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GAIA AND HOMOSAPIENS
View this outstanding environmental film on the survival of gaia and the homosapiens species.
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Imaging Life

Dawkins - A Raconteur of Nature?s Back Story
The New York Times - By Sarah Lyall - October 19, 2009
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It won?t thrill his publishers to hear this, but Richard Dawkins appears largely uninterested in standard authorial topics like his new book, his writing habits or even himself. Instead he wants to talk about giant butterflies and tiny moths, worms disguised as snakes, why goats are related to whales and whether beetles have two sets of wings (they do, and for good reason).

What better place to do it than at the Darwin Center at the Natural History Museum here, a glossy new temple to the evolutionary process, or the ?ee-volutionary proh-cess,? as Mr. Dawkins pronounces it in his precise accent. In a sign of the felicitous juxtaposition of person and place, the man dispensing tickets at the front desk recognizes this shortish man with the chronically interested expression.

?Mr. Dawkins?? he says, as pleased as if he had spotted Jacques Cousteau striding down the beach. ?I love your books.?

If there were a celebrity of the evolutionary world, Mr. Dawkins would certainly be it. His best-selling books ? including ?The Selfish Gene? and ?The Blind Watchmaker,? laying out his case for a gene-centered view of evolution ? have gone a long way toward making evolutionary biology accessible to a wide audience.

He lectures to sell-out audiences, receives standing ovations and regularly places in the Top 10 on Prospect magazine?s annual list of the world?s 100 Top Public Intellectuals. His latest book, ?The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution? (Free Press), has been on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for three weeks.

His previous book, The God Delusion a furious howl of rage against organized religion, was an international best seller and made Mr. Dawkins, unofficially, Britain?s Top Public Atheist. He is active in the humanist movement and last year was a prominent sponsor, along with the philosopher A. C. Grayling, of the Atheist Bus Campaign, which placed banners saying, ?There?s Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life,? on the sides of public buses in major British cities.

The Afghanistani Quagmire

The Afghanistan problem
Los Angeles Times - By Gilles Dorronsoro - October 20, 2009
The huge cultural misunderstandings between Western forces and the Afghan people make it unlikely any counterinsurgency mission in the countryside will succeed.
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In Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's view, the key to success in Afghanistan is to "secure the population." The thinking is that the populated area of the country, largely the Pashtun belt in the south and the east, must be cleared of Taliban insurgents. Concurrently, the U.S. must win hearts and minds through local development projects. Over time, with enough U.S. troops, the population will come to feel protected and the insurgents will be marginalized.

So goes the plan. But after eight years of war, this approach is surprisingly ignorant of both the realities of Afghan society and the limitations of America's tolerance for casualties.

I was in Afghanistan during the summer, as 20,000 coalition troops tried to retake Helmand province, one of 11 provinces now under de facto Taliban control. But over three months, during which they sustained significant casualties, the troops failed to take control of even a third of the area. The coalition had built an archipelago of small outposts, leaving much of the territory between unsecured. As one Afghan told me in Kandahar, "The Americans control what they see." Imagine how many troops -- and how many casualties -- it would take to secure every one of those provinces, even under the most promising circumstances.

History is not encouraging. In two centuries, the Pashtuns have never once tolerated a permanent presence of armed foreigners. Defending families and villages is a cultural duty of local men, and the presence of outsiders is generally perceived as a threat, especially when they are non-Muslim. Historical memories are long in this part of the world. Some Afghans still say prayers for mujahedin who fought against the British -- in the 19th century.

Because the Afghan culture highly values politeness, Westerners rarely understand how unpopular they are in the region. Locals are annoyed by the road-hogging conduct of NATO patrols. They have a suspicion of men wearing sunglasses. They are outraged at the mistreatment of prisoners and the killings of civilians.

In the countryside, Westerners are essentially perceived as corrupt and threatening to traditional Afghan or Muslim values. Contrary to our self-perception, the villagers see the foreigners as the main providers of insecurity. The presence of coalition troops means IEDs, ambushes and airstrikes, and consequently a higher probability of being killed, maimed or robbed of a livelihood. Any incident quickly reinforces the divide between locals and outsiders, and the Afghan media provide extensive and graphic coverage of botched airstrikes and injured civilians.

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Carrumpah-Lobo - The Homosapiens.ki Blog
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International

Israel | Top IDF officer warns: Settlers' radical fringe growing
Haaretz - By Anshel Pfeffer - October 21, 2009
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The extremist fringe of West Bank settlers is growing, a senior officer on the Israel Defense Forces General Staff warned this week. Though most West Bank settlers are law abiding, the officer said, recent years have seen an upswing in violent attacks by extremist settlers against both IDF troops and neighboring Palestinians. The officer blamed individuals "formerly in positions of power, who are now unemployed and setting up all kinds of committees," for fanning the flames of radical sentiment among settlers.

United States Government

Why Won't Obama Draw a Line in the Sand and Take on the Wall Street Wrecking Crew?
The New York Times - By Frank Rich - October 20, 2009.
We know Obama has good values, but we don't know if he has convictions.
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At the dawn of the progressive era early in the last century, muckrakers attacked the first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, for creating capitalism?s most ruthless monster. ?The Octopus? was their nickname for Standard Oil, the trust that controlled nearly 90 percent of American oil. But even in that primordial phase of the industrial era, Rockefeller was mindful of his public image and eager to counter it. ?His great brainstorm,? writes his biographer, Ron Chernow, ?was undoubtedly his decision to dispense shiny souvenir dimes to adults and nickels to children as he moved about.? Who could hate an octopus tossing glittering coins?

It was hard not to think of Rockefeller?s old P.R. playbook while watching Goldman Sachs?s behavior when the Dow hit 10,000 last week. As leader of the Wall Street pack, Goldman declared surging profits, keeping it on track to dispense a record $23 billion in bonuses for 2009. But most Americans know all too well that only the intervention of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money saved Goldman from the dire fate of its less well-connected competitors. The growing ranks of under-and-unemployed Americans, meanwhile, are waiting with increasing desperation for a recovery of their own.

Goldman is this century?s octopus ? almost literally so. The most-quoted sentence in financial journalism this year, by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, describes the company as a ?great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.? That?s why Goldman?s chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, recycled Rockefeller?s stunt last week: The announcement of Goldman?s spectacular third-quarter earnings ($3.19 billion) was paired with the news that the company was donating $200 million to its own foundation, which promotes education. In Goldman dollars, that largess is roughly comparable to the nickels John D. handed out to children a century ago. At least those kids could spend the spare change on candy.

Teddy Roosevelt?s trust-busting crusade ultimately broke up Standard Oil. Though Goldman did outlast three of its four major rival firms during last fall?s meltdown, it is not a monopoly. And there is one other significant way that our 21st-century vampire squid differs from Rockefeller?s 20th-century octopus. Americans knew what oil was, and they understood how Standard Oil?s manipulations directly affected their pocketbooks. Even now many Americans don?t know what Goldman?s products are or how it makes its money. The less we know, the easier it is for reckless gambling to return to capitalism?s casino, and for Washington to look the other way as a new financial bubble inflates.

As Wall Street was celebrating last week, Congress was having a big week of its own, arousing itself to belatedly battle some of the corporate suspects that have helped drive America into its fiscal ditch. The big action was at the Senate Finance Committee, which finally produced a health care bill that, however gingerly, bids to reform industries that have feasted on the nation?s Rube Goldberg medical system. At least health care, like oil, is palpable, so we will be able to keep score of how reform fares ? win, lose or draw. But the business of Wall Street, while also at center stage in a Congressional committee last week, is so esoteric that the public is understandably clueless as to what, if anything, the lawmakers were up to, if anyone even noticed at all.

The first stab at corrective legislation emerging from Barney Frank?s Financial Services Committee in the House is porous. While unregulated derivatives remain the biggest potential systemic threat to the world?s economy, Frank said that ?the great majority? of businesses that use derivatives would not be covered under his committee?s much-amended bill. It?s also an open question whether the administration?s proposed consumer agency to protect Americans from mortgage and credit-card outrages will survive the banking lobby?s attempts to eviscerate it. As that bill stands now, more than 98 percent of America?s banks ? mainly community banks, representing 20 percent of deposits ? would be shielded from the new agency?s supervision

Citizens / Civil Organizations / Activism

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter" - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Topical Sections
Art and Culture

Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin" | Music Video
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Civil and Corporate Crime

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.?
--- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-Nov-21, in a letter to Colonel E. Mandell House

US | California Sues State Street for $200 Million
The New York Times - October 20, 2009
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California?s attorney general, Jerry Brown, said Tuesday that he was suing State Street, the large Boston-based bank, accusing it of committing ?unconscionable fraud? against the state?s two largest employee pension funds, Calpers and Calstrs. Mr. Brown said he was seeing to recover more than $200 million in overcharges and penalties. Mr. Brown said that State Street overcharged the pension funds by adding a secret and substantial mark-up to the price of interbank foreign currency trades, totaling $56.6 million over eight years. The interbank rate is the price at which major banks buy and sell foreign currency. ?Over a period of eight years, State Street bankers committed unconscionable fraud by misappropriating millions of dollars that rightfully belonged to California?s public pension funds,? Mr. Brown said in a statement. ?This is just the latest example of how clever financial traders violate laws and rip off the public trust.

Economy and Finance

Bloomberg Economic News
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Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News
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US | Opinion - Safety Nets for the Rich
The New York Times - By Bob Herbert - October 19, 2009
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The headlines that ran side by side on the front page of Saturday?s New York Times summed up, inadvertently, the terrible fix that we?ve allowed our country to fall into. The lead headline, in the upper right-hand corner, said: ?U.S. Deficit Rises to $1.4 Trillion; Biggest Since ?45.? The headline next to it said: ?Bailout Helps Revive Banks, And Bonuses.?

We?ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government ? while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they?ve wanted.

And we still don?t seem to have learned the proper lessons. We?ve allowed so many people to fall into the terrible abyss of unemployment that no one ? not the Obama administration, not the labor unions and most certainly no one in the Republican Party ? has a clue about how to put them back to work.

Meanwhile, Wall Street is living it up. I?m amazed at how passive the population has remained in the face of this sustained outrage.

Even as tens of millions of working Americans are struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their families? heads, the wise guys of Wall Street are licking their fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion-dollar bonuses ? this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their way by Uncle Sam, with very little in the way of strings attached.

Never mind that the economy remains deeply troubled. As The Times pointed out on Saturday, much of Wall Street ?is minting money.?

Energy

US | Clotheslines Banned in Thousands of U.S. Communities
You are officially invited to join the fight to legalize it...again. No, we're not talking about the smokable plant that's gotten so many politicians in hot water. We're talking about the good old fashioned clothes line.
Care2 - By Beth B - October 17, 2009
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As families all over the nation seek out different ways to reduce their carbon footprint and save money by using less energy, many have decided to return to hanging their clothes outside to dry them. However, many have met with great disappointment when homeowner's associations and community management services have told them the lines are not allowed.

Treehugger.com reports that, "hanging clotheslines was against the rules in so many communities nationwide that state governments are being forced to step in and make it against the law to ban them. And states like Vermont and Utah have already succeeded. But the fight for the right to hang clotheslines is just getting started.

Environment and Radioactivity

US | Toxic legacy of the Cold War
Ohio's Fernald Preserve has flowers, birds and tons of radioactive waste. Sites that once supplied the nation's nuclear arsenal now pose a staggering political, environmental and economic challenge.
Los Angeles Times - By Ralph Vartabedian - October 20, 2009
Reporting from Fernald Preserve, Ohio - Amid the family farms and rolling terrain of southern Ohio, one hill stands out for its precise geometry.
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The 65-foot-high mound stretching more than half a mile dominates a tract of northern hardwoods, prairie grasses and swampy ponds, known as the Fernald Preserve. Contrary to appearances, there is nothing natural here. The high ground is filled with radioactive debris, scooped from the soil around a former uranium foundry that produced crucial parts for the nation's nuclear weapons program.

A $4.4-billion cleanup transformed Fernald from a dangerously contaminated factory complex into an environmental showcase. But it is "clean" only by the terms of a legal agreement. Its soils contain many times the natural amounts of radioactivity, and a plume of tainted water extends underground about a mile.

Nobody can ever safely live here, federal scientists say, and the site will have to be closely monitored essentially forever.

Fernald is part of the toxic legacy of the Cold War, one component in a vast complex of research labs, raw material mills, weapons production plants and other facilities that once supplied the nation's nuclear arsenal.

Today, these sites pose a staggering political, environmental and economic challenge. They harbor wastes so toxic that the best cleanups, such as the eight-year effort at Fernald, can do no more than contain the danger. Cleaning the properties enough that people could live and work on them again is either unaffordable or impossible.

US | Nudging Recycling From Less Waste to None
The New York Times - By Leslie Kaufman - October 19, 2009
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At Yellowstone National Park, the clear soda cups and white utensils are not your typical cafe-counter garbage. Made of plant-based plastics, they dissolve magically when heated for more than a few minutes. At Ecco, a popular restaurant in Atlanta, waiters no longer scrape food scraps into the trash bin. Uneaten morsels are dumped into five-gallon pails and taken to a compost heap out back. And at eight of its North American plants, Honda is recycling so diligently that the factories have gotten rid of their trash Dumpsters altogether.

Across the nation, an antigarbage strategy known as ?zero waste? is moving from the fringes to the mainstream, taking hold in school cafeterias, national parks, restaurants, stadiums and corporations. The movement is simple in concept if not always in execution: Produce less waste. Shun polystyrene foam containers or any other packaging that is not biodegradable. Recycle or compost whatever you can.

Food and Nutrition

US | Dangerous Hype: Infant Formula Companies Claim They Can Make Babies 'Smarter'
Alternet - By Ari LeVaux - October 20, 2009.
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Companies have fortified their products with synthetic versions of certain fatty acids associated with brain development. But evidence shows it may be making children sick.

If you believed a certain baby formula would make your child smarter, would you buy it?

Infant formula manufacturers are banking that you would. That's why, since 2002, several companies have fortified their products with synthetic versions of DHA and ARA, long-chain fatty acids that occur naturally in breast milk and have been associated with brain development.

The oils are produced by Martek Biosciences Corp. from lab-grown algae and fungus and extracted with hexane, according to the company's patent application. Hexane is a neurotoxin.

A growing number of parents and medical professional believe these additives are causing severe reactions in some babies, and it has been repeatedly shown that taking affected babies off DHA/ARA formula makes the problems go away almost immediately. The FDA has received hundreds of letters to this effect by upset parents, even as products containing the additives are being marketed as better than breast milk.

Global warming and Climate Chang e

Africa | Rising sea levels are threatening the island homes of Mauritania?s Imraguen fishermen.
Grist - By Tim Bromfield - October 19, 2009
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The Banc d?Arguin, where the Sahara meets the Atlantic in Mauritania, is a staging post for over two million exhausted migratory birds from Europe and Siberia. Terns dive for fish, dolphins raise curious heads to the terrestrial world and crabs promenade through an octopus?s garden. This abundance is fed by the coastal upwelling, a wind-driven fountain of life bringing cooler, nutrient-rich water towards the ocean surface.

However, this unique ecosystem is threatened by sea level rise. Antonio Araujo, Director of La FIBA?s (Fondation Internationale du Banc d?Arguin) conservation program, says ?the catastrophe that is approaching us is a reality now.? The Banc d?Arguin is so flat that it is impossible to hold the tides back, already there are visible impacts.

Nair, one of 14 low-lying islands in the Banc, is an important breeding site for spoonbills. In the last 10 years rising sea levels have reduced its size by half. Each year more than half the island?s spoonbill nests are flooded and the eggs lost.

The Banc is an important nursery for a large number of species caught by the EU fleet and its loss would be devastating for the industry. Araujo stresses this is not an isolated problem for a remote community. There is no point investing in conservation projects in Europe without conserving birds? wintering grounds in the southern hemisphere. ?If the Banc is lost, 40-50% of the waders of the Palaearctic will disappear,? he says. Bird watching in Europe will never be the same again.

Health and Fitness

The Claim: Garlic Can Be Helpful in Warding Off a Cold
The New York Times - By Anahad Connor - October 19, 2009
For centuries, garlic has been extolled not just for its versatility in the kitchen but also for its medicinal powers.
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Whatever the reason, studies seem to support an effect. In one double-blind study, published in 2001, British scientists followed 146 healthy adults over 12 weeks from November to February. Those who had been randomly selected to receive a daily garlic supplement came down with 24 colds during the study period, compared with 65 colds in the placebo group. The garlic group experienced 111 days of sickness, versus 366 for those given a placebo. They also recovered faster.

Besides the odor, studies have found minimal side effects, like nausea and rash.

Fossil Fuels? Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says
The New York Times - By Matthew L. Wald - October 19, 2009
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WASHINGTON ? Burning fossil fuels costs the United States about $120 billion a year in health costs, mostly because of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, the National Academy of Sciences reported in a study issued Monday. The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress. The study set out to measure the costs not incorporated into the price of a kilowatt-hour or a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel.

The estimates by the academy do not include damages from global warming, which has been linked to the gases produced by burning fossil fuels. The authors said the extent of such damage, and the timing, were too uncertain to estimate. Nor did the study measure damage from burning oil for trains, ships and planes. And it did not include the environmental damage from coal mining or the pollution of rivers with chemicals that were filtered from coal plant smokestacks to keep the air clean.

?The largest portion of this is excess mortality ? increased human deaths as a result of criteria air pollutants emitted by power plants and vehicles,? said Jared L. Cohon, president of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who led the study committee.

Legal Issues

Bloomberg Index of Current Legal News
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Faux Religion and Anti-Philosophies

***** US | Meet the Senators in the Creepy Right-Wing Cult Trying to Defeat Health Care Reform
Altenet - By Adele M. Stan - October 20, 2009.
The Family has spent decades consolidating power within the GOP and may have come to dominate the party even among those who do not belong to the cult.
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In the heat of summer, a din of voices arose from the U.S. Senate in opposition to the health care reform legislation that was taking shape in both houses of Congress. Overlooked in media coverage of the health care brouhaha is the membership of many of the senators who most vociferously oppose the legislation in the right-wing religious cult known as The Family.

With the Senate Finance Committee's passage last Tuesday of its version of health care legislation, expect the debate to flare again as the bill moves to the Senate floor. The Family's point men -- "key men" in the cult's theological lexicon -- will likely try once again to defeat reform in the service of their Supply-Side Jesus.

You could chalk it up to nothing more than pure partisanship, this obstructionism on the part of these Republicans. Or you could say that the ideology-cum-theology of The Family, which has spent decades consolidating power within the GOP, has at last come to dominate the party even among those who do not belong to the cult.

While leaders of religious right we've come to know assert their claim to "a place at the table," The Family sets its table for only a select few. They are the nation's powerful: senators, congressmen, business executives and the strong-armed leaders of Third World countries. Together, in secret, they worship a Jesus unrecognizable to most practicing Christians. (In their secret theology, the leadership model of Adolf Hitler is one of which Jesus would approve.)

The people of South Carolina, Oklahoma, Iowa, Nevada, Kansas and Wyoming find themselves represented by at least one U.S. senator who belongs to The Family. If he subscribes to the theology of the cult of which he is a member, the senator believes himself to be anointed to his lofty position by Jesus himself -- a Jesus who tells him that his constituents' health care dilemmas are of no consequence to God; they are just the natural order of things as deemed by him.

The Jesus worshiped by The Family is neither Jesus the peacemaker, the champion of the poor, nor even Christ the personal savior. He is Jesus the power broker, who works his will through well-situated men committed to free enterprise of a most unregulated sort.

Things are as they are in the world because that's the way God wants them. The poor are poor because God ordained it to be so -- a condition that they may have earned through disobedience to the creator. The powerful are powerful -- be they murderous dictators or corporate polluters -- because they are God's chosen. Any regulated economic system, according to this theology, is less than godly, because regulation forestalls the exercise of free will.

Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., Family members who did their bit to slow down reform in their roles on the negotiating team for the Senate Finance Committee health care reform bill, remain unmoved by the 865 preventable deaths suffered each week by people without access to proper health care.

The God of The Family's teaching would never hold Grassley or Enzi -- or any other official -- to account for those deaths, because Grassley and Enzi are key men in God's plan.

Even Grassley's dishonest campaign to convince his constituents that President Barack Obama is looking to use health care reform to "pull the plug on Grandma" -- God is just fine with that, because Grassley is doing exactly what God wants him to do, preserving the social order.

Rights and Freedom

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians."
--- Angelica Grimke - (1805-1879) Source: Anti-Slavery Examiner, September 1836

"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction."
--- Thomas Jefferson - (1743-1826), Source: in a letter to John Adams as quoted in John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964)

Science & Technology

Bloomberg Index of Current Science News
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Social Issues
Parenting | When Parents Are Too Toxic to Tolerate

You can divorce an abusive spouse. You can call it quits if your lover mistreats you. But what can you do if the source of your misery is your own parent?
The New York Times -By Richard A. Friedman - October 19, 2009
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Granted, no parent is perfect. And whining about parental failure, real or not, is practically an American pastime that keeps the therapeutic community dutifully employed. But just as there are ordinary good-enough parents who mysteriously produce a difficult child, there are some decent people who have the misfortune of having a truly toxic parent.

US - Education | Making the Grade Isn't About Race. It's About Parents.
"Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"
Washington Post - By Patrick Welsh - Sunday, October 18, 2009
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In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class -- and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study." Another student angrily challenged me: "You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us." When I did, not one hand went up.

I was stunned. These were good kids; I had grown attached to them over the school year. It hit me that these students, at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, understood what I knew too well: The lack of a father in their lives had undermined their education. The young man who spoke up knew that with a father in his house he probably wouldn't be ending 12 years of school in the bottom 10 percent of his class with a D average. His classmate, normally a sweet young woman with a great sense of humor, must have long harbored resentment at her father's absence to speak out as she did. Both had hit upon an essential difference between the kids who make it in school and those who don't: parents.

Violence - Civil, Religious and Governmental

US | Book - Interview with author | How Can the U.S. Be an Empire and a Democracy at the Same Time?
An interview with Mark Danner, whose new book, Stripping Bare the Body, explores the strange notion of a democratic empire and the wars it wages.
Alternet - By Bill Moyers - October 20, 2009.
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The following is a transcript from Bill Moyers' interview with journalist Mark Danner on his new book, Stripping Bare the Body, broadcast on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal.

Bill Moyers: President Obama has been holding one meeting after another trying to decide whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He would do well to hold off another discussion until he has sent everyone home for the weekend to read this new book with the provocative title, Stripping Bare the Body, and a cover that holds the eye like a magnet.

The subject is politics, violence, and war, and running through it is an old truth often forgot: you start a war knowing what you are fighting, but in the end you find yourself fighting for things you had never thought of.

In the meantime, you make decisions that inflict on people in far-off places suffering you never imagined.

That's but one stark truth you will find in these pages. The wars we fight, and the violence that feeds them, reveal like nothing else the hidden structures of power in Washington: the personal rivalries, the in-fighting and deal-making, the ambitions that decide our policies and often our fate. Stripping Bare the Body, you will discover, is a moral history of American power over the past quarter century.

Its author is Mark Danner, who throughout those 25 years reported from more mean places in the world than any journalist I know -- Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti, and Washington, among them. Despite more than one close brush with death, he keeps going back. He writes for some of our leading magazines and has produced a series of acclaimed books, winning awards left and right as well as receiving the MacArthur Fellowship. All the while Mark Danner has been teaching journalism and foreign affairs at both the University of California, Berkeley, and Bard College in upstate New York. He's been at this table before, and it's good to welcome you back. ... First, the title. Very provocative. Where did it come from?

Mark Danner: Well, it comes from a former Haitian president, who survived in office for about four months before being overthrown in a coup d'etat, and he said he told me and said in speeches subsequently that political violence is like Stripping Bare the Body, the better to place the stethoscope and hear what's going on beneath the skin. He meant that times of revolution, coup d'etat, war, any kind of social violence going on tends to form any one moment of nudity, as he put it. In which you can actually see the forces at work within the society stripped bare.

It's like one of those models in biology class, where you see the body, you see all the organs beneath it, and suddenly you see who's oppressing whom, who has the money, who has the power, how that power is exerted. And that that is the time to seize a society and look at it, to X-ray it, try to understand what exactly is going on in its intimate recesses.

US | Will the Soldiers We Train in Afghanistan End Up Trying to Kill Us in the Future? It's Happened Before - It's Already Happening Again
Alternet - By Tom Engelhardt - October 20, 2009.
For 30 years we've been deeply involved in creating, financing, and sometimes arming a part of the world that has shown willingness to create violence on our own soil.
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Is it too early -- or already too late -- to begin drawing lessons from "the Long War"? That phrase, coined in 2002 and, by 2005, being championed by Centcom Commander General John Abizaid, was meant to be a catchier name for George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror." That was back in the days when inside-the-Beltway types were still dreaming about a global Pax Americana and its domestic partner, a Pax Republicana, and imagining that both, once firmly established, might last forever.

"The Long War" merely exchanged the shock-'n'-awe geographical breadth of the President Bush's chosen moniker ("global") for a shock-'n'-awe time span. Our all-out, no-holds-barred struggle against evil-doers would be nothing short of generational as well as planetary. From Abizaid's point of view, perhaps a little in-office surgical operation on the nomenclature of Bush's war was, in any case, in order at a time when the Iraq War was going disastrously badly and the Afghan one was starting to look more than a little peaked as well. It was like saying: Forget that "mission accomplished" sprint to victory in 2003 and keep your eyes on the prize. We're in it for the long slog.

Sound and Fury

Photography - US | Photos from the Book, Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America
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Hip Hop | Maestro Fresh Wes - Drop The Needle
- Video

Bouncing barefoot on the sidewalk
- Video

A Song for the Times - Bing Crosby (1932) ?Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
- Audio

The History of A Great Depression-Era Anthem For Our Time
- Audio/Text

Yip Harburg (1970)
- Audio

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Music Video | Leonard Cohen | "Democracy Is Coming to the USA"
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