart in the Pacific was the Japanese Army’s Section 731 which performed inhumane medical experiments on live Chinese prisoners. At war’s end, nevertheless,there was no compunction on the part of the US military community about taking advantage of this ill-gotten “knowledge.” Within the United States, doctors have conducted “research” on Black Americans by deliberately not treating their syphilis infections. American medical researchers have secretly released clouds of infectious agents on San Francisco in the name of science. In one of the most notorious criminal acts of the last century, American doctors participated in decades of surreptitious “medical research” that consisted of injecting toxic, highly radioactive plutonium into large numbers of unsuspecting patients, feeding radioactive cocktails to unwitting pregnant women and deliberately exposing large numbers of American soldiers to radioactive fallout.(2)

While the Democrats and Republicans blather indignantly about Iran’s nascent nuclear ambitions, the United States has embarked on an equally pernicious and subtle arms race: biological weapons. There are laboratories in the US — “biosafety labs”, as they are euphemistically called - where some of the world’s most deadly pathogens are being “studied.” According to the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) testimony on October 4, 2007 before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Energy and Commerce, much of the research conducted at the various BSL laboratories involves recombinant DNA experiments. (3) Depending on their ratings and containment capabilities, these laboratories may house highly dangerous and infectious pathogens such as Ebola, Marburg Virus, Avian Influenza, SARS, Small Pox, Q Fever, Tularemia, Lassa Fever Virus, Foot-and-Mouth Disease, and Anthrax, among others.

In 2001, before the events of 9-11, there were only five BSL 4 laboratories in the United States conducting the most dangerous type of research involving the most virulent pathogens. By 2006, however, that number had tripled to fifteen BSL 4 laboratories, with more on the way. And that only includes the known BSL 4 laboratories. At the present time, there are more than 1,350 known BSL 3 laboratories spread throughout the United States on university campuses, at hospitals, at government research facilities and in private institutions. Forty-six states have at least one BSL 3 laboratory within their borders and some states have multiple laboratories, often on university campuses or near densely populated cities.

There have been an alarming number of incidents that have compromised the safety of people who work at these laboratories. And, by extension, the history of past incidents portend huge risks to the unaware communities in which these laboratories are located.

Obviously, medical research is a good thing, as is the prevention or cure of disease. Unfortunately, most of the money for medical research focuses on the cure for diseases, rather than the prevention of them. That is because people will pay good money — indeed, they commonly are willing to fork over all of their money for medical treatment so that they or their family members may live. But people are far less willing to pay to prevent disease in others or in future generations. So it is inherent in genetically selfish human nature and inherent in that selfish human nature’s economic counterpart — capitalism — that disease research focuses primarily on expensive cures, rather than on inexpensive prevention. Cure, not prevention, is where the money is.

Research into how to cure disease also can teach how to make that disease more deadly, more infectious or more selective in, for example, which ethnicities or racial groups it affects. It is precisely in that murky ambivalence of good and evil where the interests of commerce, the military and homeland security are intertwined.

We Are Who We Work For

Why would someone choose to work on biological issues with military implications? A young, curious and talented researcher might hesitate to research the purely military applications of, say, the 1918 influenza virus, but would feel exalted to research a cure for the illness, should it ever resurrect itself in nature or ever be used as a weapon of terror. Unfortunately, research into the cure for a dormant disease necessarily involves resurrecting it or creating the very terrorist weapon in order to design its antidote. Thus, creating the silver bullet also requires creating the monster that the bullet has to kill. The danger is that the monster will get out or will evolve into something immune to silver bullets; or that the monster itself will be fashioned into a real bullet as an instrument of biological warfare.

Another motive force for biology workers could be simple “patriotism.” Although Samuel Johnson said in 1775 that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, a scientist could genuinely and enthusiastically support a nation’s policies. Such a person might psychologically share the sense of power that the state expresses when it uses a new technology to exterminate its opponents. For example, the eminent German chemist, Fritz Haber (referred to above as the father of modern fertilizer) was proud of his poison chlorine gas. By contrast, Haber’s wife, Clara Immerwahr (also a scientist with a Ph.D in chemistry) was absolutely appalled by her husband’s chemical weapons. Upon learning about Fritz Haber’s involvement in the production of poison gas, she borrowed her husband’s service revolver and shot herself through the heart. Haber, after his wife’s suicide and undeterred in his “patriotism”, then proceeded from the Western Front to the Eastern Front to supervise the “patriotic” use of poison gas by the German army against Russian soldiers.(4)

A more prosaic reason why someone might become a weapons researcher is that s/he simply needs a job. One of the most powerful reasons why American professionals are so politically docile is because they leave graduate school chin deep in debt. Debt makes you malleable because debt makes you timid.

This is the result of decades of social planning that has sucked money out of all public schools and institutions of higher learning. The goal of this social planning was to make college and post-graduate education more expensive and, thereby, make students more dependent on loans, corporate largess and military research grants. A second policy goal was to leave newly graduated professionals desperate for employment to pay off their loans — employment that now mostly is provided by large corporations, the military or universities that are funded by the military or large corporations. The net effect is the same: there are very few work alternatives for an intelligent scientist with a family to support and piles of student loans to pay off.(5)

Someone might get involved in scientific military research simply out of curiosity or, because like playing a video game, it can be fun. Although amoral curiosity is essential to scientific inquiry, mere curiosity detached from empathy and a sense of consequences can be no less destructive than the curiosity of a kid who pulls the wings off a fly. As for the infantile joy some might experience from playing with highly lethal weapons, I can only suggest self-trepanation as a cure.

The Noble Prize or the Nobel Prize?

Although we think of fundamental change as emanating from the top, the whole edifice of power and control actually rests on the participation of those that possess the knowledge and skill to let it function. In short, we get the State that we ourselves have created. We are inmates in the prisons we built for ourselves.

Adolf Eichmann was charged with scheduling the trains that delivered millions to death camps. (6) He protested that he was merely doing the job that he was employed to do. He claimed that he was unaccountable as a mere instrument of an irresistible state power.

No one is merely doing a job. Short of a general strike, there is always — always– the personal option of simply withholding one’s services. No one makes any scientist or researcher, technician or programmer create anything that one does not want to create. No power is irresistible. No one is unaccountable.

In modern society, the problem of accountability is too often “solved” by bifurcating it: the acts of innovation and creativity are separated from the responsibility for those acts. The concept of responsibility is removed from the scientist and researcher and allocated to the professional “ethicist.” This kind of offloading of responsibility is precisely what led to cadres of otherwise brilliant scientists working day and night on the Manhattan Project to create a nuclear bomb while the ethical consideration whether it was right to devise such a weapon (let alone use it under the circumstances) was wrongly delegated to others. The “others” were the leadership elites, the politicians and the generals who, history has proven, are too often the most egoistical, the most fraught with ulterior motives, the most psychologically unfit and the most ethically challenged.

In addition to separating responsibility from creativity, the intense secrecy imposed by the state or commercial interests shrouds scientific research and engineering, thereby further isolating creativity from its ramifications. Segmenting and compartmentalizing and making confidential the individual pieces of weapons research tends to further divorce the scientist and engineer from seeing any picture bigger than his or her “job.” This, in turn, diminishes the sense of personal responsibility. It enhances the power of those who fund research and who coordinate the professional classes to accomplish our epoch’s monumentally dirty tasks.

If we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, then we are also endowed with certain inalienable responsibilities. The weapons that exist today, and those that are currently under development, are immensely more destructive, more nefarious than what was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Therefore, the responsibility for what they create is accordingly that much greater for the 21st Century researcher, engineer and scientist than for those who built the first nuclear bombs. Certainly, any bright mind that is capable of creativity on this scale must be responsible for thinking through the consequences. The unburdening of the engineer or researcher from the ramifications of how their works will be used makes life easier for them, but only in the sense that they have become Pharaoh’s slaves who work merely for the aggrandizement of lesser and not quite honorable men.

I have twice mentioned the chemist Fritz Haber. Ignoring the fact that he was the father of gas warfare, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded Haber the 1918 prize for chemistry for his work on ammonia fertilizer. Nobel Prizes are a mixed bag and this particular award tells us a lot about the mythology of the foundation and the folks who run it. Nobel peace prizes have been awarded to Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi , but also to the likes of Henry Kissinger (who bombed Cambodia to smithereens), Theodore Roosevelt (who was responsible for the bloody American colonization of Cuba and the Philippines), and to Muhammad Yunus (who pioneered the capitalist model for very high profit, very high interest micro-lending to the poor and downtrodden).

Alfred Nobel endowed his foundation at his death. The money came from the profits from his invention of dynamite and gelignite and other concoctions that go bang. In short, the most “prestigious” awards on earth, including the so-called Nobel Peace Prize, are funded by the profits of an arms manufacturer. Some say that Nobel created his foundation out of remorse because his own brother had been blown up in an explosion at his dynamite factory. Others say that Nobel was moved to salve his conscience because a premature newspaper obituary he read had damned him as a merchant of death who became wealthy from inventing new ways to kill more people.

Alfred Nobel’s remorse gave the world a very nice foundation. It could have been a “nicer” world, however, if, before his death and during his productive years, Mr. Nobel had paid greater attention to the ramifications of his work. That is all we should ask of the scientists, researchers, engineers and technologists of our own times. To think about and take personal responsibility for the ramifications of what they are doing. To think about and take personal responsibility for how their work actually will be deployed. To think more responsibly and more nobly than as mere employees or slaves of pharaohs.

Footnotes

1.Asimov’s First Law of Robotics is that a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2.Eileen Welsome has written the definitive book on this subject, The Plutonium Files. 3.The data in this paragraph is derived from the GAO report available as a pdf. 4.Fritz Haber’s career was totally conflicted. His process for creating ammonia aided agriculture world-wide. It also facilitated large scale production of explosives. Haber was also instrumental in the development of the insecticide Zyklon A… which the Nazi regime ultimately “refined” into Zyklon B to gas concentration camp victims (among whom were some of Haber’s relatives). Ultimately, Haber was exiled from the Germany about which he had felt so “patriotic”. He died a stateless man. 5.I highly recommend physicist Jeff Schmidt’s book Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives. 6.Hannah Arendt was, and remains the most insightful interpreter of the Eichmann phenomena, notwithstanding the smear campaign mounted against her. Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil.

The sad, sad truth…….

As I sit sipping my morning cup of coffee and reflect on the anti-war protests sponsored by the Oct27 coalition (where I saw some good collaboration between UFPJ and ANSWER—at least in San Francisco —yea!), I have a few thoughts. Yesterday, tens of thousands of activists from around Northern California, Northern Nevada and some from Southern Oregon attended the rally in my new hometown, San Francisco . Despite weather in the Eastern part of the country, I hear that the rallies all over the rest of the country were extremely well attended and the energy was high. The throngs of humanity in San Francisco stretched out between the Civic Center to Dolores Park in a line that was over two miles long and it took over an hour for the last marcher to reach the endpoint. However, what does this all mean? We have marched. We have done sit-ins in Congress Reps offices all over the country. We have written letters, emails and sent faxes. Some of us have camped in ditches in Central Texas for weeks at a time. CODEPINK is doing a marvelous job of keeping the pressure on in DC. We have had countless numbers of rallies, teach-ins and candlelight vigils, but the occupation is continuing and people are still dying and are forced from their homes by the ongoing and unremitting violence. In November of 2006, the peace movement scored a major coup but we later discovered that the Democrats had only used our vibrant, angry and deeply committed movement to regain both Houses of Congress. Some of us erroneously thought that we could relax a little and allow the 110th Congress to take some of the slack from us hard-working activists to end the war and hold BushCo accountable. After all, that’s what we pay them for, isn’t it? I, and my organization, was roundly criticized by many people for going to Congress in January to demand that the Dems do the job we elected them to do. “Give them a chance.” “Shut the f**k up.” These and harsher epithets were hurled at us. I understand, because we wanted to relax, too. In November, we were as shocked as everyone else was, though, when Nancy and Harry (Bush Enablers Number One and Two) took impeachment “off the table.” We knew there would be no rest for the weary with this Congress, and, unfortunately, I think we have been vindicated…very regrettably for democracy around the world. Where do we go from here? George has asked Congress for 45 billion (to add to the 200 billion Congress already handed him) more Chinese lent dollars for 2008 to sustain his bloody occupations and Congress will unconditionally yield to his request because they are puppets of the Supreme Puppet. Coincidentally, this will keep the bloody mess going until the ’08 elections where the Dems can point their blood-stained fingers at the Repugs not even realizing that we are not buying that load of crap anymore. Both parties are culpable; both parties are supporting war crimes; both parties must be held accountable. We need to run Peace Candidates against the Bush Enablers and we need to support the Peace Candidates we already have like Dennis Kucinich that are floundering on the decks of the USS Main Stream Media. The peace movement must also be held accountable. We wrangle for a limited amount of funds and guard our “listservs” jealously and fiercely. It is way past time that the peace movement share resources, gifts and talents to force the established elite in DC to do our will. We are the moral majority in this country; we are in the right; we need to work together to funnel and focus our energies. So many times we are on parallel paths going the same direction but rarely walking together towards our common goals. We can be sure that the Corporatocracy is walking lock-step toward their goal of US global hegemony which is neither peaceful nor benevolent. In March of ’08 we will be mourning the 5th anniversary of a “war” that was going to take six months (Donald Rumsfeld), 50 billion dollars (Paul Wolfowitz) and zero American lives (George Bush). Obviously, this is unacceptable. The Camp Casey Peace Institute is calling for a Peace Summit in San Francisco on the weekend of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday to bring the leaders of the movement together so we can find ways to support each other to our common goals of peace, sustainability and accountability and to plan for relevant and effective actions all around the 5th anniversary. With US aircraft carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and Turkish forces poised on the border of Kurdistan , if there ever was a time to put differences aside and celebrate similarities, as BushCo in tandem with Congress, Inc has brought our world to the brink of World War III, it is now.

Cindy@CindyforCongress.org

http://www.cindyforcongress.org/

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