Matthias Chiroux is a former active-duty Army sergeant whose reserve unit is to be deployed to Iraq next month.  --  On Thursday, he called a press conference in the halls of Congress Thursday that to proclaim:  "I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government, and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq.  My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation . . . I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation," AFP reported Friday.[1]  --  The announcement was connected to the Winter Soldier hearings underway in the nation's capital, though the AFP article obscured the connection and did not name those hearings.  --  A Google news search shows that during Armed Forces Week mainstream media are continuing to ignore these hearings....

After a visit from U.S. President George W. Bush to King Abdullah in Riyadh on Friday, Saudi Arabia said on May 16 that it would increase output by about 300,000 barrels a day, "increasing its oil production to its highest level in two years," the Financial Times reported late Friday.[1]  --  "Riyadh pointedly waited until Mr. Bush had left the meeting before it made the announcement — leaving U.S. officials in the embarrassing position of having already briefed reporters not to expect any movement from the Saudis," Javier Blas noted.  --  On Friday the price of crude oil futures set another new record of $127.82 a barrel.  --  A separate Financial Times piece posted a few hours later set the decision in the context of OPEC politics, and said Saudi Arabia's decision "threatens to deepen the rift that has emerged inside OPEC between the moderate Arab Gulf countries and hawkish Iran and Venezuela."[2]  --  In a review of the spike in energy prices, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, the paper's chief economics commentator, urged a market-based argument for structural global adjustment and against the complacent view that the price of oil will soon decline:  "On balance, it is quite unlikely that aggregate demand for oil will collapse, as it did after the two previous price spikes, just as it is unlikely that massive net new oil supplies will come on stream in the near future.  This does not mean that prices will remain as high as they are today for the indefinite future:  such stability is improbable.  But it means we should expect a sustained period of relatively high prices even if “peak oil” theorists are proved wrong.  If proved right, this would be true in spades. . . . The great event of our era is the spread of industrialization to billions of people.  The high prices of resources are the market’s response to this transforming event.  The market is saying that we must use more wisely resources that have now become more valuable.  The market is right." ...

A background piece published Saturday in the Financial Times of London reviewed the factors that have swelled the U.N peacekeeping budget to triple the U.N.'s non-military expenditure and caused anxieties that "the growing demands on the world's 'Blue Helmet' forces are running out of control."[1]   --  Plans are under review at the U.N. to "field about 90,000 uniformed personnel worldwide in the year from July," Harvey Morris reported, a 10% increase from last year and three times the number deployed (and the amount expended) in 2003.  --  There is also a north-south dimension to the concerns:  "The average peacemaker is likely to be an Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi," Morris said.  "The three states, with well-equipped armies, supply about a third of all U.N. forces deployed.  --  But, although peacekeeping amounts almost to an export industry for a poor country such as Bangladesh, these traditional suppliers now find themselves at their limit and increasingly reluctant to face the risks that 21st century Blue Helmets are required to run.  --  While developing country forces man most U.N. posts around the world, the U.S., and Europe broadly opt for missions under NATO, European Union, or national flags.  This has fuelled resentment that developing countries fill most posts while the permanent five members of the Security Council — the U.S., U.K., France, Russia, and China — maintain control."  --  Why the rapid increase in peacekeepers?  --  "U.N. peacekeeping is undergoing its second and this time much larger surge since the end of the Cold War," Morris noted.  --  "Before the Soviet collapse, superpower rivalries limited the scope for international responses to regional conflicts.  In the 1990s, crises in the Balkans, Somalia, Cambodia, and elsewhere saw troop levels rise eight-fold to almost 80,000.  Then came the U.N.'s failure to prevent the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia.  After this, U.N. member states turned away from the organization for peacekeeping initiatives.  But with unrest simmering in many parts of the world, the Security Council is under pressure to respond and its answer is often to put boots on the ground.  The DPKO [the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, which now has some 27,000 civilian auxiliary posts] is obliged to carry out its instructions, sometimes against its better judgment."  --  Another problem:  "Officials worry that the Security Council is too ready to order the deployment of peacekeepers to theaters such as Darfur, Chad, or Somalia where there is as yet no peace to keep.  Traditionally, the Blue Helmets were not intended for a fire-fighting role.  Their job was to monitor ceasefires between previously warring parties or to act as a buffer between them.  Nowadays, in a range of crises worldwide, but principally in Africa, they risk finding themselves in the line of fire." ...

In a case that seems destined to inspire more than one murder mystery in the future, a U.S. citizen who had served as director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University died on Wednesday at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, the Associated Press reported later that day.  --  Arrested on May 9 upon her arrival in Seattle for an academic speaking engagement, Dr. Roxanna Brown, 62, was a somewhat exotic figure.  --  She had a gained a Ph.D. in art history at UCLA and lost a leg in an accident in Bangkok more than twenty-five years ago, and federal authorities had just arranged for her grand jury indictment for allegedly "allowing art collectors to use her electronic signature to overstate the value of items they donated to several Southern California museums."  --  Roxanna Brown's brother, who lived in Chicago and who maintains that she was innocent, said that "his sister became interested in Southeast Asian art after visiting him in 1968 in Australia, where he was recovering from a Vietnam War wound."  --  The Los Angeles Times said Thursday that Brown "was a focal point of a widening federal probe that was launched with highly publicized raids on four Southern California museums in January."[2]  --  Brown died about 2:30 a.m. Wednesday as preparations for her extradition to L.A. were underway.  --  Her death was initially believed to have been due to a heart attack, but the Seattle Times reported on Friday that the King County Medical Examiner's Office said she had died "from infection and inflammation caused by a perforated gastric ulcer."[3]  --  Coming on the heels of a Washington Post series on the neglect suffered by detainees in the post-9/11 immigrant detention centers around the nation, there was sure to be interest in the fact that "the detention center does not have any medical staff on duty overnight."  --  The talk that Dr. Brown was prevented from giving on May 10 at a "China in Asia Workshop" at the U. of Wash. on "Maritime Asia in the Early Modern World" was entitled "The Sea Trade from China to Southeast Asia."[4]  --  Roxanna Brown was the author of the erudite Ceramics of Southeast Asia: Their Dating and Identification, 2nd ed. (Oxford UP, 1989; orig. ed. 1977), which treated of Vietnamese ceramics, Go-Sank kilns, Khmer wares, Sukhothai and Sawankhalok kilns, Northern and other Thai kilns, celadon wares, and Burmese ceramics.  --  For more on Roxanna Brown's scholarly work, see this 2004 article from UCLA's Center for Southeast Asian Studies....

In a review posted Friday on the Truthout web site, Blackwater muckraker Jeremy Scahill had lots of superlatives for John Cusack's new genre-defying film, "War, Inc."  --  "It is sort of like this generation's 'Dr. Strangelove,' 'A Clockwork Orange,' and 'The Wizard of Oz' mixed together with the unembedded reporting of Naomi Klein, spiced up with a dash of 'South Park.'  It is a powerful, visionary response to the cheerleading culture of the corporate media and a pliant Hollywood afraid of its own shadow."  --  ("The Wizard of Oz"?  "South Park"?  Frankly, we would have preferred to hear a reference to "Apocalypse Now."  From Scahill's description, you get the feeling the film lacks gravitas.   But then again, the Iraq war itself has, despite all its horrors, been somehow lacking in gravitas.)  --  Anticipating objections, Scahill says that "anyone who thinks the premise behind 'War, Inc.' is 'over-the-top' has not been paying attention to real life."  --  Scahill is referring to "the Wal-Martization of life (and death) represented in the new U.S. model for waging war."  --  "With 630 corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton on the U.S. government payroll in Iraq getting 40 percent of the more than $2 billion Washington spends every week on the occupation," he writes, "Cusack's 'futuristic' film is not far from the way things really are."  --  For more on "War, Inc.," see here....

On Thursday the House voted down an Iraq and Afghansitan war funding proposal in what the Washington Post called a "surprise action left antiwar activists on and off Capitol Hill exultant, Republicans gloating, and Democratic leaders baffled."[1]  --  "Recriminations from all sides quickly followed," Johathan Weisman said.  --  Among those exulting were the Progressive Democrats of America, who described the action this way:  "The appropriations amendment granting 162.5 billion dollars more for operations in Iraq failed to pass the House today.  Eighty-five Democrats voted with fifty-six Republicans for a total of 141 votes for the amendment.  The congressional Progressive Caucus hung together and with other Democrats and two Republicans cast 147 votes to defeat the amendment.  Whether 132 House Republicans abstained in today's vote in a protest against Pelosi's parliamentary procedures or to distance themselves from the president is yet to be determined.  Either way, it worked to allow the House to finally vote against funding for the occupation of Iraq."[2]  --  Unfortunately, all of Pierce County representatives (Norm Dicks, Adam Smith, and Dave Reichert) were on the wrong side of the 149-141 vote.  --  Paul Richmond, an attorney who is mounting a challenge to Norm Dick in Washington's 6th Congressional district, issued a statement proclaiming that Dicks's vote "shows that the Congressman is at odds with the majority of citizens, the majority of Democrats, and his constituency."[3]  --  Richmond also called attention to Washington State Congressional District Caucuses which will be held tomorrow, and urged supporters to "show your support for my campaign, please consider a visit to Shelton, (on the Peninsula, North of Tacoma) early Saturday morning."[4]  --  See also here for details of the process; the nominating convention will be held from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m....

Global investors are eyeing Russia as the next big growth market, the Financial Times said Friday in its "Your Money" section, and suggests that "you" should, too.[1] -- (Shouldn't this rubric be "Their Money"?)  --  True, Russia has an "image problem," an "unpredictable political environment," and an "opaque corporate structure," as Alice Ross pointed out, but from the point of view of corporate profits, those can have an upside, too:  "The appointment of Dmitry Medvedev as president is seen as a sign that political stability will continue, particularly with Putin continuing to play a key role."  --  And "credit is still in its infancy in Russia.  Credit cards are virtually unheard of, mortgages are only just beginning to surface, and banks rely on good old-fashioned deposits, rather than sub-prime backed securities for their funding.  --  Gary Potter, co-head of Thames River multimanager, says:  'Particularly in today’s environment, Russia offers a potential beacon of opportunity. Having so much oil and gas is an incredibly stable anchor.'"   --  COMMENT:  If one pulls back from the corporate balance sheets for a moment, one can see another side of the thinking this article reflects.  --  As UFPPC said in a statement last year entitled "Are the Ecological Crisis and the Social Crisis Two Sides of a Single Coin?", "there is an essential link between the ecological and environmental crisis that is leading to catastrophic climate change, and the socioeconomic crisis that is producing an ever-growing gap between rich and poor and breeding war and terrorism."  --  That link is the culture of late capitalism:  "[O]ne cannot understand the concomitance of the ecological and social crises if one does not analyze them as two facets of the same disaster, one that results from a system directed by a dominant stratum that today has no motive but greed, no ideal but conservatism, no dream but technology.  This predatory oligarchy is the principal agent of the global crisis." ...

Two well-informed debaters will face off at King's Books (218 St. Helens Ave.) in Tacoma at 7:00 p.m. on Fri., May 23, on whether the U.S. should leave Iraq immediately or remain in Iraq indefinitely.  --  Arguing for remaining in Iraq will be Floyd "Chip" Churchill, who has degrees in Government, Military History, and Crisis Management and teaches at Pierce College.  --  Arguing for withdrawal will be Steve Niva, who has degrees in Political Science, International Politics, and Middle East Studies and teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia.  --  More information below.[1]  --  NOTE: This event is being widely posted on the internet; among others, News Tribune reporter Mike Gilbert has given the event a plug on his FOB Tacoma blog, and it's also been posted on Craig's List.  --  Better come early to get a seat....

Coming on the day the New York Times published as its lead story a piece about the "waves of apprehension" that are sweeping Republican Party circles in the aftermath of a striking defeat in a Mississippi by-election on Tuesday suggesting that Barack Obama's coattails may be long and wide, President George W. Bush's decision to inject a veiled attack on Sen. Barack Obama in a formal speech to the Israeli Knesset given on the occasion of that nation's 60th anniversary celebrations has "created a political firestorm in Washington," the *Times* reported Thursday.[1]  --  In remarks broadcast on CNN and posted on YouTube, Sen. Joe Biden, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noted that Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice are also proposing dealing with Iran, and said of Bush's remark:  "This is bullshit.  This is malarkey.  This is outrageous — outrageous, for the president to go to a foreign country, sit in the Knesset . . . and make this kind of ridiculous statement.  He's the guy that's weakened us, he's the guy who's increased the number of terrorists in the world."  --  As for dealing with Hitler, what commentators should be pointing out is that the president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was part of a financial élite that worked to facilitate Adolf Hitler's rise:  "By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman) [a Wall Street firm of which Prescott Bush was a managing partner] and Dillon Read were two notable active investors in a Germany rapidly rearming under Adolf Hitler.  It is an irony, but not a coincidence, that by 1943, many of their best-known partners and executives — from Averill Harriman and James Forrestal to Robert Lovett, Douglas Dillon, William Draper, and David K.E. Bruce — were major figures in the Washington war effort or the Office of Strategic Services, as were the two Wall Street lawyers with the largest German practices — the two Dulleses.  John Foster Dulles, as a board member of International Nickel, actually had helped work out that firm's prewar cartel agreement with I.G. Farben to provide Germany with a steady supply of nickel for armor plating.  When Wall Street firms and major multinational corporations like General Motors, ITT, and Ford needed to rearrange German holdings, it was to these two that they turned.  Prescott Bush, who handled much of the German work at Brown Brothers Harriman, used their services. . . . In 1938, the firm had been collaterally involved in a German transaction — shipping tetraethyl lead needed by the Luftwaffe — by the Ethyl Corpration . . . In 1941, the New York Herald Tribune had featured a front-page story headlined 'Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank'" (Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush [Viking, 2004], pp. 38-39).  --  George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a director of that bank (the Union Banking Corporation).  --  In a review of this sorry history, the London Guardian summed it up this way:  "[F]iles in the U.S. National Archives [confirm that] a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism."[2]  --  "[N]ew documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power."  --  "UBC [with Prescott Bush as a director] was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family [August Thyssen was a crucial financial backer for the Nazi Party] eight months after America had entered the war and . . . this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler's rise to power."  --  That George W. Bush should propose to give lessons to Barack Obama about dealing with fascists is testimony to the utter cynicism of the forty-third president....

A GOP effort to sink a conservative Mississippi Democrat by linking him to Barack Obama failed badly on Tuesday, sending "waves of apprehension" through the Republican Party, the New York Times reported Thursday.[1]  --  "The victory by Travis Childers, a conservative Democrat elected in a once-steadfast Republican district on Tuesday, was the third defeat of a Republican in a special Congressional race this year," Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse said.  --  "In addition to foreshadowing more losses for the party in November, the outcome appeared to call into question the belief that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois could be a heavy liability for his party’s down-ticket candidates in conservative regions."  --  The results "suggested that Mr. Obama might have the effect of putting into play Southern seats that were once solidly Republican, rather than dragging down Democratic candidates." ...

In its quest to find recruits to staff its military, the U.S. "is violating an international protocol that forbids the recruitment of children under the age of 18 for military service," IPS reported Tuesday.[1]  --  Jim Lobe said that the ACLU has prepared a 46-page report to be submitted to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child entitled "Soldiers of Misfortune" that says that "The United States military's procedures for recruiting students plainly violate internationally accepted standards and fail to protect youth from abusive and aggressive recruitment tactics."  --  "While the United States is one of only two countries — the other being Somalia — to have never ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the U.S. Senate ratified the Protocol in 2002, making it binding under U.S., as well as international, law," Lobe wrote.  "Unlike most other industrialized countries that set their minimum recruitment age at 18, the Senate decided on 17 as the absolute minimum for the United States."  --  But "the U.S. armed services 'regularly target children under 17 for military recruitment, heavily recruiting on high school campuses, in school lunchrooms, and in classes,'" according to the report.  --  In fact, "recruitment efforts even dip below 15-year-olds, according to the report, which found that the Pentagon's Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), which operate at more than 3,000 junior high schools, middle schools, and high schools across the country, target children as young as 14 for recruitment.  The report cited recent studies that found that enrollment in some JROTC programs was involuntary." ...

Barack Obama is often said to be a foreign policy neophyte, but that's not the view of Jonathan Steele.  --  Steele is the author of Soviet Power: The Kremlin's Foreign Policy — Brezhnev to Andropov (Simon and Schuster, 1983) and more recently Defeat: Why American and Britain Lost Iraq (Counterpoint, 2008), and thinks Obama's life experience (particularly the years of his childhood that were spent in Indonesia) has given him deep insight into U.S. foreign policy.  --  Writing in the London Guardian on Wednesday, where's presently a columnist, Steele asked:  "[H]as any other candidate grown up with such a direct encounter with a country under massive political repression or seen the cynical face of the U.S. empire?  The Republican nominee John McCain accuses Obama of not having national security 'experience,' but what experiences do he or Hillary Clinton have which compare with Obama's?  They were raised in the usual American cocoon of believing that the values behind the country's anti-colonial beginnings still guide its international behavior.  Obama, by contrast, knows the U.S. has run a global empire for at least the past half a century.  His mother taught him, he writes, 'to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad.'"[1]  --  But like every observer, Steele has noticed that "Obama has chosen to make large-scale compromises" in the field of foreign policy, most notably when it comes to Israel.  --  Will the compromises be enough to satisfy those who are demanding them?  --  Justin Raimondo, for one, doubts it.  --  "Poor Obama," he began a column on the subject on Wednesday.  "No matter how much he tries to placate the Israel lobby, they just won't take yes for an answer.  The Lobby has been after him for months, trying to dig up 'evidence' that someone with the middle name of 'Hussein' is necessarily an enemy of Israel."[2]  --  But a close analysis of how Obama handled the hectoring of a member of the Israel lobby in an online interview on the web site of the Atlantic leaves Raimondo full of admiration:  "Obama cuts to the core of the issue . . . Obama is here engaging the Lobby, challenging its claim to set the terms of the debate — and refusing to grovel.  Good for him . . . Obama really goes on the offensive toward the end . . . [his] mirror metaphor is really devastating, yet more evidence of the candidate's underrated ability to lash out — but with a rapier, not a broadsword." ...

Without a valid medical reason, the U.S. government has "injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country," the Washington Post reported Wednesday in the final installment of its shocking in-depth examination of the treatment of those caught up in its post-9/11 immigrant detention system.[1]  --  (See here for Parts I & II, and Part III, of the series.)  --  "Repeatedly," Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest reported, "documents describe immigration guards 'taking down' a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport."  --  The practice is "a violation of some international human rights codes" and is "banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places."  --  The Post revealed that U.S. officials consistently lied to the public about the extent of the practice.  --  "[T]he government has routinely ignored its own rules."  --  Typically, "a U.S. public health nurse is assigned as the medical escort and given prescriptions for the drugs," and to recruit such employees "the government has sought to glamorize this work.  'Do you ever dream of escaping to exotic, exciting locations?' said an item in an agency newsletter.  'Want to get away from the office but are strapped for cash?  Make your dreams come true by signing up as a Medical Escort for DIHS!'"  --  Typically, sedated detainees get "a cocktail of three drugs that included Haldol, also known as haloperidol," which "gained notoriety in the Soviet Union, where it was often given to political dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals."  --  Its use in these cases is "medically and ethically wrong," said Philip Seeman, a University of Toronto specialist in psychiatry and pharmacology.  --  Goldstein and Priest also demonstrate that ICE chose to ignore legal advice that the practice is illegal and contented itself with issuing a new policy inventing an arbitrary definition of "combative detainee" in an attempt to legitimize its conduct.  --  After publicity about the Amadou Diouf case in the spring of 2007, ICE issued a new policy according to which "DIHS may only involuntarily sedate an alien to facilitate removal where the government has obtained a court order," but "[h]ow well the government is following its new rules is unclear," Goldstein and Priest said.  --  They reported on one case in which involuntary sedation was used without such an order from a judge, that of Maher Ayoub of Egypt in August 2007.  --  The Post also posted online dozens of documents related to the case....

On Tuesday, David Swanson of After Downing Street posted a May 8, 2008, letter from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI 14th), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which is charged with examining article of impeachment, to his Democratic colleagues, inviting them to sign a letter he has drafted warning Pres. George W. Bush that "impeachment proceedings should be considered" should he attack Iran without Congressional authorization.[1] ...

Faced with Spain's "worst drought since records began 60 years ago," the worst-hit region, Catalonia, has begun importing water by tanker ship, the London Guardian reported Wednesday.[1]  --  "At a cost of 22m euros (£17.5m), six shiploads [of water] are to arrive [in Barcelona] each month for three months, from Tarragona in southern Catalonia, Marseille, and Almeria — one of the driest areas of southern Spain," Graham Keeley said.  --  "[A] 'water war' has broken out, with different regions scrabbling for extra supplies.  --  The Socialist government, which initially opposed water transfers from one region to another, executed a political U-turn and allowed water to be pumped into Catalonia from the river Ebro in the neighboring region of Aragon.  --  The move infuriated southern regions such as Murcia and Valencia, which asked for similar concessions.  Both are significant agricultural areas, with a busy tourist season about to start, and expect their water supplies to be hit hard.  --  Both areas, run by the opposition conservative Popular party, claim Spain's Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodrìguez Zapatero denied their requests for water transfers for political reasons."  --  Spain is also in the process of building two dozen desalinization plants.  --  BACKGROUND:  Water activists Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke wrote in Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (New Press, 2002) that "the world is running out of fresh water . . . unless we dramatically change our ways, between one-half and two-thirds of humanity will be living with severe fresh water shortages within the next quarter-century” (xi-xiii).  --  Barlow, co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, argues that the neoliberal Washington Consensus, with the World Bank and the IMF as its enforcers, advocates privatization as a response to this problem, but that this is unacceptable from the perspective both of human rights and of natural ecology....

United for Peace and Justice, the national coalition to which UFPPC belongs, is calling attention to Thursday's Winter Soldier testimony at a hearing convened in Washington, D.C. by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (May 15, 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. EST).[1]  --  An effort is underway to have the hearings broadcast live on C-SPAN.  --  The initial hearings on March 13-16 in Silver Spring, MD, received almost no mainstream media coverage, and a Google news search suggests that this regrettable pattern is about to repeat itself.  --  It indicates that there has been discussion of the upcoming hearings in recent days by UN Observer, the London Guardian, Political Affairs Magazine, and ZNet.  --  Not one mainstream media organ is attending to these testimonies, although they will be taking place during Armed Forces Week.  --  As Shakespeare said:  "Marcellus: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. — Horatio: Heaven will direct it. — Marcellus: Nay, let's follow him" (Hamlet, Act I, Scene iv)....

In this 2002 meditation on working for the common good in dark times, Margaret Wheatley writes:  "[R]ecall the Buddhist teaching that hopelessness is not the opposite of hope.  Fear is.  Hope and fear are inescapable partners.  Anytime we hope for a certain outcome, and work hard to make it a happen, then we also introduce fear — fear of failing, fear of loss.  Hopelessness is free of fear and thus can feel quite liberating.  I've listened to others describe this state.  Unburdened of strong emotions, they describe the miraculous appearance of clarity and energy."[1] ...

This 30-second short won the "funniest ad" category in MoveOn's "Obama in 30 Seconds" contest....

"Armed Forces Day" was first observed in 1949 as a consolidation of what had previously been Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard Days (though observance of these separate commemorations continues).  --  Congress had passed the National Security Act unifying the armed services in 1947, which also created the Central Intelligence Agency.  --  This year, the Bremerton Chamber of Commerce has organized a number of events, one of them being the "60th Annual American Financial Solutions Armed Forces Day Parade" in downtown Bremerton, featuring "[m]ore than 150 marching units including nearly two dozen bands and the Pearl Harbor Survivors [who] will parade through the streets of downtown Bremerton to celebrate Armed Forces Day."[1]  --  (Incidentally, Bremerton has miscounted: since Armed Forces Day was first observed on May 20, 1950, this 2008 events are the 59th, not the 60th annual observance.)  --  Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations, is serving this year as the parade's Grand Marshal.  --  The parade will be broadcast live on Bremerton Kitsap Access Television, and will feature among its entries the National Guard's M1A1 Abrams tank ("a huge crowd favorite"), the Combat Veterans International's motorcycles "offering a moving tribute to service members."  --  But the application of North Olympic Peninsula Veterans For Peace (Chapter 139, based in Sequim) to join in Saturday's parade has been rejected, David Jenkins informed VFP members on Monday.[2]  --  The board of directors of North Olympic Peninsula VFP has decided to challenge this rejection by "form[ing] up at the tail end of the parade procession," and is asking supporters to join them.  --  "Now is the time to commit words and beliefs to action," Jenkins wrote.  --  "Now is the time to be unified in our effort and demonstrate that our belief in our constitutional right to speech and free expression is real. . . . We appear to have a great deal of support."  --  Jenkins said that the "Bremerton Armed Forces Day Festival and Parade is a week-long celebration of the false and fatal misleading culture of war.  It generates the excitement and energy that sucks in the future of our country, our youth, to become fodder.  --  It has little to do with defending the freedoms guaranteed by our constitution and much to do with defending the interests of wealth and the oligarchs of America."  --  Jenkins invites supporters to join them to "demonstrate that our belief in our constitutional right to speech and free expression is real."  --  Thanks to David Jenkins for permission to post his message here....

A post-9/11 national system of "fusion centers" has been under construction for several years.  --  Fusion centers are state or local intelligence-gathering bodies linked to law enforcement agencies and also, in many cases, to private entities, including corporations).  --  In October 2007 they numbered 43, with plans for more.  --  In April 2003, as an ad hoc Senate subcommittee tasked specifically with monitoring fusion centers met to hear testimony about an October 2007 GAO report entitled "Federal Efforts Are Helping to Alleviate Some Challenges Encountered by State and Local Information Fusion Centers," [117-page PDF file] the ACLU released a statement warning that "Fusion centers have the potential to be privacy nightmares."[1]  --  The ACLU, which published its own 27-page report on fusion centers in December 2007, complained that "Though several recent reports have confirmed fusion centers’ growing role in law enforcement and revealed their expanding ties to private industry, including relationships with massive data-brokering companies, no third parties were set to testify."  --  "There’s simply too much we don’t know," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.  --  The executive summary of the ACLU report is posted below.[2]  --  It states that although fusion centers were supposed to be concerned with terrorism, "the scope of their mission has quickly expanded — with the support and encouragement of the federal government — to cover 'all crimes and all hazards.'  The types of information they seek for analysis has also broadened over time to include not just criminal intelligence, but public and private sector data, and participation in these centers has grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and even select members of the private sector."  --  The ACLU pointed to a number of factors conjoining to "undermine fundamental American values" and also to "turn [fusion centers] into wasteful and misdirected bureaucracies":  ambiguous lines of authority, dubious private sector participation, troubling military participation, privacy-threatening data mining, and excessive secrecy.  --  The ACLU has also published a set of 39 "questions to ask about fusion centers."[3]  --  Despite their imporatnce, most people are unaware of the existence of fusion centers, because corporate-owned media rarely refer to them.  --  The ACLU's news release generated not a single news article, a Google news search indicates.  --  The only recent mention of the ACLU and fusion centers in mainstream media of which we are aware was a May 1 squib in the Tucson Citizen announcing an ACLU-sponsored talk at the Univ. of Arizona on "Domestic Surveillance in Your Back Yard."[4] ...

In Part III of a series on neglectful care inside the post-9/11 immigrant detainee system that began Sunday in the Washington Post, Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein focused Tuesday on mental health issues.  --  (See here for Parts I & II.)  --  "[P]eople with mental illness are relegated to the darkest and most neglected corners of the system, according to interviews and thousands of internal documents, including e-mails, memos, autopsy reports and other medical records," they wrote.[1]  --  "Suicide is the most common cause of death among detained immigrants," and "suicide attempts seem to be on the rise."  --  "[I]n confidential memos, officials estimate that about 15 percent — about 4,500 — [of the 33,000 detainees held on any given day] are mentally ill, a number that is much higher than the public ICE estimate.  The numbers are rising fast, memos reveal, as state mental institutions and prisons transfer more people into immigration detention." ...

"How can you detain sick people without giving them swift and proper care — as everyone should have the right to get?" wrote one reader of a Washington Post series on the neglect suffered by detainees in America's immigration prisons, which are increasingly private and for-profit.[1]  --  "I kept shaking my head in disbelief while reading this," wrote another, "that we in the wealthiest nation in the world could so easily turn a blind eye to a prisoner's suffering — a prisoner who was being held for buying stolen jewelry more than 10 years ago?  A case that was dismissed?  But I was more stunned to read the callous, selfish posts here.  What has the lady done to deserve this neglect?  She had health care through her husband, and the system won't allow her to use it.  But they won't care for her either.  Not only has the U.S. immigration system become full of paranoid penny pinching, holier-than-thou automatons, it seems that a lot of U.S. citizens have too."  --  The series of articles is written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein, and includes many links to original documents on the Washington Post web site.  --  The Post's series is based on "thousands of pages of government documents obtained by the Post.  They include autopsy and medical records, investigative reports, notes, internal e-mails, and memorandums.  These documents, along with interviews with current and former immigration medical officials and staff members, illuminate the underside of the hasty governmental reorganization that took place in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."  --  The first article, published Sunday, describes "an unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees across the country.  Some 33,000 people are crammed into these overcrowded compounds on a given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay here."[1]  --  The detainees, who are often incarcerated by mistake or for minor infractions, "have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," Priest and Goldstein wrote.  --  'Most are working-class men and women or indigent laborers who made mistakes that seem to pose no threat to national security."  --  Almost a score of horrifying cases are reviewed in brief.  --  The second article in the series focuses on the appalling story of Yong Sun Harvill, a woman convicted of buying stolen jewelry a decade ago, sent thousands of miles away from her family, and then subjected to an incredible pattern of neglect and indifference to her serious and life-threatening medical problems.[2]  --  "[T]he obscure federal agency that oversees detainees' medical care, the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS), operates with a top priority of limiting care and saving money," Goldstein and Priest wrote.  "Its medical mission is only to keep people healthy enough to be deported."  --  Although Yong Sun Harvill has lived in the U.S. for 32 years, she is being threatened with deportation to South Korea.  --  See here for a "60 Minutes" segment on the Washington Post investigation....

A 42-year-old man died in 2006 at the Northwest Detention Center in what is believed to have been one of some thirty preventable deaths of persons in the custody of the Dept. of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the web site of the Seattle Weekly reported today.  --  "We never heard about it" at the time, Rick Anderson noted.  --  But recently released documents showing how many detainees have died in U.S. immigration prisons were described last week by the New York Times and the Washington Post.  --  On May 5, the Times published news of 66 names "on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007 . . . compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by the New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act."[2]  --  Nina Bernstein called the list "the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration."  --  In the case of one death, Bernstein described how the Corrections Corporation of America (which built Tacoma's Northwest Detention Center and then sold it to Geo, the present operator) labeled as "proprietary information — not for distribution” a report that described how a detainee who "fell" and injured his head was "shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth."  --  He later died.  --  At present, "[n]o government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them.   No independent inquiry is mandated.  And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance."  --  On Tuesday, the chair of a congressional subcommittee said she was introducing legislation "to set mandatory standards for care and to require that all deaths be reported to the Justice Department and Congress."[3]  --  “This is about whether the government is conducting itself according to the basic minimum standards of civilization,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California.  --  Without the Freedom of Information Act this story would never have come to light, but the "public editor" of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, wrote on Sunday that "it is increasingly difficult to pry records that should be open out of federal agencies."[4] ...

Shell and Repsol have pulled out of Phase 13 of Iran's South Pars, the world's largest gas field, the Financial Times of London reported Sunday.[1]  --  Anna Fifield and Javier Blas called the decision "a blow to Tehran’s attempts to expand its energy exports in the face of U.S. and international sanctions."  --  However, both companies said they "could still participate in other phases."  --  The next day a senior Iranian energy official said that production of another part of the South Pars field operated by StatoilHydro, a Norwegian energy company, would begin early this summer, Reuters reported.[2]  --  For more on the South Pars field, see here....

In a long article posted on the Atlantic Free Press on Tuesday, Eric Larsen of the 9/11 truth movement takes as given "that 9/11 was an inside job."  --  After all, he writes, "today only sixteen percent of Americans actually believe the 'official' theory."  --  He focuses his fire on the many of those he calls "left gatekeepers" who maintain a studied silence about 9/11.[1]  --  At 10,000 words, Larsen's long, earnest, and hectoring piece can be taken as a measure of his frustration in the face of that silence.  --  Any American citizen with a sense of civic responsibility and a conscience "who still adheres to the government's seven-year-long chain of continuous and contemptible lies about what really happened on 9/11 is either a fool, a complete non-entity socio-politically, or a party to the cover-up and thus to treason," wrote Larsen.  --  Eric Larsen, 67, is the author of A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006)....

On Jun. 16 & 23, Dr. Ron Boothe will lead UFPPC's Monday night book discussion group, Digging Deeper, in a discussion of two recent books that shed light on the growing importance of genetics: J. Craig Venter's A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life (Penguin, October 2007), and Ronald M. Green's Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice (Yale UP, November, 2007).[1]  --  Digging Deeper meets Mondays from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Mandolin Café (3923 S. 12th St., Tacoma)....

The London Independent reported Sunday that "Oxfam warned yesterday that 1.5 million people could die needlessly in Burma as the first outbreaks of disease were reported in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, and many of the worst-hit areas went an eighth day without aid."[1]  --  "The U.N. World Food Program said it had never seen such delays in dealing with a modern humanitarian crisis and described the official response as 'unprecedented.'"  --  On Friday night, the Financial Times reported that Burma was locked "in a stand-off with the international community after flatly refusing to allow foreign aid workers into the country to tackle the impact of the recent cyclone disaster."[2]  --  On Saturday, the New York Times reported that the Burmese officials had "seized a shipment of United Nations food aid on Friday intended for victims of a devastating cyclone, declaring that they would accept donations of food and medicine but not the foreign aid workers international groups say are in equally short supply there."[3]  --  "The International Red Cross estimated Friday that the combined efforts of relief agencies and the Myanmar [Burmese] government have distributed aid to only 220,000 of up to 1.9 million people left homeless, injured or subject to disease and hunger after the storm," Seth Mydans wrote.  --  Writing for Atlantic Free Press, Martha Rose Crow looked at the situation in Burma with an jaundiced eye by a reading of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.[4]  --  In